mylightspirit

The neighbor who stares from the window, the workers nearby, the person walking their dog, the frequent visitor to the neighborhood; strange faces that become familiar in our daily lives. Faces we smile at, nod to with a morning greeting. Faces of all kinds and expressions that gradually become part of our everyday life.

In the past couple of years, new strangers have joined our daily routine; faces appearing in our lives on a small screen or on the TV, looking into our eyes, talking to us, or just passing by. Faces that haunt us every day. On the days we don’t see them, we get worried; we search for any tiny piece of news about them, just to know what’s going on; just like when we don’t see a neighbor for a couple of days.

Then come the faces that passed by with a story that appeared for a couple of days and then was gone, just like that. We never knew how it ended: two children, their faces dusted with tears, looking for their parents; a father unaware of his family’s fate; a mother lost among strangers, searching for a familiar face.

A broken-hearted family mourning a loved one in front of all of us; people we feel for, for a moment, a day, or more; but they are left to mourn for a lifetime.

Each story eventually reached an end, whether happy or not, but it was an ending we never saw, because those faces left us in the middle of the story, with an open ending for our imagination to take over. Faces that haunt us as we try to move on, burdens we carry for people we don’t know.

It hits us hard: what if we are the ones left with an open ending; or with no ending at all?

We will never know how these stories end; or perhaps we are simply afraid to search for their endings; our hearts cannot handle that much pain. So, we leave them as they are, like a movie or a book that leaves us hanging with no clear conclusion.

The question remains: will we be the strange faces in someone else’s story? Will our suffering, grief, and pain haunt them? Or are we already just minor characters in this world, with no real meaning to our presence in the larger story?