When I walk into a room, the light will not strike me. Everyone will not turn their heads, and wonder who I am, or even look at me. At a party, I won't stand out; you will be lucky, or at least observant, to see me there.
No; I will find a corner, outside. I sit down, with a beer or a scotch; I will stay there, and enjoy the lack of other people, so rarely obtained silence. I might watch you, while you're inside; I might not. The light inside might suit you, might make your hair shine brighter, your eyes light up; for me, the shadows fit me better. The light of the moon makes me more interesting; it attracts me, lures me towards it.
They say people are always afraid of the dark; if you are at home there, you have nothing to fear. That is my complaint; that there are not many like me around. Fringe dwellers, those who simply do not fit in. We sit; we watch; we emulate well. We can pretend, because if we couldn't, we would not exist for very long.
It isn't intelligence; it isn't social inadequacy; or at least, I don't think it is. It is something about the quality of a person; something that is not initially evident. Something that draws them away from the eye, unless you are of the self-same type; it is difficult for you to be attracted to one from the other side of the room, the centre looking out. I look in, towards the light, because I'm where I belong; you might look out, and see me, some time. And you may be appalled; repelled. Disgusted, because in the light there is ample room to hide; in the darkness, you can have all of your inadequacies on display. Darkness is honest.
Or you might be looking out, because all of your life, you have been pretending. The light touches your hair; the hair product you use works well. Your eyes look beautiful under the sun; the contacts were a good purchase, despite their uncomfortableness. You smile, and it lights you up, and everybody else looks at you. When you enter the room, everyone does look at you; you look back, and fix a smile over a scream.
And you see me, and your eyes pierce the shadows, as only one of our own can. You are, as above, appalled, disgusted; yet you are fascinated. You don't smoke; neither do I, even though most of us do. A good enough reason to walk the fringe. Yet you see me, as I am, without pretence or charade, sitting; staring straight back at you. Your man looks out into the night, squinting; asks what you are looking at. You demur, and say nothing; yet, you keep looking back at where I was. Like a cat, you will never see me in the same place twice; looking at you in the same way. You look for me though; when your eyes find mine, you cannot hold my eyes for long; it hurts, to look at me. Just as looking at you is painful for me, so with looking back.
It isn't that I crave the light, within you; nor is it that you want the darkness in me. It is that we both want the twilight; the threshold, between danger and safety, neither side of the spectrum. To live without the shadows within you is hateful to you; to live in utter darkness is not desirable to me. You want to take off your make up, to wear your glasses, and to lie in bed without needing to say the right thing for a while; I want to embrace that which is noble in me, if only to believe that I can be other than bestial.
Or maybe it's that we both want what we cannot have; the light in me keeps me from taking you from your man, as I would if I were fully dark; just as the dark in you keeps you wanting to step out, and let your hair down. He wouldn't accept it in you; maybe the first little kinks, but not the eventualities. And the girl sitting next to me isn't, and could never be mine; the darkness is a poor place for emotions or attachment.
And so we sit, then stand, and then we sit again, each of us looking at each other before looking away; then I get up. Your eyes light up, as I walk towards you; you half rise, you lips half open. You smooth down the yellow sundress you wear; you give me a half smile of recognition.
I smile as I walk past; acknowledgement of what we both want. And a farewell.
Your face falls, as I say my goodbyes, and I walk out.
********
In all honesty, I never expected to see you again; I hadn't seen you before. It was a nothing party; I was invited because someone I knew was invited, and so on. I don't know you; we have never met, even been introduced. A glance across the room, from a savage to a lady; mutual desire. So I find it mildly entertaining to see you again; even more than mildly, perhaps.
I'm at work; it's late at night. I work a petrol station; I study. Your boyfriend pulls up. I recognised him easily; when you spend a significant amount of time watching people, you remember faces. Not like you, who dwell within; no, you remember names, but not faces. I can see your mouth, shaping my name; you must have asked someone after, who I was. That would have been an interesting conversation; you ask a friend, who didn't even see me. Then you kept asking around, trying to find someone who knew me, my name, who I was. Not that all of that can be encompassed within a name, but you feel you need to know it. As if my name will remind you of what you felt, when you stared at me; like a dog, baying at the moon, or running through pure wind, unable to see yet utterly not caring. But you might hurt yourself, you say; that wouldn't stop you. It's about the feeling, of letting go; you hear the echo of it, within your mind, as you recognise me.
He picks up the nozzle, and begins filling up; you get out, and come inside. He looks perplexed, but that's normal; girls prefer to stay in the car generally, when their boyfriend was driving.
You look me up and down; I still cannot look at you directly, without wanting. You feel that too, I see it; I keep my face impassive, as is necessary for the role, all the while I quake and roar inside, wanting you.
You are too good, to able, to show how you feel. Living on the fringe makes you feel more, or at least inhibits you from hiding it fully. You pretend all the time; you're pretending now.
You begin to talk to me; it's innocent, safe. Weather, news, sports- I mean, wow, you must really be stretching for subjects if you want to talk sport with nightshift. I smile, just as I did when I left, before.
I lean forwards, and I ask you about that night; that look. Who brought you to that party; what was your name. I generally keep my voice dull, boring; I play into the role of the automaton in customer service. I actually allow myself to flood into it, cadences of feeling and meaning.
It helps that, while the lighting inside is good, the windows are close; that the darkness is so near, almost between us both. You smile, and tell me your name is Isobeal; a Gaelic name. I like the sound of it; I ask you, were your parents irish. You nod; your mother. You look pleased, that I knew the origins of your name, I suppose. Small pleasures; they will have to suffice, for now.
The boyfriend comes in; I put your age at around twenty-one, twenty-two, where he is a year or so older. He carries himself like a young man, though; like a sixteen year old, strutting around and swinging his gym based muscles like he is Adonis, or Achilles- or, at least, Brad Pitt's Achilles.
He comes in, and puts his arm around you in a possessive way; she's mine, mate, his expression says, as he smiles at me cockily. I smile back, a cheshire's grin; yours, but for now. You look between our faces, reading the unspoken conversation, the challenges. I can see in your eyes, that you are intrigued; that you wonder who of the two of us would win if we fought. You know his strength, but the darkness within me appeals to you, draws at you; you cannot help but feel that I might win.
You ask me when I work next; I tell you. He gets more vexed, the longer you stay here, inside. I nod to him, and smile a little more genuinely. Relax, mate, I say. I know she's yours.
He look a little happier; he don't seem to mind when she gives me her facebook, and when you leave you smile at me a bit, almost gratefully. He smirks, but acknowledges me as best he can; you're a top bloke, and all that sort of thing. Condescending, to say the least, but that's fine. The rug is already moving.
He doesn't even have the vision to see it.
********
You come in, maybe once a week. Your first visit was to ask me why I didn't add you. I tell you, quite bluntly, that I don't really like facebook friends; there is no real conversation when the words are typed, not spoken. You nod thoughtfully, but you're still annoyed; you want to quantify why it is that you feel drawn, without the danger of actually giving in. I cannot let you get away from this so easily.
I suggest we get coffee, or a beer; you wrinkle up your nose. I laugh, and shrug; not as a date. I look at you honestly; why do you keep coming back here? We didn't talk at the party; whenever we talk, there are silences. Why do you want to know me?
