Staring blankly out at the rolling green landscapes of Western Germany as the bus moved, Tim came to a realization. It was a surreal, bitter realization: he was actually here—Germany. To anyone else, it was just another European country, but to Tim, it felt like a ghost dynamic—the only unfamiliar, yet familiar, country in the world to him.
He had no real memories of this place except for pictures of him as a toddler. He had left it when he was only two years old, when his mom moved him and his twin sister to Nigeria to live with their dad, who had been deported for a framed crime that led to him being banned from European soil.
Tim shifted slightly where he stood, keeping his right hand on the bus rail to get a better view of the scenery, but a sharp, white-hot flash of physical pain flared across his back. It forced a muted gasp from his throat, a brutal reminder of his recent ordeal.
Beneath his oversized, thick cardigan, a makeshift bandage was barely holding together a nasty laceration. It was a parting gift from the Mediterranean border—a jagged stretch of barbed-wire fence that had torn diagonally into his skin from the right side of his back all the way to the left while he was scrambling to evade the incoming border officers.
Closing his eyes, Tim found the memory of the scramble still painfully fresh. The roaring waves, the shouting in Italian, the blinding searchlights, and the sheer, paralyzing panic. He had lost everything in that chaotic rush at the Italian drop-off point. His backpack, containing his extra clothes and his phone, had fallen deep into the dark ocean, likely resting at the bottom of the sea by now. But that was it; he had nothing else anyway, since he had planned on dying at sea.
He had barely made it across the border, arriving in a public toilet at a transit station looking like a shipwreck survivor. His original clothes, a black long-sleeve cotton top, had been completely bloodied. In a frantic rush, he had washed his wound as best as he could and bought some bandages to dress it—a skill he had learned from his doctor mother. Afterward, he had clumsily thrown on the remaining clean clothes he brought along: some sneakers and the heavy hooded cardigan. He couldn't change his jeans because of the price, so he had just let them dry on him. Using the absolute last of his exchanged Euro, Tim had bought a direct bus ticket to Dortmund, which was where he was right now.
Now, he looked noticeably disheveled. His curls were still matted with a faint, dried salt crust, and his jeans, though dry, had the rumpled, exhausted look of someone who had literally just walked out of the sea.
Lost in thought, Tim was suddenly pulled back to reality by a voice behind him.
Anna had been observing the stranger in front of her ever since he gave up his seat for the pregnant woman earlier. She had been wanting to see his face and compliment him, but with his back facing her, it was a bit of a hindrance. Seeing him zone out constantly, clearly lost in thought, made her hesitate.
Nonetheless, she finally spoke up, unable to suppress her curiosity.
" Was für ein Gentleman Sie doch sind, nicht wahr? " (What a gentleman you are, aren't you?)
When Tim turned around, the words caught in her throat.
"WOW..."
The syllable slipped out of Anna's mouth before she could stop herself. She couldn't keep herself from staring at him.
All she could think about was just how striking the stranger was. His face... gosh!!, he's beautiful, she thought. His hair, is just so curly—more than her own— and light brown. And his eyes—wait, is that a purple or black iris? Well, I guess he's mixed race. Even with the rumpled, salt-stained Jean trouser he was wearing, he stood out completely.
"I said, 'That was a gentlemanly thing you did, with the seat, you know,'" Anna said in English, her voice quiet and guarded as she pointed toward the space he had vacated for the pregnant woman.
Thought I heard him speak German to her a minute ago, Anna thought, noting the silent, slightly confused look Tim gave her. Why did he look so lost when I spoke German just now? Weird.
Turning around and seeing the stranger, Tim realized she was a girl with A medium-to-dark "chestnut" brown Springy, corkscrew curly hair—long with a layered cut— some of it woven into small braids, falling past her neck and shoulders down to her back. She looked quite cute, to be honest, and incredibly curious.
He guessed she was right around his age, maybe eighteen. She had a heavy, closed-off expression, her eyes carrying a familiar exhaustion that Tim recognized instantly.
"Just doing what I was taught," Tim replied, his voice barely carrying over the rattle of the bus as he gripped the overhead rail. He didn't shrug; the movement would have torn at the fresh scabs on his back.
"My mother always said some things are non-negotiable, no matter how broken you feel."
Anna didn't lean back in her window seat, and she didn't smile. Her eyes, sharp and heavy with an exhaustion that mirrored his own, slowly scanned his salt-crusted cardigan and the tight, matted curls of his hair.
There was no playfulness in her gaze—only a deep, quiet recognition. She had been drowning in her own heartbreak for weeks, carrying a heavy weight of friendship guilt for a year now, and even abandoning the football pitch she once ruled. But looking at him, she felt a sudden, unexplainable pull.
"People usually look away when things get hard on these routes," she murmured, her voice laced with a guarded solemnity. She didn't offer her name, keeping her walls firmly intact, yet she didn't look away from him either.
"You look like you're carrying the weight of the world. And you look like you just walked straight out of the ocean."
Tim let out a faint, humorless breath that died before it could become a laugh. The sadness in his eyes deepened, a raw bleeding honesty passing between them in the silence. He liked the quiet, serious way she spoke English—it lacked the hollow cheerfulness of the outside world.
"Is it that obvious?" he whispered, his fingers tightening on the metal rail as Anna nodded without saying a word.
"Yeah... let's just say the sea leaves a mark on you. In more ways than one."
She nodded slowly, the silence between them drawing them closer, intertwining their separate miseries into a single, unspoken bond.
"I know that look," she said softly, her eyes locking onto his with an intense, sudden chemistry born of shared damage.
"You look like someone who went out into the water looking for a way to disappear."
The silence that followed her words was thick, heavy with the weight of things left unsaid. Tim stared at her, his heart hammering against his ribs. He hadn't expected a stranger on a German commuter bus to see right through the salt crust and the oversized cardigan, straight into the dark, hollow spaces of his soul. But she looked genuinely concerned, and that intrigued him. They didn't know each other, and this was the first time he was seeing her face, yet there was something about her—her expressions, her curly hair—that felt familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time.
"You're observant," Tim finally murmured, a tiny ghost of a smile touching his lips. It was a sad, fragile thing, born from the sheer irony of his survival. "But the water didn't want me. Apparently, I'm too stubborn to drown."
Anna's eyes flickered, a subtle shift occurring behind her guarded expression. For a split second, the corner of her mouth twitched upward—a little cheeky, a little bitter.
"Maybe the sea just has higher standards," she countered. "Or maybe it realized you still had some chivalry left to give away to strangers."
Tim let out another quiet, raspy chuckle, though he immediately anchored himself against the overhead rail to keep his back from twisting.
"Yeah, well... my mom would have come back from the dead to haunt me herself if I let an expectant mother stand. I didn't survive a shipwreck just to get taken out by a maternal ghost."
The mention of his Mom brought a brief, profound shadow across his face, a raw sliver of the grief he carried. Anna noticed. She didn't press him, but her posture softened slightly, the invisible wall between them lowering by a fraction.
"Fair point," she said softly, her voice dropping to match the low rumble of the bus. "But seriously... you're bleeding through that cardigan, aren't you?"
Tim stiffened slightly, then forced himself to relax, looking down at his chest and then back to her deep brown eyes. "Is it bleeding through?"
"No," she admitted quietly, her gaze locked onto his. "But I can see how you're holding your breath. I know what it looks like when someone is trying to pretend they aren't completely torn apart."
Tim looked away, staring back out at the passing trees as the bus began to slow down, entering the outer concrete layout of the city. 'She has no idea', he thought. Or maybe she does. There was a strange, magnetic chemistry in how easily they understood each other's armor. It was comforting, yet terrifyingly raw.
"Dortmund Central is the next stop," she announced, breaking the silence as the overhead automated intercom chimed in German.
"Hey, I speak German, you know".
The words left Tim lips with the faint ghost of a smile, a desperate attempt to anchor himself to the present.
"Oh! I figured," Anna said, her medium to dark 'chestnut' brown curls shifting as she tilted her head. Her expression sharpened into something more curious than before.
"I heard you speak it to the lady a moment ago, but you looked completely lost by the words I said earlier."
"Yeah... I don't speak it much and my accent isn't exactly fluent," Tim admitted, his hand gripping the overhead rail tightly to steady his swaying body.
"But I do understand almost all of the language. And me being lost?"
He paused, finally tearing his eyes away from the passing German scenery to look at her fully. The ache in his chest flared, entirely separate from the physical agony in his spine.
"It was your curly hair. It made me think of someone important, and memories just flooded in all at once. Sorry." I gestured toward her hair with a brief nod, letting out a small, bitter, sad chuckle that felt hollow even to my own ears.
"Oh. Guess it must be someone really important, huh?"
Anna said it softly, her tone losing its edge.
Tim just offered a quiet smile in return. He didn't say anything else. He didn't know how to, and honestly, he didn't have the strength to try. Turning his face back toward the window, a wave of profound helplessness washed over him, and he could feel the raw defeat written all over his face. He felt completely stranded in his own thoughts as the reality of his situation crashed down.
Where am I going to sleep tonight? How am I going to contact my Aunt when I don't have my phone, and I don't have her number memorized? What happens to my life now that I'm actually here? Here. In Germany.
Those were the thoughts consuming him, and he had absolutely nothing but the cross-body bag slung over his chest. Inside was some useless Nigerian currency, a few legal documents from back home, and the fragile, twenty-year-old relic of his two-year-old childhood German passport. He had managed to exchange some money with a good Samaritan at the bus station back in Italy, but he had paid a horrific price for the exchange rate, and the last of that Euro cash had been completely swallowed up by the ticket for this direct bus to Dortmund. He was basically cashless. Even if he could find a place to take his remaining Nigerian Naira, it wouldn't be enough to book a decent hotel—which was a terrible idea anyway, since he didn't have a valid, legal German ID to get past a front desk.
Taking a deep breath, Tim exhaled, only to catch the eyes of the girl he'd been conversing with looking deeply at him.
"Are you okay??"
To be Continued.....