Can You See Me?

You like to think of yourself as a nice person, but you get stressed, like we all do, and that gets worse when you’re hungry and tired and sometimes you say or do things that you wouldn’t if all was well in your world, or you had that moment to think before your mouth spoke.

That was how you were when you came out of a shop, looking on your phone at your work email even though it was well into the evening, and you nearly fell over a man who was sat in a corner of the doorway, blackened cardboard underneath him, a dozen layers of clothes on. He looks up at you, and his bright green eyes stand out against the outdoor tan and the ingrained dirt in the lines of his face.

“Did you not see me?” he said, and that is where another time you might have said sorry, no, apologised for nearly walking over him, perhaps given him some money or gone back into the shop for a sandwich. But this time you are tired and hungry and apprehensive about everything and you don’t think, just snap, “No, I didn’t see you, and you have no right to be there.”

By the time you get home, you regret this, and feel bad about saying it, but there’s nothing you can do about it, and by the time you’ve eaten you’ve mostly forgotten it.

The next day at work you’re searching through a stock photography site for an image to use in a newsletter, and the first hit on ‘man at desk’ is the same man, shaven and clean, sitting behind a white desk in a pale blue shirt and red tie, holding a mouse with one hand, and looking at his laptop, which doesn’t appear to be connected to anything. You have a horrible feeling that if you keep looking, even though it’s just a photo he will turn his head and look at you. The newsletter goes out with some clip-art of a desk, nothing else.

On the way home you’re sat on the train and pull your phone out to pass the journey and look busy so no one talks to you. But then you drop it on the floor, and as everyone else looks at you while pretending not to look at you, you scoop it up and shove it into a pocket, feeling all the journey as if it’s burning you. When you took it out and the lock screen lit up, there he was. Not aggressive or angry, just stood in a park, a little way away, staring at you. It’s a few hours until you dare look again, and when you do the lock-screen picture is your dog, muddy and grinning, just like it has been for a year.

Over the next week he appears in a crowd scene on a Netflix drama set in New York, in with other people on a charity fundraising poster, all stumbling across a finish line in t-shirts and shorts looking exhausted, the only one looking up at the camera is him. He’s modelling trousers in a Boden catalogue and eating fried chicken on a flyer posted through your door and he’s stood behind your friends in a photo one of them shares on Facebook post, and he walks past the window of a colleague who’s working from home and calling in to the office on Teams.

At the end of the week, you have hardly slept and you can’t face speaking to any of your friends. You scuttle out of the house for another few bottles of wine to get through the day, and as you turn a corner, there he is. Just standing there.

“Do you see me?” he says, in a very ordinary voice.

“I see you,” you reply. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

He nods and walks away, and you never see him again, on the street on in a picture or in a film, or anywhere but in your memory, and from that he cannot ever disappear.

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