Creative Burst - I Have a Photo of a Man

I have a photo of a man whose name I don't know. I came across it one day while I was in a used bookstore in Ann Arbor. The Dawn Treader. A nice place, comfortable, big. Lots of books. The fiction section takes up one half the store so one could spend the entire afternoon without having to go back to the same shelf and re-scan “in case you missed something”. It was in the “Am to At” shelf where I found a curious book lying spine down. It stuck out, not only because it was hardcover and an odd size—about three times as tall as wide—but also because the dust jacket was bright pink. I thought at first that it was a home made book, maybe something self-published, and I was about to skip over it when I noticed that in the center of the pages a thick piece of paper was sticking out just slightly. I took the book down and opened it up to the page that held the piece of paper expecting to find an old postcard written to a distant relative by some grandparent who hadn't heard from him in ages or from one lover to another who loved what they were seeing as they traveled, but couldn't stand to be away from the other for another day. But it was from neither of these two people. In fact, it wasn't a postcard at all. It was a photograph.

The photograph that has brought me down to this dark place. And now I'm trapped here, waiting, considering a world going on above me, without me. Trains, taxis, people walking about giving little regard to other places that exist beyond what can be seen between the front door to the car to the office and back home again. They have no idea that a man lives and walks among them who has the power to change lives, the power to tempt, to incarcerate. But I do, because I found the photo. And the one who finds the photo is the one who will find the owner of the half-smiling, bearded face.

Now I suspect that the only was to escape is to find his name. But how can I discover anything about him when I'm locked inside this prison, captive to my own desire to solve a mystery that I never wanted to pursue in the first place. A dare led me here, and a name is all I need to return to the place where I came from. But for now all I can do is close my eyes and picture the world going on without me.