The faceless man
I wasn't precisely expecting a visit from a faceless man this morning, but it happened anyway. I was getting ready to go to work when someone started to knock on the door as if they were about to kick it open. Interrupted in the middle of the very important decision of using the red or blue tie, but there it was, the unexpected visit, in front of my door, holding a book in its hands.
“What do you want?”, I asked, a bit annoyed for the interruption.
He (or she?) looked at me with his not-existent eyes. Its face was in my general direction, so I figured it was looking at me. It stretched both its arms and, holding the book with a strong grip, it offered to me. Silently, it gestured with the left hand towards the book, as if were explaining to me the importance of what it was putting in my hands. And that was my mistake. I took it. Didn't give it a proper thought, I just stretched my left hand and took it. Looked back at him, gave a nod, and closed the door without having an idea whether it had been finished explaining or even had said “goodbye”.
After closing the door and getting back to what I was doing before, I found that whatever I felt it was important that moment didn't really matter. A man without a face came to visit, and had left something it treasured a lot, to the point of offering to some stranger like me. What was it? Whether I chose the blue or red ties, it wouldn't really matter to me in that moment. So I took a closer look at the thing it gave me. They were blank pages, all of them. The faceless people, whoever claimed to have authored this book, just took a bunch of blank pages and considered them “a book”.
I couldn't just look away, though. The blank pages were asking to be written on, so I took my pen and started to write whatever my first thought was.
“My thoughts aren't mine anymore”
Huh? This isn't what I was intending to write. It wasn't even what I was thinking in the first place.
I heard someone knock on the door again, as if someone was trying to kick it open. I kept looking at the line I had written before. The knocks grew a bit more violent. I stood up and walked towards the door. There was a faceless man again. I didn't ask what was it this time. It was like I already knew why it was here, so I let it in.
“What's the meaning of this?” I asked, showing it what I had written. “Why did I write this?”
The faceless man, looked at it, and then looked to me, as if it had eyes on his own. But this time, with a foreign language I was able to understand, he spoke up, from inside my mind, an enigma.