STRANGERS • by Michael Ogah

There’s a strange man who waves by the window. I wave back even though I don’t know who he is. He smiles at me and walks on, his shoulders slouched, the briefcase in his hand swinging back and forth like a child playing with its lunch box. He is headed towards the street with a stair that leads to a park, which leads to a plaza, which leads to his office. I wonder what his name is.

Every day, I wait for the strange man who waves at me by the window. Am I obsessed? Maybe I am. You see, I live alone — a writer with no friends, just acquaintances who think more of our relationship. If they were being honest, they only reach out to me on marked calendar days like Easter, Christmas, and New Year to say, ‘Happy Holidays.’ To be fair, I don’t reach out either. Friendships have always been a chore: the constant need for validation, attention, and the superpower to discern social cues like unspoken silences.

The stranger and I say hi every morning. It’s been like that since last year. I’d like to think that’s when he moved into the neighbourhood. I wonder if, like me, he has no friends. Is that the reason he waves at me with a smile? Two planets orbiting in separate universes, momentarily aligned in a cosmic dance of mutual recognition.

Morning is when the stranger goes to work. He wears either grey, black, or brown suits and pairs them with pink, blue, or white shirts. I wonder if he is a lawyer; he certainly dresses like one, or a businessman working in finance. Whatever he does, I am certain he works in the plaza two levels down because I’ve seen him there more times than I can count. I assure you, on all occasions, I wasn’t stalking him. I was simply taking my walks, walks I take after every meal, during which I daydream, thinking about a new character, plot, or world for a story I am writing.

In the evenings, the stranger walks by my window in a tattered t-shirt of any colour and always blue shorts. I think blue is his favourite colour; his eyes, the sky, and the ocean are all blue. I wonder if his wardrobe choice is an homage to Mother Nature, thanking her for the gift of life in his lungs, water in his tap, and food on his plate.

I wonder where he grew up. Did he have a hard life as a child? Like me, has fate been kind to him in recent years, having escaped the hell that was his childhood home — a drunk father who never spared the rod, a loud mother who wasn’t shy with words. Does he have scars on his back from whooping, a chipped ear from a vicious dog set loose on him by his father for having to repeat a class? Surely, his shiny corporate shoes and neatly pressed clothes tell a story of resilience, a rags-to-riches tale.

What if the stranger is nothing like I imagine him to be? What if he is married, with a wife he keeps locked up for fear of being jilted? What if he beats her, yells, and throws tantrums like my father did? What if he is miserable, walking to a job he detests, ruminating during his long walks about existentialism and the possibility of ending things? What if he is having an affair, with a woman he is deeply in love with but will never be with because she too is married?

The stranger is walking past my window this Tuesday morning, and I wonder what secrets these windows hold. If they could tell it all, would they reveal that I also look at the stranger with longing, that I spend sleepless nights thinking about his touch, his skin against mine, our lips locking? Would they disclose that I am also afraid of a man I have never actually spoken to? A man who probably doesn’t wave to me each morning but to the wife who waves back on the floor above mine, her eyes wrinkled with tears as she smiles with a wave, longing for hours to turn into minutes and minutes into seconds so that he could return, turn the key to the door, push it open, and say, ‘Honey, I’m home!’


Michael Ogah is a Nigerian screenwriter and aspiring novelist whose debut screenplay, ‘The Missing Link,’ came to life on Africa’s Iroko TV in 2018. His short stories have graced literary platforms such as Lolwe, African Writer, Brittle Paper, and Decolonial Passage. He is a law graduate from the Nigerian Law School and Masters’ degree holder in International Management from the University of the West of Scotland. When he isn’t singing in the shower, or pretending to be a better cook than Gordon Brown, he is working on his first novel.


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