The Stranger – Part 1

The sunlight softly kisses my face with the warm passion of a summer morning, but I wake up with a sense that all is not well. As I lie in bed for a few more minutes trying to savor the last few moments of rest and solitude, I know somehow that I am not alone. There is an intruder in my bed and I don’t know how this interloper got here. My eyes remain closed and I hear only the sound of the early morning traffic blaring through the apartment’s open windows. A morning wind tugs at my head as I lay in bed, awake, and I open my eyes to the familiar white speckled ceiling I have become accustomed to for these last 20 years.

I turn my head slowly to the right and the left and see only the pillows that comfort my head at night. The sheets are, of course, crumpled against the bottom half of the bed and I am the only one there. I look around and see my closet door opened as I left it before going to bed. The rocking chair next to my bed holds the folded clothes exactly where I remember them. The walls are decorated with the same paintings that have been there for the past 10 years. But something is different. Something has happened during the night. I don’t know how I know this, but all is not right.

I try to ignore the strange new tapping in my head accompanying me as I get up to conduct my morning rituals. I only have an hour to get ready. “C’mon, you’ve got to get up to make the donuts” I tell myself as I do every morning. I walk to the bathroom and yawn as I turn on the lights and look at my mirror to see if I’m the same man who went to bed last night. “Yep, I’m still me.”

I open up the cabinet to reach for my toothbrush and notice a slight change in the way I hold the brush. I’m not sure, but there is something different about my grip. I feel as strong as always but the hand holding the brush somehow seems strange. As a matter of fact, there’s something different in the way I’m moving this morning. I seem to be slower, as if my body is not my own. I slowly squeeze the toothpaste and watch it spiral out of the tube onto the bristles of the toothbrush. I begin to have a sense of vertigo. I have to sit for a moment, take a deep breath and try to understand what is happening. In the few moments it takes me to breathe, I realize that I had just met the stranger who slept in my bed last night and woke up with me this morning. I briefly saw his face reflected in my bathroom mirror.

I am the stranger.