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.
Then he steps backward off the edge.
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 in that mirror, you catch yourself looking back. From that night on, you leave your window unlocked
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. The stranger has come and gone, but his
The stranger on the roof was never there. Or rather: he was never not there. He is the vertigo that lives inside every home, the crack in the domestic spell, the reminder that the house is not a fortress but a poem—and poems have trapdoors.
