Sometimes I'm afraid to look at people in case they remind me what a mess I am. But lately, the light's been helping me play tricks on them, so that I get to spy on strangers without feeling myself to be less. It doesn't always work, and sometimes I take breaths to remind myself I'm alive (and that alone might be a secret red-flash achievement).
Waiting for the bus, looking like biker Ron Perlman (did he know it? Might that have been a shared thought in the ocean of indifference that spread between us?). I watch him get on at the middle door, the crowdy door, the best-in-the-line door. I'm at the back. The stragglers' door, the ran-the-whole-way-here shutter.
Suppose it doesn't matter. It's Saturday. Early enough that the bus looks breezy and spacious between us. I fix him with my gaze a moment longer, but look away the second he looks up.
He's spotted me. I know by the way his eyes linger that he's felt me looking, sees my honey-gold-halo and wants to know better this stranger darling bold enough to pin him. Unlike clay, he stays put. Refuses to walk over, not that I'd want him to. My gaze is devoid of desire, though brimming with curiosity. The worse kind of lust. The one that gets me in all manners of trouble. Sometimes I push just to see if the walls are real or air foam. If I press here, will you bear the indent of my finger forever?
I give it a minute, but I gotta keep quick. Saturday morning traffic means the bus is rolling fast. Give it three, I might not catch him. So I only allow one. Now that he's distracted, I can look on him openly. Full head of hair, after all these years. White, though, to match his beard and his black shades. Not the mirroring kind. I wonder sometimes about people with opaque glasses. Rainbow mirrors challenge me to look at myself, but them bat-wing shades feel almost like a challenge. I like the furtive pleasure of our eyes meeting through darkened panels.
The rush of danger when I feel strangers looking.
He, however, does not. Look. He stares out the window for a second, then plunges back into his phone. Reading. He lacks the stilted rush of fingers that have become conversations. The news? Probably. Nobody reads interesting things anymore.
I try not to dwell, focus instead on where he's come from. The bramble of old houses, the narrow streets behind his stop. See his blue-pocket low-rider parked out front. A nameless, numbered gate that I wouldn't know. Bet I'm gonna know it now. Some day, a week or a month from now, I'll be walking like I do sometimes and stop in front of a house - like-any-other-house - and there it will be. Parked and uncovered. A sunny day, harbinger of early frost. Warm enough for one last ride.
And I'll stop before the gate and know who lives there. One day, but my stop's coming up now. I get off, spare one lingering glance towards this mirrorless stranger, a riddle unto himself, then the doors close. Bus heads on, while I head into the subway. Digging out my phone.
