Perfect Stranger

It is too early for conclusions.

I saw you in the park yesterday. Or someone who looked just like you, which is to say, like someone I didn't recognize. Your unawareness of me seemed a kind of meditation. It made me feel more opaque.

I'm explaining this badly, I know. It's just that there are times when I feel myself slipping away, and others when I float, oarless, on transparent water, barely disturbing my own thoughts. It gets hard to distinguish sanity from light. And then yesterday, watching you read on the bench, it occurred to me that I could root myself here, above this spreading shadow, scribbling leaves of crisp phrases in a diary of high summer, throwaway pages, their anguish imaginary and weightless as the blue of the sky.

I would say you made this possible but you are the opposite of possibility, like the resumption of weight at the bottom of a fall. In a city of eight million you are the only one beyond coincidence, the only one who understands, or knows instinctively, that isolation, like any dance between two people, has its rules. To call you a stranger would be an imposition. To thank you an ingratitude. Yet I return every day to the same spot, certain you won't be there, and the knowledge anchors me.

It is too late for conclusions. All the questions we could ask have already been betrayed.