Who Does She Think She Is

Who Does She Think She Is

Who could have thought this would be the day her future collided with her past, and that she would live to tell about it. Collided, literally, as she hurried head down through that hurrying crowd thronging to see what made such an enticing sound. Collided, when she first moved left then right then right then left to weave and warp her own passage through the bustling, jumbling, rudely self-centered surge. She collided with them and they with her, but no one knew epochs were destined to a face-off in her personal universe. She merely wanted what everyone did – what is that enchanting sound?

She, of all people, was in her own cloud of unknowing, but yesterday that unknowing was fixated merely on existentials. Today her unknowing would bring back not only memories, but imminent and swarming options. On what, pray tell, would those choices be based - on memories, on fantasies, or on beliefs?

How she ended up being a thronging part of a thronging crowd was purely by choice. Today she made the choice to go outside in the sunshine instead of labor away indoors. Today she gave herself a long ticket to ride the oceanic waves of her desires for freedom and spontaneity. It was her choice to wear comfortable shoes, not heels, and ‘swishy’ clothes, as she called those airy, loose garments that make women’s bodies as comfortable as a man’s inside their respective fashions. And it certainly was her choice to not pay too much attention to structuring the day in order to be titillated by it and excitingly stroked by whatever opportunity it presented. So it was her choice to unite with the throng, to be titillated by the sound, to be stroked by collision with other hurrying bodies, to be excited by newness and the unknown.

Streaming toward the unknown she began to sweat from the heat of her singular exertion in concert with the building heat of the crowd. “Whew! I could have worked out this hard in a nice air-conditioned gym,” she chatted aloud to herself. But she chose to continue her quest. “’Scuse me, ‘scuse me,” her words a burgeoning wall of force around her, oblivious to irritated stares or affronted comments. ‘Look at me making my own way, assuming that my mere desire is OK to demand the compliance of everyone else,’ she mused. ‘When did I finally become this person? When did I give up self-depriving niceties and deference to others? Hmmm…. Have I really, or is it just today? Well, I think I have, really. It’s not just today. Yes, that’s right, I feel truly that I’ve changed and am now the person I want to be. Yes, that’s right. Well, whatever, here I am pushing my way and not giving a good ta-hoot about anyone else.’

And there she went. It seemed like a long way to go but gosh-by-golly she was gonna do it. Moving bumpily along, she had a surreal sensation of seeing so many familiar faces, voices, smiles, stances. ‘That person looks like Robert, with his tall strong frame.’ ‘Hey, is that Margarita, I thought I just heard her laugh.’ ‘Oh, there’s a version of Rudy’s profile, geez, thought that was him for a moment.’ ‘Look at that beautiful figure that reminds me of…. who is it again, oh yeah, looks like Jesse.’ Edging on simultaneously through the crowd and her crowded thoughts a part of her mind drifted between now and various moments of ‘then’. 

When she caught peripherally another posture, profile, stance from another moment of ‘then’ her stomach caved, heart bumped. Sweat not produced by crowds broke out on her upper lip, like Richard Nixon in a political debate. Oh, for a bit of breathing room from the crowd and her memories. ‘No,’ thinks she, ‘it was not real, only another surreal association. Besides, I can’t see it anymore.’

Onward she wove, but now almost less fixed on the goal and more on peripheral perceptions. ‘Was that it again? No. Oh, stop, just keep moving and at least get out of this middle-crowd heat.’ ‘Was that it? Dammit, stop worrying, it shouldn’t matter now.’
A slowly-subsiding tug of war worried her along until at some random moment she was just moving along and had forgotten to worry. Exertion is a beautiful thing.

“Hey, ¡hola!” she called out to a real, live acquaintance. Maxi turned around as her voice-waves reached his ears. “Hey, Girl, what are you doing here? This is a little crazy, don’t you think? I just heard it about 4 blocks back and saw everyone hurrying to here so of course I had to come, too.” “Yea, me too, about 6 blocks back. I’m being a little rude by maneuvering my way up front but, what the heck. Good to see you. Isn’t it amazing how many people we don’t know in the world?” “True dat, sometimes it’s overwhelming.” “Right? I keep thinking that I see so many people I know, but then in the next moment it’s not really them, just something about the person that reminds me of someone familiar.” 

They thronged on together for a time but she found that she felt impinged and limited. Soon she wanted to go solo again, so she made her excuse to go left when he leaned right. “You leaving?” he asked, “Where you going?” “Oh, don’t know, just feel like heading out over to there,” she told him, pointing her finger in a vaguely-definite over-there direction. “See you! We can tell everyone later that we were here!” And there she went, choosing yet again to make her own way, feeling all sorts of independent. ‘It’s always just a wee bit scary,’ she thought, ‘but I’ve come to like a little bit of scary.’

“’Scuse me, ‘scuse me” she wove and warped. She was much closer now, the sound clearer, her goal nearer. ‘Look at me coming up on the front of the crowd,’ she narrated to herself. ‘I’m startin’ to feel downright vanguardish, like I belong at the front of the pack instead of snuggled in the middle all the time. A nice place, the middle, but it’s about time to choose some other place, even if it takes more work or is harder or scarier.’ Her inner motivational Oprah gently bumped and collided her through the crowd, toward the front, up to the edge of knowing. ‘I’m almost there,’ she urged herself toward a near future accomplishment.

It was at about 10 deep from the frontline that future and past collided. It was no longer a vision, a periphery, a thought. She’d deliberately pushed past the doughy couple and the mother with child and the big guy with lanky girl beside him to unknowingly land smack dab behind the fleeting impression, the familiar stance, the reminder from moments and years before.  A brief touch on the arm to move him from the path of her quest was all it took to be suddenly hanging in mid-air between her proud Oprah-inspired independence and years of learned inhibitions. He turned to impede such affront to his personal space and saw, as she instantly saw, the lingering power of their former connection. His eyes lit up, hers clouded. His body straightened, hers collapsed a bit. He smiled knowingly, she gazed staringly mute. Her mind whirled while she watched that familiar former puppet-master mouth form frighteningly sultry phrases. “Why, look at you, great to see you. How are you doin’? You look good.” He smiled and in her mind’s eye she saw him licking his lips in delight at her mute distress. She knew that her future place in the front of the crowd was still waiting for her. She knew that she only had to choose how to get there. She had a mountain of words at her beck and call, years of rehearsed responses, millions of imagined successes.

He reached to embrace her, she stood stoically, politely, middle-of-the-packly still. His arms touched her shoulders, his hands skimming her back as she hung stiffly between knowing and unknowing in the heat of the crowd and the moment and the choices and the epochs of her life. His chest in her face raised the temperature by a million degrees. Her need to breathe was literal and figurative, her proud independence and timorous vulnerability collided. The big bang happened for the second time in history.

She moved back, away. She saw the surprised spark in his eyes, she felt strength spark in her heart. She breathed. He dropped his arms, she dropped her chains. She glared, he stared. Now from her peripheral vision she saw another familiar form – freedom. From head to toe and back again her viper gaze raked rivets in his precious personal space. She turned, leaving behind her unspoken mountains of words and his unrequited reunion.  ‘’Scuse me, ‘scuse me,’ she moved knowingly toward the front of the crowd, breathing.


Word count: 1,496