I would never know your name. I only know your face, indelibly imprinted on my third eye. The one that is awake regardless of whether I sleep.

It started as a commonplace event; a bus, streaming through the blackened downpour, coming to a lethargic halt at a bus stop. Of all places. No one would think twice about the event but for its accompaniment.

A gentleman, or, rather, a scoundrel. Half-cocked and hunched like the scourge of Nôtre-Dame, if not far less graceful. If not far more disgusting.

“Myah!! WAIT FOR ME!!!” He yells.

Well, not exactly that, but enough to incent me to, for the first time, regard your face; the face of a bus driver. The face of someone suddenly consumed by fear. Eyes that regard each and every direction but directly toward the perpetrator. Eyes that look not forward, with confidence, but down, and away.

The eyes of a victim. The face of someone who didn’t deserve the rapture waged against her.

This, pissant, this…meek offering to the darkness that has only recently begun to drain upon my landscape, this wretch of a human chose you, you as the object of his frustration and anger.

And you sit, behind the wheel of your bus, your…other, home…you feel unsafe. I can see it. I see it in your eyes, the way you hold your chin, the way you look forward, but never to the side.

Someone with eyes as kind as those tucked behind your bespectacled face, those eyes do not deserve what has been laid at your door. This monster, no, this man, deserves nothing less than exacted judgement from whatever deity is in your personal pantheon.

I want to rage against this man, and the wet, dark night that spawns his ilk; I want to, but I don’t.

I sit, and curse, and wait.

I wait until you pass by, off into the night, that I may allow the façade of society once again veil my fears and inhibitions about the true nature of man.

I feel sick. I ride on. Into the dark, wet, trail of tears that lay before me.

Originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/@keithhamilton/i-would-never-know-your-name-a33774f65e36