Strangers meeting in anonymous space can script themselves into intimate rituals.

Evidence

Some old people come and go [from the New York Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square] like characters in a dream, having fixed roles to play. Two are known as “the lovers.” They come in separately, meet, sit and hold hands a while, then leave. … “You would think they were 16 years old and just in love,” a woman said. “She always wears a veil on her hair. He wears a little cap, a couple of sizes too small, and they sit and hold hands.” — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 731

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the observing/flaneur theme in Cole and Simmel: two figures enacting coded intimacy inside a zone of civil inattention.
• CANDY: Romeo and Juliet playing their roles in a bus terminal’s waiting room is a compact, oddly touching image worth retelling.
• FICTION: The bus-terminal lovers as dreamlike fixed-role figures could seed a short scene about anonymous urban ritual.