Trust me. Just trust me on this one.

He has a full head of thick hair, all brushed back with hardened gel. If he doesn't, the thickness fluffs into a platinum mane. You never ever, ever see his eyes. The sunglasses are part of his face and he's old enough that he doesn't come across as a young cool punk. He's probably never fully recovered from cataract surgery, or perhaps on meds which make one sensitive to the sun.
He has too many scars on his body to count, instead he undresses and asks me to point to which ones I want to know about. He is gnarled like a machine's gnashing teeth from hell wouldn't let go. I point straight to him. One monstrous unhealing laceration. And I am struck by a primal fear. The mangled and lost is reaching for me, opening my hands and kissing them, open-mouthed wetness on my wrists, up my arms. He sniffs me -- I'm a shivering animal.

 "This, is how I got these scars," he whispers to the hair beside my ear.

Two things shoot through my mind:
1. Oh shut up, if you were a 20-something boy in all black I'd laugh your face off you crazy old kook.
2. Oh shit, whether this guy is making it up for affect or not, he's hacked and disfigured and saying something like that isn't the most reassuring. Run bitch run!
I hardly flinch and stay put. Because I'm compassionate and idiotic and have a strange relationship with fear. I stare right at it until it's amorphic and vaporous. And then becomes nothing.

Unless I'm on the NYC subways, in that case, someone needs to hold my hand because I'll just sit and cry in confusion. But that's another and different story that will have a happy ending when I do my surprise visit. Or it'll have a tragic ending because I'll be kidnapped and murdered and thrown in the Hudson.

This is not me against him, it is me against myself. 

And I am fucking terrified.

-E-