The stranger I pass on the sidewalk has felt every curve, crevice, and corner of my body. His hands have glided over each and every insecurity; read them like poetry as I shuttered at my own vulnerability. He holds uncanny similarity to someone I once knew but he refuses to meet my eyes, keeping them glued to the sidewalk in a timid way that reads almost shamefully; a trait not possessed by the man I am well acquainted with. The man I knew was anything but timid, he spoke in a tone that all but demanded people to listen. I once sat by his side on the sidewalk for an hour, while he entertained a group of complete strangers with short stories of his life. With each tale he told he drifted further from the plot until nothing he said made much sense at all. Yet the entire group listened quietly, nodding their heads in understanding and gasping at each plot twist in his mangled up mess of words and wisdom. And so did I, completely in awe of the way that someone could speak in such a hypnotising way, a poetic air to each meaningless phrase. With each syllable he spoke I drifted further into the trance, along with the rest of the group. By the time he had finished his collective memoir, we had made a new group of friends. It was just that easy for him. He would simply speak and others would bend to his will like play-dough. I am not sure if the stranger I pass possesses this power of speech, but I can infer by his timid stature that he is dispassionate towards lengthy speeches; in fact, he seems impartial towards any kind of attention at all. The stranger that sits across from me in class has held my limp body whilst I slowly drowned in a river of my own tears. He ran his fingers gently through my hair, my head in his lap, and whispered sweet nothings to me until I was calm enough to sleep. But he doesn’t seem to remember; he watches the professor lecture, not a thought behind those big brown eyes. I am all too familiar with those eyes, but they are shallow now. The eyes I recall were far too easy to lose oneself within, so deep I could climb into them and wander around for hours. Each time they would reveal a new secret: a hint of green in a corner I had not yet explored, or a ring of icy blue pooling around the endless abyss of his pupil. They would whisper beautiful sonnets to me as I wandered. Each day they would tell me something new. Shakespeare once said the eyes are the windows to the soul; I never really believed this cliche until I met this man. When I told him that he laughed and mocked, “And what do you see in the windows of my soul?” At this point, I was far too embarrassed to admit the world I found within those eyes. And yet, here I am looking into those same eyes, and I see every story they have to tell in an instant. And I am completely uninterested. The stranger I bump into on the A-train knows my deepest, darkest secrets and my inner-most desires, but when he looks at me, he doesn’t seem to wander much deeper than the surface. He holds an uncanny resemblance to the first man I ever truly loved. And I remember the day he told me loved me as if it were yesterday. I recall it often. We enjoyed nothing more than to scream and fight, you see, to argue was our greatest pastime. There aren’t many feelings that one can grip onto quite as strongly as the passion of a fiery argument. I can’t recall exactly what our topic of discussion was on that particular day, but I remember the anger and sadness that burned within me as I roared my verbal attacks across the room. I remember looking into his eyes and seeing the anger within him, one that burned with an equal strength to mine, his rebuttals firing back almost instantaneously. Lastly, I remember the passion in his voice as he let out a shaky “I love you.” He fell to the floor, and I fell with him, climbed into his lap, and held him closer than I knew it possible to hold another being; I held not only his body, but also his soul. Nothing that happened before or after mattered anymore. He loved me. That moment is engraved in the back of my mind like a stain I can never quite scrub off, it often visits me in my dreams. But the stranger on the subway appears to have scrubbed his stain clean a long time ago. It occurs to me for a moment to ask him how he managed to get it off. There must be some sort of dish soap or bleach solution that does the trick. I hold my tongue. He almost looks as if he is holding his as well. At least that is what I will tell myself in order to stop the stream of tears that flows behind my eyes. I wonder, does he also have a stream? I need to stop wondering, this is the curiosity that killed the cat. The train slides to a stop at 34th Street, Penn Station, the doors open and I exit. I don’t turn back to see if the stranger exits behind me. I do not need to know, it is moments like these when my mother is right; ignorance really is bliss. The stranger who does his homework in my favorite coffee shop knows far too much of my past and almost nothing of my present. All the same, I know everything of his past and almost nothing of the person sitting across the shop on this dreary Sunday afternoon. I tap my pencil on the table, eyes glued to my laptop screen. I console myself with the silent affirmation, “It is better off this way. I am better off this way.” I tap my pencil some more. Tap.Tap. “Things are better now.” Tap. “I am better now.” Tap. Tap. I wonder if he is doing the same. I am too curious, I must stop wondering about these things. This is not the kind of curiosity which awakens life-changing scientific discoveries, it is the kind that leads you into a dark cave which houses a sleeping bear, one that you will discover when you step on its paw… you know what happens next. I mustn't give in to my weakness, I must do my homework, I must remember why things are the way they are. I close my eyes and recount the day he died. We had been apart two months for the summer. It took about ten days of distance for him to decide he wanted nothing to do with me. I was a road block to his freedom. Nothing more. For him, It wasn’t worth the effort to make long distance work. It was only worth it when things were convenient, when I was at his immediate disposal. I’d love to tell you I was surprised. I’d love to tell you this is the first time he had chosen his resentment towards commitment over the love he had for me. I thought maybe if I gave him space he would eventually rediscover this love, repressed in the back corner of his brain, waiting to be uncovered. Instead he rediscovered his love for sex, drugs, and alcohol. He was chasing a kind of high that I could not provide and, despite my constant pleas, he would not stop. He was like a runaway train with no emergency break. I prayed to every god I could think of for someone to help him, I prayed to gods I did not know existed, I prayed on altars in which I was not welcome. Looking back, I think I spent so much time focusing on his problems so that I would not have to focus on my own. It was just three days after my birthday when I got the call. “Hello? Blessing?” “Nick? Are you okay?” “I’m okay. I overdosed. I’m in the hospital.” The pit in my stomach filled with relief as my heart filled with sadness. My eyes quickly overflowed with tears. All I could choke up was a measly, “How could you do this to me?” I could almost smell the smoke coming out of my ears as the relief left me and every pore in my body began to leak with burning anger and dread like hot lava. “What the hell is wrong with you, why would you do this to me? You could have died.” Anger quickly turned into grief as realization struck. “You could have died. What would I do if you had died?” I could have won a Guiness World Record for the number of emotions one person can feel at one time. In fact, I am surprised the electrodes in my brain didn’t fry, leaving me a chard, black pile of mush on the floor. “Oh my god, what would I do if you died?” “I know. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Can you ever forgive me?” But the person speaking on the other end of the phone was no longer a voice that I could recognize. It was no longer my Nick, my first love. It was a stranger. A complete and total stranger. A voice that once sounded so hypnotizing now muted by tones of regret. Tears continued to pour from my eyes as realization struck once more. It’s too far gone, he is too far gone, I will never get to know and love him the same way ever again. The man I love is dead. His body remains the same but he has killed off all the parts of his soul that I loved the most. He has painted over memories of love and passion, covered them in ugly shades of melancholy and dread. His words are now empty. His eyes are now shallow. He is now a hollow shell of a person. I don’t even wish to fight with him anymore, to scream would be no use in this dark room of despair. My eyes poured dark mascara tears of dread as I struggled to find the right response. After a much-too-long moment of silence I choked up the words that had been sitting on the tip of my tongue all summer, “Nick, you are no longer the person that I know and love. You have disrespected me in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I have been worried sick for months while you have been out partying and using drugs I can’t even pronounce. We can never come back from this. To even try would be completely useless. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.” I wish I could honestly tell you that these were the words that left my mouth that day. That I stood up for myself instead of surrendering my dignity and burying my head in the sand. I wish I could say that was the last time we spoke. I wish to pretend that I did not waste the following months attempting to love a complete stranger. A stranger who continued to build me up and tear me down over and over again, like some kind of unfinished artwork with which he could never quite be satisfied. In an ideal world, this is where the story ends and there is nothing more to say. Yet, here I am, sitting in my favorite coffee shop on a quiet Sunday afternoon, tapping my pencil, trying to do homework, accomplishing nothing. My eyes drop to the floor as I blink out just one more tear for the stranger. I feel it roll down my cheek, watch it splat on the dark, wooden floor. From this day on I will let the stranger be a stranger, nothing more. I will cry no more tears and waste no more time on pointless curiosity. Things are better this way. I am better this way. Tap. Tap.