The Stranger Who Knew My Name

The Stranger Who Knew My Name

By [HAFSA]

The first time I saw him was outside the bookstore on 6th Street. He stood leaning against the lamppost like he belonged to the rust and the rain, an unshaven man in a brown coat a size too large. He watched people with tired, knowing eyes, but it was me he smiled at.

“Don’t forget the blue one,” he said as I passed.

I turned. “Excuse me?”

He just tipped his head toward the bookstore, as if that explained everything. I walked inside, brows furrowed, slightly unnerved. I wasn’t planning to buy anything blue — until I saw it.

An old poetry collection. Hardcover, blue spine, edges frayed like it had been carried through someone’s life and back. I don’t know why, but I bought it.

That night, I found a name scribbled inside the front cover in faded ink: Eleanor, age 24. My mother’s name. Her handwriting. And the year matched — twenty years ago, before I was born.

The man’s words echoed: Don’t forget the blue one.

A week passed. I tried to forget. Told myself it was coincidence. But then it happened again.

At the train station, he appeared beside me on the bench like a shadow stitched into the crowd.

“You always hum when you’re nervous,” he said.

I froze. My mouth went dry. I hadn’t even realized I was humming — an old lullaby, something my dad used to sing after Mom died. I turned toward him, ready to ask who he was, but he stood up before I could speak.

“Platform 3,” he added. “You’ll find her there.”

My heart thumped louder than the train. My sister had been missing for months — disappeared after a fight, dropped off the grid. No contact. No posts. No trace.

I ran to Platform 3.

I didn’t find her that day. But I found a woman who looked just like her. Same laugh. Same restless tapping fingers. She wasn’t Sarah. But she was her roommate — the one who’d moved with her to the coast. She was in town for a layover, and she had Sarah’s new number, new address. She told me everything.

That night, I called my sister for the first time in seven months. We talked for hours. I cried like a faucet left on. She said she’d been scared I hated her. She’d missed me too.

From then on, I started watching for him. Not daily, but often — in the corners of crowded cafes, near the riverwalk at dusk, on park benches where old people feed pigeons and talk to ghosts.

And sometimes, he was there.

He never told me his name. But he always knew mine.

“Stay away from the red letter,” he said once.

“You’ll regret the coffee at dawn,” he warned another time.

“When the window cracks, listen. It’s time.”

Each warning, each whisper, meant something — but only after the moment passed. I avoided a toxic job offer because of him. Missed a car crash because I changed my route. Reconnected with a childhood friend because he told me to “call the one who paints flowers.”

And every time, he vanished before I could ask, Who are you? Why me?

One winter evening, I found him sitting under the skeletal branches of a willow tree. Snow fell in slow motion. The air was thin with silence. This time, I spoke first.

“You always leave. Why?”

He looked up at me with those same quiet, tired eyes.

“Because I’m not supposed to stay,” he said. “I only come when you’re about to forget something important.”

“Forget what?”

He gave a crooked smile. “Yourself.”

I sat beside him. The snow didn’t melt where it touched him. I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but my mouth wouldn't move. My breath caught like frost on glass.

“Are you real?” I whispered.

He chuckled. “Does it matter? I only know what you already know. I’m just a reminder.”

“Of what?”

He stood slowly, brushing snow off his coat. “That your life is still yours. And it's waiting.”

He began to walk away.

I rose, voice trembling. “Will I see you again?”

He paused.

“When you need me,” he said. “But not when you want me.”

And then he was gone — no footsteps in the snow, no sound, like he'd been part of the wind all along.

I never saw him again after that winter. Not clearly. But sometimes, I still feel him — in a sudden urge to turn right instead of left, in a familiar stranger's voice, in the rustle of pages when I read the blue book under lamplight.

And once in a dream, my mother’s voice told me something soft and strange:

"Some angels don’t have wings. Just old coats and kind eyes."

So I listen now. To the silence, the signs, the quiet stranger inside me — the one who always knew my name.