a stranger i once knew

A Stranger I Once Knew

The day was different from other days. Mori sat alone. He had lived twenty-three years, but as he looked back, his memory felt only of disappointment and broken things. Today, he wanted something different. He had spent months trapped inside his own head filled with suffocating thoughts, so he forced himself to board a train and leave his usual routine behind. On the ride over, he switched lanes and walked through different stations. 

He saw the exact same faces every morning. He usually saw the station security guard, who always gave a kind smile that Mori always ignored, because he was too tired to fake a polite smile back but today, the guard wasn't there. The crowd was full of strangers. Mori stared at the new faces, looking desperately for someone he didn't find.

He got off at "Hangout Way." station. The main street was loud, bright, and crowded with people laughing and talking. He walked for twenty minutes, pushing past the noise, until he found a nice quiet cafe where there was barely any sight of a human.

He took a seat outside under the withered shed. When the waiter came, Mori ordered a hot Spanish latte. It was strange because Mori had always hated coffee and he was strictly a milk tea person.

He placed a small dark bag on the table, a bag he never carried with him. Unzipping it felt like opening a grave and inside were fragments of another life. He pulled out a small, torn piece of paper, written on it were the words:

"I was always there wasn't I, you had a choice didn't you?"

Mori placed the note on the wooden table. To keep the damp wind from blowing it away, he set a small salt shaker on top of it, then he pulled out a blank sketchbook and a pencil. He pressed the lead to the paper to draw, but his hands stayed still. His mind was too loud. The thoughts came in heavy and exhausting refusing to calm his mind  but that was exactly why he had come here. to force himself to sit with the noise, his thoughts…to maybe find a way to undo everything until it finally stopped hurting and bothering him.

The waiter set down the Spanish latte and Mori took a sip. It was sweet, thick, and tasted terrible to him, but his face remained completely blank, he didn't flinch or give any reaction. As he zoned out to the steam of coffee Mori stared at the empty chair across from him. He closed his eyes and imagined a girl walking up, pulling out the chair, and sitting down right in front of him.

In his mind, she was a stranger now, but there was a time when she wasn't. She used to know the way of his thoughts, and he knew hers. How do you talk about someone like that? What do you call a person like that? A friend? An ex-friend? A stranger you used to love? A stranger you once knew? And even if they were strangers, there was no way to be friends with them again, because  all the past makes this stranger cursed, and only if there was a way to lift this curse.

Mori's hands tightened around the warm coffee mug.

There must be a way to fix it, he thought.

Everything finds a way in the end. Maybe not today, and maybe not next year, but ten years from now, the things that tore us apart won't matter anymore. The reason she isn't in my reality would be fixed. We will find our way back to each other, but deep down, the cold air reminded him of the truth, people are easily replaced, people are easily forgotten.

I stop my pencil. The charcoal smudges slightly against the cheap notebook I crafted for myself. I look down at the paragraph I just wrote, my heart aching in the quiet of the cafe.

I reach out and touch the mug sitting in front of me. The hot Spanish latte…my favorite drink, the one I forced Mori to order in my story has gone completely cold. The sweet foam tastes like the most bitter thing ever.

There is no Mori sitting under this shed. There is only me, sitting alone at a corner table, trying to drag a ghost back to life with a pencil.

I write him into these pages because it is the only place I can control him. I give him the choices in these paragraphs that he never had the courage to make in real life. I make him carry a bag full of our little memories because it is too heavy for me to carry alone. I make him look for me in the crowded train carriages because I am the one searching the faces of strangers on my two-hour commute every single day, thinking that maybe one day I will talk to him.

I write these brutal, sad stories to make him realize what he did. I built a world in pages to show him how much it hurts, but Mori wasn't much of a reader. He never opened a book when he was in my life, and he will never read the stories I write about him now.

In my notebook, Mori is still sitting by the window, frozen in time, hoping we will meet again. But out here, in the real world, he is out there with people he replaced me with, and even if he's gone from my life it feels like I am the one who died.

What memory am I even going to keep alive,

If I am the only one who remembers it?