Old-fashioned man

There he was again, that lonely boy, only twenty years later and no longer a boy. Yet his face remained unchanged despite the well-trimmed beard. It was a face that I could still attach to his former young self - serious manner, solemn appearance, unsmiling eyes, altogether an old-fashioned face. As revealing as his clothing, still very much like his old one, while no longer perpetually blueish still monochromatic, brownish this time around, as if reflecting maturity, a middle-age reached much too soon. There was nothing I could do to stop my mood from growing rapidly dreary at his vision. Dreary and partially upset too by the futility of being driven to think by the presence of such ghost-from-the-past that the ample amount of elapsed time since I had last seen him could have been entirely wasted. There he was inside a stall of an antiquarian books fair and there I was, outside, looking at him oblivious to my stare, as he browsed through the pages of a book displaying seemingly weird-looking contents. This was a man forever moored to his past by the mere subjectivity of my inescapable recollections. I left the fair feeling however that there could be more truth to justify my sudden sadness than what could be derived from the half-deceiving image I could make up of such a misanthrope.