Night Owl

Ava Bauer | Spring 2024

I woke up with an uneasy feeling that today was a world whose rules I was behind on learning. My vision was narrow, untrustworthy. I thought the two women whom I passed in the stairwell were reaching out to me as though I were about to fall. I thought one of them might be my friendly neighbor Alice. I started to speak to her but suddenly felt that she did not recognize me. In fact, I got the feeling that we had never actually met before, that my mind had been playing too much make believe with the pretty woman next door. 
Later that night I was on a balcony. I do not remember whose. Maybe I didn’t even know. I had the feeling of wanting to go home. Or of wishing that home would feel like home again, like when a stranger visits your apartment and overstays their welcome. 
I wandered from this balcony to the inside of a hazy, dark apartment. Illuminated by a harsh light, Bea was laughing in the corner. I hadn’t seen her since the day before she died in middle school. I was happy she was there and I loved her very much but her presence made me feel ill. She was surrounded by adoring guests draping her in questions about her love life, her job, her apartment hunting. I rushed to her corner of the room, enraged by my inability to hear her answers and the knowledge that I would never get them, but by the time I reached her, her face had morphed into a stranger’s. This stranger was looking at me. 
“And you? What are you doing next year?” 
I mustered some vague answer as quickly as I could, but this guy — I can’t recall this stranger being a guy, but I can recall his shiny teeth and how cocky they felt — kept responding to me. I realized somewhere in our conversation that he was flirting with me. I tried to rally within myself some excitement about it. At the very least, I recognized it as something I should feel excited about, like hearing your alarm and knowing in your mind that you’ve overslept but that your body hasn’t responded yet. 
Like a puppet, I performed all the trappings of flirtation. I arched my mouth into a deliberate smile, I spoke low and slowly in a way that I suppose was meant to indicate that what this guy was saying was intriguing and sexy but simultaneously stupid and not above being made fun of. I maintained eye contact. He did all the same things so I figured we both must have been doing them right.
“What’s your name?” he asked in that half-affectionate, have-detached way. “I’m Anna.” I tried to introduce myself in the same tone. This game came to me quite easily but it felt heavy somehow. It was not fun. 
He repeated my name back to me like it was one he had never heard before, one he wasn’t yet sure how he felt about. 
“Yeah. What’s yours?” 
“I’m Stephen.” He sounded like he’d done this a million times. I felt underwater.
“Stephen…” 
Stephen… 
Do you ever think you see someone in a place they couldn’t possibly be? Do you ever look at someone you’ve looked at a thousand times before and suddenly wonder if you’ve made them up? Do you ever sense that the world is smaller than it was yesterday? “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re going insane?”