Un Extrao En - El Tejado

You run to the parapet, heart fracturing. You look down. There is nothing. No body on the pavement. No blood. Only the wet gleam of streetlights on cobblestones and a single tile, dislodged, spinning in slow circles before it comes to rest.

You open the window. The cold air rushes in like a truth. He turns his head slowly, and his face is not a face—it is a mirror. Not of your features, but of your solitude. He smiles, not with cruelty, but with the tired sympathy of one who has been watching from the high places for a very long time. He does not speak. He simply lifts one finger to his lips: Shh. un extrao en el tejado

And yet, as the minutes pass, your fear begins to curdle into something stranger: recognition. You realize that you, too, have been that stranger. Not on a roof of tile and tar, but on the roof of your own life. The nights you lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to descend into the warm rooms of sleep. The moments you stood apart from your own body, watching yourself from above, a foreign observer in the museum of your habits. The stranger on the roof is not an invader. He is an externalization of every time you have felt out of place inside your own existence. You run to the parapet, heart fracturing

From that night on, you leave your window unlocked. Not for him. For the part of you that still wants to climb onto the roof and see what the world looks like when you are no longer sure you belong to it. The stranger has come and gone, but his footprint remains pressed into the soft lead of the flashing, and every time it rains, the water pools there, a small dark mirror. No body on the pavement

He stands still, not like a burglar calculating entry, but like a saint contemplating a fall. His posture lacks the tension of a threat. His hands hang loose at his sides. He does not look down at your window; he looks at the horizon, where the city ends and the countryside begins its slow dissolve into fog. This is what makes him terrifying: he has no business with you. You are incidental to his vertical pilgrimage.