The bus

1994: The Year I Graduated and Met Gabriel

1994. The year I graduated. The year I was nineteen, shy, and carrying a secret I never told my mother.

His name wasn’t really Gabriel. I’m calling him that to protect him, and to protect the girl I was. Because that girl was young. She was quiet. And she developed the biggest crush of her life on a bus driver.

He drove the 108. The one that went to Martinez. I rode his bus late at night. Always. I’d time it just right so I could get on, pay my fare, and sit close enough to the front to see him but not close enough to make it obvious. He’d let me off at the BART station, or close to home if the night felt too dark to walk alone. He looked out for people like that.

That was the thing about him. He was special to me because he was special to everyone. He had a way of making you feel seen without saying much. He remembered faces. He waited if he saw you running. He said “be safe” when you stepped off. And in 1994, when I was graduating and the world felt big and loud and uncertain, “be safe” felt like poetry.

He was the first person I ever crushed on. Real, aching, write-his-name-in-my-notebook crush. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was shy. I didn’t flirt. I didn’t know how. So I just rode the bus. I memorized his schedule. I could always find him at his job, behind that big wheel, doing the same route, every night. That was the comfort of it. He was constant.

Nothing ever came of it. He was married. I knew that. Even at nineteen, I understood some lines. I never told him how I felt. I never told my mother. This was mine. A quiet, impossible thing I carried from the 108 to my bedroom, where I’d replay every “good night” he gave me like it was a love song.

I wasn’t the only one. So many girls loved him. They were braver than me. They confessed. They handed him notes, phone numbers, promises. They’d tell him right there on the bus, in front of everybody. He was kind about it. He’d smile, shake his head, and let them down easy. He’d let many of the women off — at their stops, and from their hopes. He never made them feel small. That’s why they kept riding. That’s why I kept riding.

I graduated in 1994 with a diploma in one hand and a crush I couldn’t speak in the other. That summer, I was learning what it meant to want something you couldn’t have. To feel something real and keep it to yourself. To understand that love, or whatever this was, doesn’t always get a story. Sometimes it just gets a bus route.

I don’t ride the 108 anymore. I don’t know where Gabriel is. I hope he’s well. I hope he’s still safe.

But I remember. I remember being nineeen, shy, and pure, sitting behind a married bus driver on the way to Martinez, thinking the sound of the engine and the hum of the tires was the sound of my heart.

He was my first crush. He didn’t know it. He didn’t have to. He got me home. And in 1994, that was enough.