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hat or noticing a person's particularly large feet or bulging eyes.

I guess the best way to put it is, I can see beyond the physical. I see other aspects of our existence: spiritual, psychic, another realm or dimension, call it what you want. I see it. Unfortunately, it can wear a person down. It almost drove me crazy when I was a teenager. I gradually broke down trying to save the people around me. I don't do that anymore. I have learned to filter out most of the things I see and not take action. I pretty much have come to the conclusion that what I see can't help others. It scares or repulses them and makes them think of me as some sort of freak. And in the end, most people will do what they want to do.

Now I have to tell you, other seers I know, and yes, there are many others, consider me a coward or just a selfish and weary seer, unable or unwilling to take action. But I don't know if they're right I only know what I've lived. I didn't ask for this "gift". I embraced it for a time, hated it for another, and now simply wish to ignore it.
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With regards to the newsstand, I once had a friend who worked there. His name was Qahaar. Perhaps friend is not the best word, because we never visited each others' homes, and we didn't know each others' families or anything like that. But it just seems that we enjoyed talking with each other and had a lot in common. After a haircut, or renting a video, or buying a CD or a slice of pizza, I always seemed to find my way to the newsstand to talk to Qahaar for a couple of hours. He would sit there on a stool behind the worn counter and just laugh with me about the grumpy, old Middle Eastern men who walked in and out all day. He would keep me up to date on the best looking women living in the neighborhood or working in the shopping strip. We would try to out do each other by quoting lines from movies we both liked. We would teach each other Spanish and Arabic and then spend hours comparing them. He always learned my Spanish faster than I learned his Arabic.

Sometimes I would get so busy, I was in graduate school at the time, that I wouldn't come by for weeks. Nevertheless, I knew as soon as I did come back by, Qahaar would be there stacking newspapers from London, Paris, or Cairo, barking back at feisty, old men and just waiting to show off how much better his Spanish had gotten or waiting to tell me about a new Honduran girl in the neighborhood. Once, I convinced him to have a beer with me at a pizza place near the newsstand.

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