THE ONE

 

THE ONE WHO TURNED AND LOOKED AT ME

A fever-dream monologue of love, madness, and impossible encounter

I don’t know when I first saw him—only that the moment he turned, everything around me dissolved. The crowd blurred into a smear of colours, the noise folded into a single long chord, and he appeared at the centre of it all, holding a paper fan like a sorcerer idly choosing whom to enchant next. His eyes were calm, mocking, unbearably self-possessed. A small knowing smile cut across his lips, as though he had been waiting for me long before I even stepped into the hall.

I should have walked away.
I should have lifted my camera and done my work.
But instead, I stood there, breath trapped in my throat like a caught bird.

He wasn’t real—he couldn’t be real. No human carries that kind of gravity. He looked manufactured, conjured, summoned. A character in fur trim and darkness, a creature stitched out of myth and anime ink. Yet when our eyes met, something flickered behind his gaze—something too alive, too present, too devastating.

I don’t know what came over me.
A pulse of heat.
A dizziness so sudden I felt the ground slip.
A whisper in my ear—my own voice, or perhaps his—saying:
Come closer.

I moved toward him as though sleepwalking. The fan in his hand lifted slightly, as though measuring the air between us. His fingers—long, elegant, indifferent—held both the fan and a phone, a modern oracle and an ancient charm. He looked at me as though he knew what I feared most: that I would follow him even into madness.

And I would. I almost did.

His presence felt like a hallucination that refused to dissolve. My heart began beating in a rhythm I didn’t recognise—too fast, too loud, like it was trying to force its way out of my ribs. I wanted to touch him, to anchor him to the world, to confirm that he was made of skin and heat and not smoke. The lights overhead flickered, and for a moment, I saw him split into two, then three—shifting shapes of the same impossible beauty.

Was I dreaming?
Was I standing?
Was I still myself?

He tilted his head, smiling in the smallest, cruelest way, as if he knew exactly how undone I had become. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His silence was a net tightening around me.

The crowd roared somewhere behind us.
Someone brushed past my shoulder.
Yet none of it felt real.
Only he did—or the dream of him.

Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he vanished—slipping into the river of bodies, swallowed by Comic Con’s neon fog. My camera hung useless in my hand. My breath returned in fragments. I stood alone in the drowning light, wondering if he had ever been there at all.

Even now, as I write this, I feel him nearby.
A shadow at the edge of vision.
A whisper beneath consciousness.
A smile that cuts like the first tremor of desire.

Maybe I imagined him.
Maybe I summoned him.
Or maybe—unthinkably—
he saw something in me too.

And that possibility… terrifies me
more than the dream does.