Dear Stranger...

Dear Stranger,

Do I know you? How can I know you if you are a stranger? That’s a conceptual dichotomy, right? But I still feel that I do. Sometimes, you float across my mind, an intensely familiar presence, known yet mysterious, inexplicable. When did I know you? In this lifetime? Probably. Will this letter ever reach you? Do I want it to reach you? I don’t even know your address. I will never send it to you. However, should it still find its way to you, maybe you will recall the time we spent together. I am still wondering should I be writing this letter at all…some experiences are best left unsaid, unexpressed, not articulated. How can I use language that fails me all the time to capture some of the most precious memories?

When I met you I didn’t know you. You were a stranger to me. You have once again become a stranger to me—a different stranger, but still a stranger once more. Somewhere, in between these two strangers, lies the person I knew for a very short while. "Knew" is a wrong word to use but then language is so inadequate. There is no one word to describe a blending of the known and the mysterious.

Has your life been reinvented, recreated by a meeting? By some conversations? Maybe. Mine has been. My conversations with you. We shared the same space for some time, for a very short time, for a negligible period of time in a lifetime. I gradually got to know you—or so I thought. We talked almost not at all initially. I was contented to listen to you talking to others, marvelling at your intellect. I wanted to participate but held my tongue—often feeling tongue-tied in your presence. I cherished the moments we spent watching movies, talking, sitting in the semi-darkness, the breeze from the balcony blowing the curtains obstructing the computer screen till you got up to move them out of the way... in retrospect, those evenings seem ethereal, surreal almost, far beyond my reach now. Did they really happen? Hallucination, delusions cannot be that vivid...

I saw the razor sharp intellect. But I also saw someone who was intensely lonely, seeking for something, someone…probably someone to match your intellect and intensity. You are so self aware, yet you do not know what is it that you seek—just like the rest of us. I started to see through that façade of bravado, that pretense of being in control, of being on the top of things. I wanted to talk to you, to tell you that you are the best, you have so much to give…but you were too scared to show your pain, to show your need, to share your grief. I saw your strengths; I recognized your failings. And I wanted to tell you that neither mattered except that you were you, that all of these were manifestations of you. I watched you unobserved, watched you trying to be what you were not. Did you know that yourself? Or were you also deluding yourself as well as the others?

Maybe, we will meet someday…will I recognize you? I don’t know. Maybe, you won’t recognize me either because memory is ambivalent. But what is recognition. Just an acceptance and identification of a familiar face or much more, much much more…

Should I end this wishing you all the best…but that is so banal, meaningless…what does it mean? These phrases have no meaning. I will end this hoping you will find what you are seeking. One day, you will. Perhaps, you already have…

Then, you will no longer need to wear a mask of bravado, then you can be your true self—intense, sensitive, strong enough to expose your weaknesses.