“It’s very cold right now, it hasn’t been this cold since morning”, I heard a voice from my left.

I glanced in that direction and saw a guy smoking and walking toward me. He hadn’t taken a bath for days, it was apparent. He was wearing a dark cream sweater with blue jeans. He had probably been taking good notice of the weather since morning, or he was just acting himself. He stopped a few feet short of where I was leaning against a small wall. He continued talking, without trying to note if I was even looking at him or not.

“I’ve been on the computers since morning. It is so time-consuming!” he looked at me, and I nodded, wondering if I knew him from before. I didn’t. He said again “it is really time consuming.” I wondered if he was doing something “on” the computers that was time consuming, or if he had been typing up something on the computers that took time since the computers there only have Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word installed. He couldn’t have been using the Internet to check his email, since this guy wouldn’t have any friends to send any emails to, unless he was harassing others. The way he looked at his cigarette, it seemed that this guy had been a half-drunk-looking “dude” for sometime now. It was somehow evident that he simply needed some company in this rainy atmosphere. I kept playing with my small umbrella, pressing the button on it repeatedly to open and close the umbrella. He kept on rambling.

“This place opens at 7 am, but today they opened at 6:30 in the morning!” His eyes shot wide open with this statement. He was somehow puzzled by this revelation that this place, the Student Union building in the heart of the campus, can open 30 minutes early to let students come in early to study. One thing was sure; either he had fried his brain a lot with lots of powder, or he had just sniffed on something. Either way, he didn’t care whether his target audience actually wanted to listen to him talking or listen to him vanishing. I hadn’t said a word at all, and my mere nodding in the start was all he needed to know that I wasn’t going to run away from him with my hands in the air.

He kept talking, while I kept playing with my umbrella, looking around, waiting for some people who were supposed to meet me at this very location. Wondering where they were, I decided to spend time wondering about how many seconds it would take to knock this guy out with my umbrella to attain silence in that area. I came to the conclusion that it would take me less than a few seconds, if not a second, to do that. I decided to continue playing with my umbrella and let nature take care of him. It did, in the form of two helpless kids.

As he kept on talking, two kids came out of the building, each holding a cup in their hand which was probably filled with some sort of soda. He looked at them and said, “Wow, that must be cold, really cold.” One of the kids nodded back, saying “Yeah it is.” The guy looked at the kids again after glancing at his cigarette, and repeated the exact sentence “Wow, that must be cold, really cold.” This scared the kids somehow, and they looked at him, and looked at each other, and then stood there looking at the floor, as if they were now scared and shy at the same time.

The people I was waiting for had been 30 minutes late. It was time to drive back home in the rain, while that guy in the dark cream sweater practiced his socializing skills with the kids. He didn’t notice I was gone, as I heard him behind me change his conversation from the kids to me again and then stopping short in his sentence, realizing that I was gone.