Someone Else Is Wearing My Life

The coffee was always ready at 7:14. Jabari Diallo had not set it that way intentionally — it had simply become true over the years, the way most things in his life had become true: gradually, without ceremony, until one morning he noticed the pattern and realized it had been there all along. He lived alone in a narrow row house in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, three blocks from the reservoir, where the streets smelled of old brick and cut grass in summer. He worked remotely, translating technical documents from French and Portuguese into English, a job so quiet it sometimes felt like thinking rather than working. His days were not remarkable. That was the point. That was the thing he had chosen.
I chose it too, for a while. Watching someone choose stillness is like watching a man lower himself into warm water — you understand the appeal, even as you know something is circling beneath the surface.
It was a Tuesday in late September when Jabari first noticed the car. A gray sedan, unremarkable in every dimension, parked across from his house on the opposite side of the narrow street. He noticed it the way you notice a stone in your shoe — not immediately, but with a building, nagging awareness. He had taken his morning coffee to the front stoop, as he did on days when the air still held the last warmth of summer, and the car was simply there. He did not think about it. He went inside. He worked until noon, ate a sandwich, took a walk around the reservoir. When he returned, the car was gone. He forgot about it entirely.
The second time was Thursday. Same car, or one so identical to it that the distinction felt academic. This time a small detail snagged his attention: the car was parked facing the wrong direction, nose pointed north against the flow of traffic. Nothing illegal, just slightly wrong, the way a painting hung a half-inch crooked is slightly wrong. Jabari stood at his window for a moment, coffee cup warm in both hands, and studied the car. The windows were tinted lightly, not enough to be suspicious, just enough to make the interior unreadable. After a few minutes he pulled the curtain closed and returned to his desk. He translated a maintenance manual for industrial refrigeration units. He did not think about the car again until Friday evening, when his neighbor, a retired schoolteacher named Marcia Innocent, knocked on his door to return a borrowed garden trowel and mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had seen someone sitting in that gray car for most of the afternoon.
“Just sitting,” she said, with the particular emphasis of a woman who had spent forty years reading the subtext beneath what children said and did not say. “Not on a phone. Not reading. Just sitting and looking at your house.”
Jabari thanked her. He locked his door after she left, and then stood in his hallway for a long moment, aware of the specific quality of silence that a locked door creates — not safety exactly, but the illusion of a boundary between what is yours and what is not.
I know that silence well. I have been on both sides of it.
He told himself there were explanations. There are always explanations. He had no enemies he could name, no debts outstanding, no relationships that had ended badly enough to warrant this kind of attention. He was a man who translated other people’s words for a living. He was invisible in the particular way that careful, quiet people are invisible — not hidden, just unremarkable. And yet the car came back Monday morning, and this time, for just a moment before he stepped away from the window, he saw the door open. He saw a man get out.

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About the Author

Adrian Chervinsky — studied Criminal Psychology not to catch them but loose the cops tail … Dark narrow streets you prefer to avoid? He calls them home.

— Adrian Chervinsky

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August 18, 2026

10min-stories