It was close to midnight when I said I had to leave. I’d been watching you, but you either thought I didn’t know, or didn’t think what you’d been doing was important.

“I have to go,” I announced.
“Why?” you asked.
“Because,” I replied, looking at you with my most serious expression, “otherwise I may turn into a pumpkin.”

So I left. My lungs hurt from all those countless cigarettes, and the wine burnt my throat and two day empty stomach. As I stomped drunkenly back to the bus stop, already stinking of my own stale aftershave and anaemic efforts at conversation, I looked up at the stars and asked a question.

“Why?” I asked.

The answer came, as it only ever really does, by a series of coincidences. A man carrying an accoustic guitar walked past me with his friends - some band that had perhaps been playing in a pub somewhere. The guitar and the man carrying it stood out to me for no apparent reason. Then I saw another man with a guitar packing up his equipment in The Abbey. Then I saw another as I watched the world speed past on the bus.

What do guitars mean? Why is a man with a guitar an answer to my question? I remembered a song I’d heard, strummed by a man with a guitar as part of a recent performance that I’d been only loosely involved with.

“You’re no one till somebody loves you,” he sang.

This morning I sat alone on the bus, as usual, which trundled along on its usual route with the usual traffic jams, uncomfortable seats and people who step on your feet and stink of bad breath, listening to my iPod to drown out as much of the Wednesday morning world as I could. But there’s something new on my journey. Your flat is now on my bus route. It always was, of course. I’d passed it by every morning, never once knowing.

As I passed it this morning for both the first and the umpteenth time, the curtains still drawn, I realised that nearly every song I’d been listening to on shuffle had been sung by a man with a guitar.