I didn't recognize the other one behind the counter. She was new. I hadn't seen her here before. But then there was recognition. Another flush. I realized what the resemblance was and suddenly she was a specter, a spirit, a whole different attitude or tone. There's no way you could've put two pictures together and thought them the same. It was an expression. She was like a sharper version and more plain at the same time.
A pot-bellied man with a strange crop of gray hair for his younger looking face was shuffling down the street. In the street along the curb. Two small American flags poked up out of the shaggy grass along with the dandelions. The sense of warm air at night like color in water -- passed over, transplanting, a picturebook of elsewhere, emblem as aspect to this here before. To live elsewhere, always foreign even at home, gratuitous.
"You look like someone I once knew."
"A long time ago?"
"Not long enough, apparently."
A desert of days flipped like pages, leaves blowing away, their emptiness as unrealized as what had been lost to make them. Now he remembered. What he recognized was the chance, the pull, the event -- not to have to recognize himself. Again, a flash of that, but just as quickly the anguish recoiled -- or was it again or anew. That too had been a conceit, and now again it was a recognition of himself, like a glance in a shard of mirror cutting.
"But I like it." She persisted. "The feeling it's not me. I don't have to be myself."
The conceit returned, recognition redoubled.
Oh, no. I can't fall for this again. I couldn't withstand doing that -- to you or me. Across even more years now. I cry for them, I cry for me. Say it out loud to the walls. Hear yourself telling someone. The self-consciousness of age trying to communicate with the self-consciousness of youth.
Perhaps to be able to weep for all of us is to know that this conceit of the other we share is not a match, not symmetrical, not flush. It's always also cross-purposes. Alone together, the fate or our selves.