The Girly Girl

Cold late noon, between bursts of rain. By now, the ache the drop in temperature brings to my fingers is something I'm used to. I walk across the not so empty hall, unaware. Unaware of the faces and the sounds, ignoring the signs of life about me, as I learned to do at an early age. People never mean that much, they never last. The faces and names escape my memory just as quickly as it takes for them to make acquaintance. All there is to me is the gray concrete wall to my left and the trees to my right. And the cold.

A calling sound makes its way through the hall and I ignore it because I refuse to be the kind of girl that responds to anything that is not her name. However, I know that whomever is calling, is calling to me. What is worse, I know exactly who is it that is calling. My pace remains unchanged, as does my demeanor, but inside a hope builds. The hope that he will catch up with me. I sneak a look right, towards the trees, just so that the corner of my eye can see the gray shirt approaching me. I hear hurried steps. I take a detour left, because I like getting in my own way, and feel myself clear of danger. But fate has a funny way of messing with me because the hurried steps still approach me. I again look right, this time to the propaganda on the wall, and once again the corner of my eye sees the gray shirt, now imminent upon me.

A tap on my right shoulder leads me to turn to that side, only to find the propaganda. But my instincts, betraying my reason, make my body turn left to find him there, in his gray shirt, right beside me. He carries two smiles, one on his mouth and the other on his eyes, and I'm not quite sure which one blinds more.  Out of my lips rushed a high pitched sound that to me resembled a "Hi!", but I'm not certain. If it was a hi, then it was the most honest hi I ever delivered, one I didn't have the time to process through my channels of control, to tone down my emotion. It was in that instant, in that very moment, in every emotion the "Hi!" carried that she made her presence felt. The girly girl.

The conversation that followed as we walked beside each other is a blur, an unimportant blur, because before and after it, he was and still remains a stranger. A stranger with no prospect of ever becoming anything more, anything different from a stranger. At least not if I can help it. But at this moment in time, it is him being a stranger what makes him so important, so dangerous. She will make up stories, create all sorts of fictions about who he is. This stranger, that could be the most fetid piece of faeces there ever was, she can make out to be whomever she wants him to be. All she could ever need in a man manifested itself in the eyes of this man she barely knows. To her, he is possibilities. Of that, she is unafraid, she is eager to explore. She, who once drank a glass of rum as a dare and felt proud as her sweaty body shook, crumbled in a chair while the screams of her burned throat embraced the heat. Whether he is an instant of happiness followed by heart break, or someone waiting to reject her, she does not care. She is not afraid.

She is not me. I preferred the moment that followed goodbye because each of us walking away was the only thing that made sense to me. There is no point in wasting time on strangers. There is no point in beginning things that I know exactly how they'll end.

She holds on to the moment of hi and sometimes when I render power, mostly in my sleep, she awakens the feeling of the moment asking me for more. For her, life lies in those ephemeral moments, the ones where we forget who we are supposed to be. The moments in which I stop (or start) being me.

Me? I'm walking out of the hall and to the train station, because I can see the gray clouds and there is no way I'm going to be caught under the rain.