I had a stalker.

I didn't know his name but I'm sure he knew mine.

I called him Charlie.

He always had a camera hanging from his twig thick neck and he cradled it in his hands; a wispy finger stroking the shutter release. His dark brown hair was a curly mess and his shirts wrinkly and thin. He had the most perfect eyebrows, sweeping and gentle. He must have the most captivating eyes, I thought every time he'd glance my way. We'd never made eye contact. Charlie preferred it that way.

He came into the bookstore once a week, not to watch me leaf through the used books or reach high to shelve the approved ones, but to actually browse them. He read the unknowns; the virgins with their unbroken spines. I imagine he liked the smell of them – aromas preserved for him alone. Charlie appreciated the books wearing dusty coats and factory perfume a decade old.

The rest of the time he spent on the outside looking in. My co-workers were tickled pink. "What a geek." "Poor guy doesn't realize you're far out of his league." I just shook my head because they didn't know me and I was defensive because they didn't know him. "Why do you let him hang around?" They would ask dumbfounded. "I think it's precious. He's a kind-hearted soul – he's here to capture something beautiful." "Wow," they scoffed, "you sure are full of it." "No no, not me, I'm not beauty but he must think I am. He's built me up in his mind to be something elusive and free. He wants to capture an instance of his imagination." They rolled their eyes.

He would follow me home even on my long meandering walks. I only worked till four so I had the time. I'd walk in the middle of the street – it was often empty, a ghost town. Sometimes I felt like I was the only ghost around. Charlie was here to document my afterlife story.

I could hear his foot falls behind me, soft and so careful – mustn't scare the ghost away. I pretended like I didn't hear, like I didn't know. It hurt not to speak to the one person who meant so much to me. Sometimes he'd get within feet of me, close enough for the click of the camera lens to echo in my ear. Close enough to hear his heart beat, I wish he was.


I was working late when the bell jingled alerting me to a curious passerby. I looked up from the book I was reading to see Charlie standing in the doorway. He looked at me – I didn't look away, I never did. His gaze usually flitted away just fast enough but this time he held steady and I fell into his sea-green eyes. He raised his camera then and focused on me, head-on to capture my gaze eager to look through the camera, back into his captivating eyes. He lowered the camera and let it sway. His head was lowered but I could still see the corners of his mouth raised.

He walked to his favorite bookshelf – it was his bookshelf. I put all the obscure and yellow-paged books for his delicate fingers to examine and for those mesmerizing eyes to caress. He plucked one out, placed something in-between the pages, re-shelved the book then glided to the door. We never made eye contact again. He left. No waiting for me to close up and take my stroll home. No final snapshot. No words.

After rushing to the shelf, I yanked the book out, trembling. I flipped through pages becoming salty and wrinkled with the tears I could not stop from falling. .  There -  a single grayscale photo to hold the memory of us. It was of me, my back to him, black coat too big and draping, white bag hanging on my casual, sloping shoulders.  My unkempt hair dull against the impenetrable darkness of my jacket. I was mid-stride in the center of a wide, wide street. A white car parked ahead and to the left of me. I, a ghost realized in a silent neighborhood, lost and searching for something intangible. The alignment skewed to the right marred perfection but it was me, unremarkable and unassuming, captured in his curious aperture. Although I appeared to wander alone, he was in the photo too – invisible but present still. He was a part of me – he was in every stroll, he was in every breath and every deep pocket cradling an unloved book. He was behind me like a welcome shadow - company in an empty street. I hugged the photo close and I swear I could feel his heart beat.

She said create the world, so I did. I made it dark and dusty, coughed up from my own black lungs. I gave the trees an ashen hue and the ground a color to match the starless sky. The creatures were murmuring oozes, globs of drying acrylic that inked across the orb of my bubbling imagination.

Repulsing, it was in fact the product of an industrial mind. I was born from man's smog goddess and, if memory serves me, her breath was laced in exhaust which I inhaled nightly with her songs. She was soothing and complacent, her voice smokey like a hazy bar. No one could deny her features were hideous beyond belief. Her skin dripped pollution like morphine into veins, into deep red rivers to turn them ebony and clogged. Her eyes glistened obsidian, sharp and cold if you didn't know her at all. I knew she was lost and ashamed, as her mother, my grandmother, would often remind her of the destruction her presence caused. I loved her like grandmother nature never could.

Grandmother was ,indeed, a grand mother; full of herself, and rightfully so, she was beautiful. Shoulder blades smooth as sand dunes, hair blue and ever-moving. Her voice was a harmony of every heartbreaking, lovemaking bird song. The first time I laid eyes on her I wanted nothing more than banishment to the darkest corners of space - her beauty thundered and eroded my significance to an awful pebble. My mother was nothing more than a shadow come alive and grandmother nature wanted her suffocating daughter gone - swept away like cigarette smoke.

So mother and I gathered our clouds up into our lungs, soaked up chemicals we sweated in our separate stratospheric rooms and the air was clear for the first time. Man rejoiced, their hallelujahs pounding rejection onto my eardrums. Mother held my hand tight as cancerous cells and wept acid rain to dispel their unashamed disregard for our leaving. They settled, shrugged and raising their umbrellas went about their day. Still, the time for moving on was now. Mother bent down to my level, eyes glassy and black, "Sweetheart, create a world for you and me. Make a place where we will be loved for our horrid condition."

The taste of metal always on our tongue, carbon monoxide seeping through our pores, bathing in the radiation of our black hole sun; dank and disturbed is where we are loved.