The Man

The man. You saw him everywhere when you were little. Ever since you could remember, he had been there. The grocery store, the park, even on family vacations, he was there.

“Momma look! It's that mister again”.

“Sweetheart, no one is there” she would say as the two of you sat in the front yard together. No one ever believed you when you told them about him, so you stopped trying to convince them. Even though he was clearly walking down the sidewalk across the street from your house. It never seemed like that big of a deal when you were a child anyway, he looked friendly enough, and never gave the impression that he ever saw you. So you continued on, without a word about him. 

That’s how the two of you lived for many of your childhood years, in quiet, unknowing harmony. As you got older, he was still around, and though you knew you should have found it unsettling that this man was “following you”, his presence continued to leave you untroubled, and even brought you comfort. You hadn’t said a word about him to anyone in years. You enjoyed it that way. The kids and teachers at school used to call you crazy because you always saw him at recess or walking down the hallways. You used to ask the other kids if they could see him too, or your teachers if they knew him and what his name was. But they would all treat you as if you were some kind of freak for seeing him, looking at you as if you had some kind of awful deformity they pittited you for. Eventually, you stopped talking about him, and you were treated as if you were human. So yes, you preferred it this way, now you were only secretly the “monster girl” who sees people that don’t exist.

You were never scared of the man. He never gave you reason to be, he was always just minding his own business. He never looked your way, never followed you down the street, never peered into your window late at night when you were changing. It was always random, always in a populated area. You were certain he didn’t even know you existed. You didn’t mind, it was nice always having a familiar face, even if they were indifferent to your life. That was, until your freshman year of High School. 

One autumn morning you woke up before your alarm for school. With the extra time you had, you decided to walk to school the long way, through the countryside, in hopes of maybe catching the late sunset of the colorful season. The quiet dirt road to school always comforted you. You never saw the man in a place like this, there were too little people around for him here. While you enjoyed the alone time, you started to feel a small pool of dread form in the pit of your stomach with each step. You half hoped for the man to appear in the distance as he always seemed to. The dawn had not yet given way to the sunrise casting the trees lining the road into a deep shadow. A chill ran up your spine and you wrapped your jacket tighter around your chest.

You continued walking like this, arms wrapped around yourself for warmth and comfort, for a good stretch. The walk felt longer than usual, even for the long way. Each step seemed to last an eternity. And with each passing minute, the larger that pool of dread in your stomach grew. You tried to walk faster but it did not seem to change the passage of time. You felt like you were walking for days. But, right as you began to truly panic, you felt the heat of the sun break through the crisp air of the night, thawing your frozen muscles. You slowed your pace to look to your left, the direction of the sunrise. Beautiful deep reds and oranges stretched their long arms across the sky blending together in the light, dusting off of the light cloud cover and twinkling in the remaining frost on the ground. But this beauty is not what stopped your tracks short. The real-life painting of a sky, painted by mother nature herself, is not what caused you to drop your jaw and your backpack. No. It was the tree. The large oak tree just across the street from you. There was nothing special about this particular oak tree, except the rope that hung off of it. And the clear signs of strain on said rope. And the man who hung, lifeless, from the end of the rope. The Man. It was him. He was blue from lack of oxygen and the cold night. His lifeless eyes were staring directly past you. Even in death he didn’t look at you.

You didn’t go to school that morning. Or the next. You couldn’t. And you didn’t for a long time. Your parents thought you had lost your mind, so they admitted you to the mental hospital. They told you it wasn’t real. They told you your eyes were wrong. And you believed them. You were in the psych ward for a long time. You got better eventually, but by the time you got out, it was time for you to start your own life. You wanted to get a fresh start, a new beginning. He still haunted your dreams at times, but as you and those around you told yourself that it wasn’t real, that it was just a chemical imbalance in your brain, that you were better now, he went away. 

After you had been out of the ward for a year, you had practically forgotten about The Man. You had started your new life, your clean slate. You were happy again. Content. At peace.

After a long, normal day at work, you were walking home. You still preferred to walk places, but you no longer lived in the country. City life was the perfect excuse to walk everywhere but in highly populated groups. No opportunities for only one person to see a dead man. The streets were busy tonight as they always were. Comfortable, you happily walked home. 

It took you no time to register what was in front of you. You knew immediately. You had stopped dead in your tracks, right in the middle of the bustling crowd. There was a direct line of sight between the two of you. You couldn’t believe it. You had seen him. He was dead. His lifeless body flashed back into your memory for the first time in at least a year. There was no way. He was so blue. There's no way. He had to be dead. You saw him. He was dead. How is this happening? He was standing right in front of you. Staring directly at you. In your eyes. Seeing you. 

He was smiling at you.