The Second Person
You walk into the room, looking around at the flapping curtains and the low wooden table scattered with papers. The shelves, you notice with mild surprise, are empty save a few random items, a glass, a cardboard box, nameless, and a copy of the Oxford English dictionary. This, you surmise, is the room of a normal person, not the person you were looking for. That person is in no photographs. You shrug, turning form the quiet room, the curtains still flapping in the cold breeze through the open window. Carefully you leave, closing the door on the room and on it’s contents, thinking that because no one was in there, there cannot have been anything to the letter.
Weeks before, although it may only have seemed like a few days to you, a message was delivered to you by email. You looked at it for a few minutes, thinking about what it may mean, because the wording of the cryptic note didn’t seem to make any sense. And yet something about it, something in the sheer mysteriousness of it, made you keep it, look closer and start, because you had nothing else to do, to find meaning in the words, try and scribe connection to things you knew, and eventually make a scenario which was believable as a reason for the passing of the note. This is your own, and no one can steal it, but in the future you may be asked to reveal it, what you thought the note said, to another. And what then, will you do it, after what happened to you in the room which you had convinced yourself held the secret of the note. Will you then tell a person what you thought the note meant? There are those who have, and been rewarded. There are, however, many who have told the secret of their own thoughts and been drowned under the water of reason.
You watch other receive the same message that you did, seeing how they look once, look away, and then with a slight frown look back with interest. You watch this now, with the knowledge that whatever they may find, whatever it is that their message says, you had yours and it was wrong. And without knowing it, a habit has formed itself slowly in your mind, every day since then you have made the walk and watched the screen for sign of another note, another chance to get the meaning right. Maybe in the future you will, maybe you won’t. Whatever you think the note means, the room will still be empty.
