About a Person

There’s a saying that blazes like wildfire across the social media blogging sites of this century, in which teenagers more concerned with the affairs of the world, or of art, rather than celebrity gossip, which states “It’s funny how someone who was once a stranger can mean the world to you.”

True also is the inverse.

It’s funny how someone who once meant the world to you is now a stranger.

Hey stranger. I miss you stranger. Dear stranger, why don’t we talk anymore? Can’t you see how much I still love you stranger? Stranger, what happened? I still care stranger. You still mean the world to me stranger.

The first time we met, I thought you arrogant, cocky and rude. It’s all true. First impressions are almost always right surprisingly. But what changed was the way that I understood that arrogance, the cockiness, and the humor, which made you rude. Stranger, you were a stranger once but I soon learned differently.

You told me a secret once, of why you looked so different. It was something I hadn’t noticed, mostly because I pay little attention to the physicality. I’m more concerned of what makes a person who they are. You shared your secret of why you looked so different, how half of your face was blank, didn’t feel or see a thing. You swore me to secrecy back then, a promise I intended to keep. I held your face in my hands with that secret, placed my cheek against the blank slate, and just held it, feeling what you could not.

You became a stranger, and suddenly that secret could not be contained by me.

It was the dark humor that first connected to me. The fact that, on these social media blogging sites of the century, you posted dark images, of dead dictators of days gone by, of murders in gruesome detail, of the beautiful, which was surrounded in the darkness. It’s a trait that few people share, finding the beautiful in the diseased, in the dark. Most people flee from the darkness. I’d always searched for it. I thought you had too.

It turns out you were the darkness.

There’s a certain feeling of closeness, which you share with very few people. In which you feel, from the very first moment you get to know them, that you can be completely yourself with them. Like you have nothing to fear, no reason to feel awkward, that the whole world is your oyster and you are invincible whenever that person is beside you. I came to you once, so sad, so totally full of a sadness I could not explain, and without having to, you wrapped me in your arms, held me close, and told me enough jokes until the pain went away. Until it was so far away that I forgot what had made me sad in the first place.

Since you’ve left, that pain has come back, and it is insurmountable, impossible to describe.

You held me tight all those times, and I got too used to it. I got to used to the feeling of you, the thin material of your white shirt, the scar on your stomach from battles of years past, the scruff on your cheeks, the strength of your arms, and the stiffness of your hair as my fingers stroked through it. Hardest to forget was the scent which completely entrapped me, pulled me in, made it something that no one else can compare it to. Even now, stranger, when I see you, that scent is impossible to ignore.

You have no trouble ignoring me however.

It is funny how someone can make such a full circle transition. You were once a stranger, and then suddenly I knew you better than I’d known anyone in my entire life. I knew you more than I would care to know anyone else I will ever meet. And, in the blink of an eye, something changed. The eyes that had once been bright when they looked at me, filled with the adventurous soul of a twenty-something, turned dark and distant. Those eyes don’t even look at her with that same spirit.

You are a stranger to me now.

And part of me is of the belief that you’re a stranger to yourself now.

It’s impossible to get to the heart of a person. To be able to use the so few words available in the English language, only a mere few million, to accurately describe a person inside and out. Physically, it’s quite simple to do, to note the scratch on your cheek from when you let me shave your face, and how the blood bubbled slowly, and made a trail like a singular tear down the cheek, a line of scarlet marring the perfection of white skin. The way your glasses, thick and black, always had that fingerprint across the left lens that would never quite go away because you would always use your middle finger to push them back onto the tall bridge of your slightly crooked nose.

But, like I said, I’ve never been one for the physical.

The difficult part of this is understanding what makes a person who they are. Words don’t do the human condition any justice. How can one simply describe the way a person makes you feel? How they can make you feel, for the first time, like someone else in the world exists who is like you, who understands your own soul? How the soul of another can align so singularly with your own? The little quirks about them, the fact that they’re arrogant, that the fact that they are rude, are a part of what makes them who they are. And things like this are impossible to describe because it isn’t the way in which they show how rude they are, but more the way in how their personality changes in certain situations. It’s impossible to describe how a person can be making jokes at the expense of a whole group of people one moment, sitting in a drive thru, and then the next moment be ordering kindly, using “please” and “thank you” because of a girl he’d once offended years before.

People are impossible.

Stranger, you are impossible to describe. Impossible to grasp. And impossible to forget. And I wish, with all of my heart, that at some point in this crazy life, our souls will align again, and you will no longer be referred to as stranger.

But words have still not determined what the future will bring, and will not until it is over.