Objects In The Mirror

She frequently casts her gaze left and right as if furtively seeking something or someone. She walks slowly but with some purpose, her bell-bottom slacks dragging the ground, and sometimes they seem to drag her tiny frame down with them. 

When she shakes her head, her blonde hair catches the wind and moves across her face like a storm cloud in summer. I watch her make her way down West End Avenue toward the bus stop and take note of the young man there on the bench who stands up as she sits down. He does not stand up out of gallantry; rather, his face betrays his wary distrust. 

She places her large bag on the ground beside her as she begins to fuss with its contents, as if taking inventory. The bag is cloth and stained with spilled beverages and the soil of many roads.

As I approach, the grime cannot entirely obscure her fine features: an upturned nose and startling blue eyes. Her eyes, which I now see are a dazzling blue, peer out from a face ruddy from many hours in the summer sun, the result multiplying the effects of aging on her mature skin, now rough and furrowed. She does not so much glance at me as grimace in my direction.

I resist the urge to speak to her, to tell her that I mean her no harm. Likely, the young man who stood up when she approached would tell her the same thing if the opportunity arose. Today, though, as with many other days that I have seen her, she speaks to no one as her head darts this way and that. While others nearby stare at their phones, she keeps rifling through her bag. 

As I walk past her, I see the relief on her face as she snatches a large comb from her bag. Looking away, she pulls the comb through her hair vigorously. In the last seconds before I pass her, I notice a slight change in her expression. Could it be relief that another stranger was passing without making a threatening move or saying an unkind word?  No matter. Her face seems to soften. The urgency surrounding the bag—filled with every manner of thing, perhaps everything she owns—quietly passes.

Tomorrow, I may see her near Centennial Park or Belle Meade, or north of Vanderbilt. She might not have changed her clothes, in particular her bell bottoms, which I now notice have been cut in long shards from the knee down, frayed and dirty. But she will likely have combed her hair, and she will be moving again—still searching, it seems, for a soft place to land.