Dear Stranger,
I look at you and I wonder, how beautiful life would be twenty years from now and then I get scared that the contentment of my future is conditioned to your presence in it. Then I have second thoughts too, I question the universe that is my prediction even correct. I wonder what I would do if your presence started making me miserable. Love does that to you, you know? When love becomes more immense than the heart can handle, it breaks the fragile wall that keeps it separate from hatred. And when the two mix under the pressure and waves of turmoil, frustration, helplessness.... Everything becomes toxic! Can you imagine my state when on setting my eyes on you for the first time, falling under the charm of your aura like gravity has increased tenfold... all I can think about is how much you are capable or destroying me. People call me a hopeless romantic, void of being calculative and cautious. While here I am calculating a complete stranger's ability to rip my heart to pieces. I have even thought of the place I will hide in for solace. I will sit down on a bench and spread the shreds of my heart on it and then I will spend every day in a futile effort to stick it back. I don't know how many times I will have to do that. I mean, you and I have crossed paths once. Also if my luck couldn't get any worse, you were fatefully granted the privilege to gaze in my eyes at my weakest moments. Can I ask you a question? Tell me if you saw my cello taped heart crumbling down to rubble in those five seconds we spent looking in each other's eyes or like everyone else you just saw the telltale circles of sleepless nights and casual visits of the generous goddess named Anxiety? A part of me hopes you didn't but a bigger part knows you did and is glad that finally there is hope for being rescued. You must be thinking how pathetic it is that I need someone to rescue me, that instead of dusting myself and getting back up on my feet I am looking for a hand to pull me out of this ditch. I always thought so too. I could never decipher how everyone fed me with the lies that only I can help myself, that all it will take to turn around will be my own confidence and I believed them, I used to. But time proved things to be way more complicated than that. We have people around us because we need them, to help us, to love us, to hate us, to make us, to break us, to believe in us and to devastate us. I have to make a confession to too... You know when I wrote that we have met only once... err... well we have met only once, the rest of the times I was secretly stalking you. To say I am blushing like a bottle of blood burst on my face would be an understatement. And saying this is enough reason for you to roll your eyes and pretend to mutter "Weirdo" under your breath, like you do every time someone fails to understand the gestures you sign. Yes, I know you are mute. I would never had figured this out about you owing to the absence of communication between us. You probably don't even remember me by now or maybe you do. Somebody at school must have reminded you of the weird girl whose mom committed suicide two years ago, the girl who sits alone at the last table during lunch break, the girl who has no friends and the girl no one wants to befriend because some how she is responsible for the death of their once, favorite middle-school English teacher. I want to talk about her, about all that happened. Because I am the only one who knows about it, I am the only one who lived that horrible night, I am the one who has lived with the guilt of that night ever since. But I want to tell you other things more than I want to tell you about the infamous tragedy of this small town. First time I secretly stalked you wasn't intentional though. You were at the park on nineteenth street, you were sitting on that faded brown bench, the one closest to that large oak tree. Have you ever paid attention the bark? It has names of couples and sweethearts carved in it. And it's just one or two generations still readable, but in reality it has been the bearer of this cute gesture of love in this town for more than two centuries. When I moved here, I always felt this one tree too large and quite out of place in this prim and proper park. The park had adjusted with its existence, with time this town has grown to care for this living monument. When I was little, my mother was alive, we were a typical family and all was sunshine, rainbows, giggles, pies and good night kisses. I used to dream about carving a heart in its bark too, wanted to write my name in it then write another one, I wasn't sure whose would it be but I hoped like any girl would. Did I mention I still don't know your name.... That's why I called you stranger.... Not that I have enough courage in me to say your name.... I decided to call you stranger when I saw you in that park, sitting silently with that guitar in your lap. Obviously the first thing I thought was whether you play or not.
You seemed like the tree to me right there, with the rising sun illuminating your chestnut hair like specks of gold had rained down on it. Your eyes set on the guitar, your lips pursed and your expression full of accusations for someone invisible to both of us. Completely out of place, a gush of emigrant winds just like the oak tree. In that moment I had simultaneously desired two things so badly that even I was surprised by the need surging through me. I wanted with all my strength for you to prevail and our lamenting town to grow accustomed to your melancholic yet life evoking existence. And I wanted to come up to you and ask you why you were so sad, why you were out there at dawn, why were you not playing the instrument despite it being so precious to your heart... But forced myself to stop being silly, I did neither one of the things I wanted to. Instead I stood still in my place, quietly peering at you from behind a tree not far from your bench, expecting you to put away the childish anger and play it, sing your heart out. It was wrong of me to violate your private moments, but I was incapable of doing anything besides that. However it proved futile to linger around you secretly because you didn't play or sing. You just sat still until the park started getting visitors other than us. A child who was about to ascend the slide, noticed you there and came up to you, inquiring the same things I wanted to. You never answered, only smiled one of those common curves we all fake at some point, the light of which never wins against the perturbing fog, residing in our eyes. Shaking your head, not saying a word you got up and left. I wanted to follow you... I was curious why you didn't play, why you didn't say... Once again I admonished myself for demanding such stupidity from me but we found a win-win for both way... the part of me that wanted to follow your footsteps also got what it wanted and the part that denied on face but secretly wanted to do the same also got its desire. That night, I slept with an all new excitement and fear in me. I was praying that you turn up in the park tomorrow at the same time and I was afraid I would be abnormally disappointed if you don't. My fear won, you were not there... I had seen you two times in my entire life and it felt like betrayal to me when you didn't turn up. Why was I even expecting so much from a stranger whose name I didn't knew. With a lump of tears clogging my throat and disappointment surging in my blood I went down to your bench and kicked it. Yes I did! And yes doing it did hurt my foot! Good thing that night when my shift at the diner was over I caught a glimpse of you on my way back home. You were sitting in Jeremy's Café, with a little boy whose uncanny resemblance to you gave away kinship. The same hazel eyes as yours, the same straight chestnut locks falling in his eyes like yours. The two of you occupied the window side table. A steaming cup of coffee resting before you as the boy munched down on a muffin. He seemed overjoyed and even you were genuinely smiling for him. At that instant I hoped to be the reason for a similar smile for you someday. Like the first time I continued to watch you for longer than I intended and that was when I found out you could not talk, you signed for the boy but he only talked.... At first I thought you were trying to explain something through gestures but I realized it was you talking with your hands unlike the rest of us. Then I understood everything about yesterday... Why you didn't play, why you didn't sing, why you seemed so broken, why there was so much longing in your eyes. You wanted to sing right? In fact you were dying to, but you couldn't. I have no words for what I felt, you have an entirely mystical effect on me. Time freezes when I'm around you, I freeze when I'm around you... Thus I remained outside in the cold gazing at you two and after you had left I still kept gazing at the ghostly vibes you had left behind there. So finally I wasn't the only one with a tragedy stamped on my forehead in this town anymore. You silence actually struck a happy chord in me, another misfit was present. I know it's selfish but it's out of my control. Thrice... By then I had seen you thrice and each time was more meaningful than the other, each time revealed a greater chunk. In three encounters I was addicted to you and I knew that for the coming days I will find a way to follow you, to steal your time surreptitiously. I had no other choice... So you see how without ever knowing you became a vital piece of my existence. And you must had understood by now that these three encounters were just the beginning of it, with time I spiraled down deeper a path that would either wreck me or free me. You are my stranger and I share with you more than you can ever know. When you thought you were alone, when you thought no one would see if you had a secret meltdown, when you thought no one would notice your swollen eyes, when you thought no one would notice your swollen eyes, when you thought no one was there to share your weakest moments... you were mistaken... because this weird, broken girl who is haunted by the ghost of the woman who gave birth to her, who committed suicide because of her.... Was there watching, feeling and embracing you from far away. Don't ever think you are alone, because I am always there whether you want it or not.
Insignificantly Yours,
The Weird One.
