Okay, so I was walking down the street the other day, trying to unwind from another long day at the office where I was either being barked at by superiors or by random dogs. There I was striding down the sidewalk, working off some steam, music pumping in my ears, head in the clouds as usual. And I was just minding my own business, as I've learned the hard way that no one wants me to stick my nose, let alone my head, where it doesn't belong. I was just attempting to avoid any and all eye contact or any other kind of contact now that I think about and just when I was almost home, who do I bump into but Suzie from high school! That's right, Suzie! You know, the one with that hair and those cheeks and the legs that everyone said went on for days but I mean how do you even measure that sort of thing without coming across as super creepy.
It was a late-afternoon/early-evening stroll, although some would argue that it was actually solely an evening walk and my desire to connect it to the afternoon was misleading at best and a cause for concern at worst. It was a fairly non-descript walk that I wasn't going to be writing home about, which is an on-going bone of contention between my mom and I, as she insists on me writing vertible essays about all walks I venture on. I mean aside from a few near-miss collisions with cyclists, potentially-scaring encounters with rabid neighbourhood dogs and mace-raising pleasant exchanges with little old ladies, it was completely uneventful. So I was walking just like I do everyday, thinking about the morons I'm surrounded by at work but despite how frustrating they can be to interact with, I do enjoy being seen as relatively brilliant which is a huge step up from how dumb I felt on a daily basis being raised by my adoptive parents who used to scoff at anyone with less than a 150 IQ.
I turned the corner as I rounded towards home and "pow", there she was, standing before me as if we were 17 again or, more accurately, as if I were a pimply-and-freckle-faced 17 year old whose voice was just maturing even though puberty started years ago and people were not only starting to talk, but had been talking for years now and she was a smoking-hot, runway-ready, just-about-drop-dead-but-not-quite-totally-lethal gorgeous young woman. To say we made quite the odd couple would be completely accurate and would lead any passerby to assume I was either filthy rich, she was blind as a bat or both. Despite my best efforts to remain cool and composed and vertical, I momentarily lost all control of my limbs and my ability to speak even semi-coherently. Thankfully, all of those bladder-control lessons as a toddler paid off in spades.
I was just super shocked to see her, and a bit dazed from our actual head-on-head collision and even more so based on what she was wearing - full on glimmering and shimmering princess. What with the setting sun and my light sensitivity and my horrible headache, her costume was so shiny and sparkling that it was nearly impossible to stare directly at. As I shielded my face and attempted to stop blinking rapidly, I gazed up at her from the spot on the sidewalk where I found myself and it was if she were literally glowing as she hovered over me with a look that could best be described as either concerned or seductive, with the seductive part almost definitely a result of my being partially concussed.
For a moment I almost thought I was imagining her, seeing as she was the object of so many of my daydreams and fantasies back in school and I hadn't seen her since graduation. Back in high school, I had spent an embarrassing number of hours planning, scheming and devising how I, someone she barely knew existed, could approach easily the coolest, most attractive girl in school, woo her and whisk her away. However unlikely that scenario was, it didn't stop me from filling journal after journal with graphic drawings and fairy tale-like stories and heartfelt proposals to her that somehow fell into the wrong hands making me the laughingstock of the school for a few weeks until someone else, thankfully, drew the attention away from me.
And yet, despite all of the attention, she always acted as if nothing had happened. She was above it all and attractively didn't care or notice. We never talked and then when school ended, she went her way and I went mine; until today. How I had dreamed of a moment like this - the two of us, alone together. True, I had never envisioned the princess outfit, or me being knocked to the ground or my lip-syncing to 70s disco wearing old sweats at the time or the meeting seeming completely random and unplanned, but I still counted this as a victory.
You know I always wondered what had happened to her after graduation. Everyone had plans - acceptance letters to big schools, plane tickets to exotic locations, pig farms to manage because "they aren't going to manage themselves" my dad wrote in my obviously-scribbled-at-the-last-minute graduation card. But she was different. She was that typical girl most likely type, except that in her case, it was actually true. The world was her oyster - so much talent, so damn good looking, ridiculously brilliant and so over-the-top hilarious. I would have believed anything that anyone said about her as there was nothing that she couldn't do.
The mystery surrounding her sudden dropping off the face of the Earth led to so many rumours. Some believed that she had travelled to Europe and fallen in love with a local artisan cheese maker or that she dropped out of law school and was currently defying local regulations by raising sheep in her backyard or that she had sailed around the world to avoid walking on land for a while. For me, there was always so much regret that I never looked her in the eyes and told her how I felt. She was "the one who got away" and also "the one who "the one who marched to the beat of her own drummer and even went as far as booking an actual drummer every third Saturday"
No comments:
Post a Comment