Rant.

Hi. I'm.. I'd tell you my name, but what good would that do? Names are common-place. Hundreds other could share my name and it so happens that we couldn't be more different from each other. Instead I'll tell you about what I am.

You know how when you are a child, you think there live monsters and demons under your bed? I thought that too. But I never fought them. I wanted to know who they were and what made the world hate them so. I would often talk to them in my sleep, question them over and over again, but they never replied. One day I woke up and I knew there lived not a single demon under my bed. All of them were inside my heart and my head.

I always wanted to work at a job where I could meet my customers. I wanted to look at the way they walked, the way their face would tilt when they tried to explain things to me. I noticed the young girl who bit on her lip a little more than she should and her brother who had the jagged, bitten nails. My eyes diverted themselves onto the smaller details of these people I was trying to sell something to. For days and years, I watched and understood these people as they went on with their incessant lives.

For as many days and years, the demons inside of me scared me a little less each time I found them in someone else. Whether it was the grown man who accidentally confessed his fear of the dark or the elderly lady who reminisced about wanting to run a knife deep through the heart of her first husband. They all had their demons, their monsters. I had mine too, so normal and natural that I learnt to love them instead of people.

When the work hours ended and I was deprived of all contact, the loneliness began. I craved for more attention, more details to understand and more lives to dissect. Looking wasn't enough, I had to get deeper into the life of many.

That was three years ago.

I still hadn't understood how you could love another human.

Since the first time I eavesdropped on a human life, I've craved for more. I've craved for control. I want to intercept their lives in a way that they can never deny or forget.

I eavesdropped on a lonely man who thought he was crazy because he could only bring himself to love his cats. He spent days and weeks spiraling lower and lower into his own delusion of being unacceptable to the world till I decided he couldn't live like that anymore. I let him know that exactly fifteen doors to the right of his own, lived a woman who wanted nothing more than to worship her feline friends each minute. You would expect the two to fall in love, wouldn't you? They tried, but they soon found out that they were perhaps incapable of loving another human so they loved their cats and in a roundabout sort of way, each other too.

Sometimes I wished I had decided to change the directions of the neighbours I once had. I listened to their darkest fears every day, sometimes all three of them at the same time. How I longed to tell the husband that he could stop pretending to love his wife all the time and go ahead with whatever life he chose to have. For she herself felt trapped in his embrace and desecrated their marital bed with as many men she could find. Both craved a different skin and wore theirs for the sake of their son, who would have been the happiest human I have met if his parents would divorce and not suffocate him under the unsaid accusations of his existence. Heck, I should have made that call but I could never bring myself to trust a human who couldn't trust themselves.

In a year, it was a pattern. I would learn as much as I could about human lives in three months and hope to change them before I left. A new city, a new bunch of people, a new God for them to worship.

That was some five years ago.

And still, my heart had not beat itself into a frenzy over another.

I haven't changed my city in eight months. I have almost been caught in my attempt to steer these lives to a better vision. I have made some enemies, made some friends. What I haven't been able to do is know the girl who lived right next to me.

She was at home for so much time and yet, she said so little. The best I had been able to do was to record little bits of mumbled talk from the mornings and an occasional poetry recitation before she slept, I presumed. Since the time I stopped myself from moving for her, I have become obsessed in my need to know more. But she lets out so little, it's a wonder she has survived as a human for so long.

But she is human. Human with brownish hair, round spectacles and a smile that could breathe life into a demon. Slowly, the wish to know more started taking over my mind and one day, I broke into her home. I flipped open her journal and looked through it as fast as I could. Every left hand page said, "A man cannot destroy the savage in him by denying its impulses. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Every right hand page said, "Can he hear me the way I can hear him?" She had more confused and obsessed than I was before. I lost sleep over those three lines for days afterwards, trying to fathom her mind. I started looking out for her, stopping her occasionally on the stairway to talk or offering to run errands with her. Yet, she opened up as little as was possible and the growing obsession to shake her out of this repugnant non-disclosure was disconcerting.

And then suddenly one morning, eighty-six days and seven hours after I had read those words, she rang my bell.

For the first time in close to eleven years, I let another human being walk into my world. She glided through, without hesitation and looked at me. This was a human who had me hungering for her thoughts and words, a piece of her life. She seemed to know that.

She said, "I know you've been spying on the neighbours. I know you've been inside my home. I know what you are. I am the same. So now, can you hear me the way I can hear you?"

And then it happened. A heartbeat, different from the millions before it.

"I cannot, but I want to."

And it was clear. All I had wanted, all that my demons wanted, was to love.