Stranger

A Poem by OwenT

Stranger

There is a stranger in my yard. I see him watching me through the sliding glass door, through the half windows that line my bedroom, through the peephole in the main entrance.

I think he found a way inside. I swear I locked the door before I went to sleep but I found it hanging wide open in the morning. I see him out of the corner of my eye, in the shadows created by the plants in the living room. He peers between the leaves like a predator cloaked in jungle foliage.

The air seems to warp around him. He seems to both generate light and absorb it, leaving a pale ripple wherever he goes.

I think about the smell of cinnamon and anxious sweat and the smoke of a blown out candle.

I think about the taste of skin and the last quarter of a beer and a red and white peppermint from my grandmother’s purse.

I think about her face as she lays next to me in the sand.

I got a better look at the stranger today. I woke up and caught a glimpse before he could slip out of my room. He looks like me. Younger, older, just the same. Every haircut I’ll ever have and all the hair that I will ever lose. Muscle builds up and melts away from his skeleton.

I had dreamt about a field of wildflowers that night. I came upon a group of deer bedding down, a mother and her two fawns. The fawns were dead and the mother’s face was matted with gore. I don’t know who to feel worse for.

I’m sorry for how things went between us. I think I haven’t known who I am for a long, long time.

The stranger doesn’t care if I see him now. I think he wants me to. He paced back and forth through my line of sight as I sat and ate breakfast. I turned on some music and I kept eating.

I stepped out of the shower, cold and naked. He was waiting, also naked. Wrinkled, smooth, splattered with tumors and liver spots that came into being and disappeared like stars winking out of existence. He looked into my eyes and I looked back. His irises were chromatic, shining, shifting. Every color I have ever seen and many that I can’t describe all cycled through in a moment.

The black of a horse’s hide on its last trip through the desert. The opalescence of a pearl I found on the same day that I got a concussion. The red of iron-rich martian soil. The pale blue of a baby blanket clutched tightly in my sleep, a few years past the point of it being appropriate to have one.

The pupils too. A man's dot, a cat’s slit, a goat's dash, a cuttlefish's double-u.

He reached out and cupped my face with both hands.

At his touch I became aware of every nerve in my body, every blood vessel, every muscle fiber, every tendon and ligament and follicle. I could see the warping extending from his hands to encompass my body. It didn’t hurt. It just felt foreign, alien. Like electrified ice water from a tide pool at that beach we used to go to together was being pumped through me.

It worked at the knots in my mind and the rust that coated my insides. It loosened the tension that I carry in my neck.

Tears were streaming down my face but I don’t remember when I had started to cry.

“What am I to do?”

My voice shook as I spoke.

“All you have to do is live. Just live.”

His voice, my voice, spoke clearly. It carried the innocence of youth and the wisdom of twilight years. It made the moisture in all my trillions of cells vibrate. It brought the sound of the violin I used to play and your favorite songs and my father’s voice breaking when he was speaking to me and my brother in the kitchen.

And then he was gone. I was alone in the bathroom, still dripping water and trembling. I dried myself and fell asleep moments after I got into bed.

I didn’t have any dreams that night.