The Anatomy of a Stranger

One thing I left out of the meticulous autopsy of that empty evening last week. A singular, vibrating thread of truth in the middle of all that numbness.

I was burning with curiosity about her.

It was a completely alien sensation. I had never met someone like this before. She wasn’t a colleague I had to nervously perform competency for. She wasn’t a classmate who held the power to humiliate me in an echoing lecture hall. There were no strings attached to this temporary collision of bodies. No shared social gravity to drag me down. There was absolutely nothing to be scared of, and miraculously, nothing to feel awkward about.

She was just entirely, unapologetically human. A stranger, yes, but not a faceless ghost passing by on the street. A stranger sitting across from me, breathing the same stale restaurant air, completely untethered from my past.

It was intoxicating. A tiny, desperate slice of freedom. For the first time in my miserable life, the panopticon in my head shut down. I wasn’t auditing my own sentences before they hit the air. I was just asking her things. Dissecting her thoughts, digging into the mechanics of how her mind worked, fascinated by the sheer reality of another person existing without judging me. I genuinely, thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt like taking off a coat of armor made of lead.

But of course, morning came. The harsh, unforgiving light bleached the magic out of the room, and she left. The performance ended. The silence rushed back in to fill the vacuum.

And then, later the next day, the screen lit up. A text message. Slicing through the quiet, proving I hadn’t just hallucinated the vital signs.

I invited her back again.

I guess I am having fun. A good time. Whatever the hell that actually means.