It’s fall and feels like dead of winter. That time of year when night comes early and the world doesn’t care anymore what you wanted to get done in the daylight. It didn’t care before, but now you feel it. And that makes all the difference.

A man comes in to the Rec centre. He’s happy, cheerful maybe, he smiles and sits across from me. I smile and nod. We’re buddies now. I don’t know what brought him here and he doesn’t know what brought me here. But here we are. And nobody can take that away from us.

After a few minutes I can’t help but notice a lot of movement going on so I look up from my book. He’s taking off his shoes.

I’ve seen worse so I’m not too worried.

He then takes off his socks, rolls them up, places them in his shoes and pushes them to the side.

I’m a little more worried now but no reason to panic.

This little man who looks like the guy from Squid Games now takes up the whole couch he’s on. He notices me noticing him and he smiles and waves. I smile back and go back to my book.

That’s when I hear the scratching. I look back up and he’s got his pants rolled up, he’s scratching his legs frantically. His legs start to show the scratch marks as the dead white skin builds up.

Clearly I underestimated the situation.

He stretches his legs and starts rubbing them, gathering the fresh skin scrapings, then he brushes them to get all the dead skin flakes off. He pats his hands together, loudly. He goes back to scratching only it isn’t frantic, it’s methodical, measured, there’s a rhythm to his chaos and it goes something like scratch scratch rub brush pat, skin cells going everywhere.

Apparently I’ve overestimated my ability to not be worried by a long, long shot.

He and I have never met, but now that we’ve shared this experience I feel we have an intimate connection, a secret even. A secret connection I never wanted, could never even imagine into existence before now. We’re here together and nobody can take that away from us. But I really wish someone could.

He looks so happy.

In this moment, the world isn’t lonely enough.