He Who Wasn’t There

I met him the way you meet a shadow — in your sideways vision, which is best not to turn and discover it’s empty.

It began innocuously enough. A cafe in the center of town, a busy spot, with chipped tables and classic jazz softly playing in the background. I’d been doing this for years, a ritual I couldn’t abandon even though nothing ever actually changed. Despite Not Being Identified, The Faces Have Always Been The Same

On that day I saw him behind a desk in the corner. He became alone, sipping tea. But that translated into not everything out of the cada um. He had always been taller than his head, and yet, at espresso stores, people had been basically alone.

I cannot explain why.

His face was not distinctive, in a way that seemed deliberate. Brown hair in need of a trim, kind eyes that wouldn’t find yours immediately. He was not memorable, but there was something that held your attention about him, like he didn’t quite belong but fit in perfectly. As he plotted to vanish from the area.

As I settled into my spot at the table, I couldn’t resist glancing back at him. He seemed to have come up for an instant, and made eye contact. I iced over.

But then he became away.

I thought it became strange. Most humans will smile politely or ignore you when they catch you staring. But no longer him. He immediately spun around — as though he hadn’t even seen me. And that’s when the malaise began to kick in.

I never knew what it became.” Something felt incorrect. But it was not the sort of wrong you can articulate. Not concern, not quite, but the kind of more the gentle pulse of a dream that was beginning to drift away from you the moment you wake.

“I couldn’t stop feeling like someone was watching me in the days that followed. Not via each individual body, however via an individual. 7398 Like as if each it would flow had a territory in use, but in an unheard of distance I could no longer position. Each time I turned to go around, I anticipated seeing the man I’d seen in the coffee shop but he was nowhere to be found.

He in no way was.

At first I thought it was just my imagination playing tricks on me. But then I saw him again one night.

I had stepped into the park, round and green, to clear my head, an old habit when the world got too loud. That night, the park fell into the quiet that follows a rainstorm best. The air smelled fresh, of damp soil and tender leaves. I sat down on a bench next to the pond and noticed the water stir in the wind.

And there he become.

He wasn’t sitting down, as he had earlier. Rather than walking to the near side of the pond, he walked to the far side of the pond with his hands stuffed in his pockets to look out at the water. His posture went from lazy, comfortable to alarming in the quietness of his presence. The longer I looked, the more I felt myself as being one in which anticipation became a singularity.

But in the Ig of an eye, he transformed into long gone.

I sat up straighter, scanning the area. Nothing. No one. The park turned into empty.

My chest was pounding as I scanned the space, trying to understand. But there was no reason.

There was just nothing there.

The 1/3 occasion I saw him was inside my building's elevator. It was late — past midnight — and I had just gotten back from having a late dinner with a friend. The building was dark, the sort of quiet where you could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above.

I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor, but when the sliding doors closed behind me, I was not alone.

He angled himself into the corner, his hands deep in his coat pockets, his eyes aw down on the ground. He didn’t look up when I entered, but I felt him there as if his body had been a weight pressing against me.

The elevator moved upward. Too thick of silence air, even though the air had been long gone anyway, like the AS2. I couldn’t help glancing over at him. His expression shifted to neutral, inscrutable his demeanor as unemotional as ever. He hadn’t so much as looked at me since I arrived.

I opened my mouth as if to call something, anything, yet nothing came out. My throat suddenly went dry as questions flitted through my mind without answers.

Someone (a buzzing bee in a suit) pushed the button, and the elevator dinged at my floor.

He said nothing and stepped out as the doorways opened, vanishing down the hall.

I paused for what seemed like an eternity, staring at the empty hallway. The door to my condominium came to seem farther away than a second before it had.

Before long, the dreams began.

Every single night I was dreaming of the man. Not the way that I would hope all others would — no, this hunger had been unique. He had come to appear in the goals he had lately appear — before him, whether in time or room, there turned into always some shadowy nook, shadows so dark that here turned into no gentle in agreement to his face. He would never say the words, just look at me, as if I were supposed to understand something I could not grasp.

And then, I’d awaken.

But that sense didn’t leave me. It sat like a whisper at the threshold of my mind.

It was as if he was there all along, never really there. It was like he was in some area just outside of my truth.

I have no idea who he changed into. (He just to me whether or not, ever came to mind.) I’m not sure if he was a ghost or of my imagination or something else entirely.

What I know now, though, is this: the man who was not there, the only one to time every minute of my life, never left.

He was always just waiting, somewhere — unseen, never absent.”

And sometimes I do feel him anyway.