Someone else

I've developed this habit lately (I say lately, but that only describes how long I've consciously been aware of it). In a daydream or a reverie I end up remembering some past encounter or incident or even, occasionally, something that didn't happen at all. They're always in the first-person. And if it's a pleasant memory I will suddenly emulate the smile I had on my face at the time, and if it's an unpleasant memory I might grimace. I think I wrote about this earlier, about metaphors that weren't metaphors.

I had a moment where it happened again. It was at the edge of morning, and I was leaving the apartments. There was something happy (re)playing at the back of my mind, and since it was too early to have things at the front of my mind, I smiled. I think there was laughing in the memory. I don't remember what it was now. There's a girl about my age who I see around the place, probably has a room here. She mostly lives as a peripheral blur. I've only ever seen her in passing, a half-familiar face. Today her hair was glistening from a rain shower that was already destroying the snow that had arrived the evening before. She was entering as I was exiting, and crossed into the path of my eyes before I could look away, or drop my smile, and I'd slipped into her gaze, and so she mistook my echo of a grin as directed at her - as directed at all, I suppose.

And her eyes brightened and she gave me the first genuine smile I've received for god knows how long. As if she recognised me. Or as if she didn't need to recognise me. As if she knew exactly what my face meant, and knew also how often it meant nothing at all, as if she took all that and let it fall between her fingers anyway. As if she were some accident of positioning, the hunched hollow of some rock face, shrouded by trees, on a mountain opposite someone's call already ended. And then she turned against the door and was inside, and I'd ended up by the gates.