Have you ever, on the city street or in a crowd, perhaps watching a parade, seen in the face of a stranger a look of familiarity, of recognition? Worse, has the opposite happened, as it did to me this morning when I stumbled from bed and into the bathroom to take my morning piss? Above the toilet hangs a mirror, or perhaps as it seemed to me this morning, a window, for what difference is there but a tiny sliver of silver? That thin coating is all that keeps us looking back at ourselves, prevents us from seeing through, as I did this morning, to gaze at the stranger in the other room.

His face was that of a man older than myself, the flesh a bit mottled by age and loosened from its moorings, to let fall in places. On his brow it piled like wet snow, from his cheeks it crept like loose soil on a steep slope. His eyes, for their part, still held in them some clarity, still clung to the remains of some youthful transparency, though the corners were creased like a badly ironed shirt. It was an oval face marked with the same secret histories that any of us may carry. Secret not because of their importance, but because of their ordinariness, because no-one wants to hear them. In all there was nothing extraordinary, grotesque nor beautiful, to be perceived. It was the face of any stranger.

Still, there was something familiar living beneath the surface of this person that revealed itself in a profile, a movement, like a fish whose glittering scales can be seen sliding through the shallows as it rises to feed. Something I had seen in a photograph, the same features reflected in a more youthful frame. But then the moment passed. The face of the stranger, perhaps embarrassed by the length of our mutual gaze, turned aside and walked away. Maybe he went to his wife ( you could see a bedroom through the glass), maybe to eat a quick breakfast and brave the two hour commute, maybe back to bed to relish his first day off in a month, maybe to wait at the station to catch his train. He shuffled off.

And if I had followed him?

***

Just some more navel-gazing pseudo fiction of the kind you may now be accustomed to, that is not to say, expect from, me.

Also, this just in: Napoleon Dynamite is the best film evar! Oh man! I was crawling in my seat and then I had to, really I mean it, stop myself from squirming onto the floor (I was alone in the theater so, not so weird), and then I was laughing into my closed hands and singing to myself and then I was clapping and then it was over. Wat a movie. If you see it, and... well, I won't nag, but if you do see it wait until after the credits roll for the sooper secret ending.