Stranger than Fiction

I slyly peer a 30-something woman from across the room. 

A sibylline beauty,  her features are mysterious, ominous. Her profoundly green-hazel eyes are icey, almost jaded. 

She scans a cell phone screen superficially. After a pause, navigates her index finger around the tiny display. The rough, callused digit delicately twirls like a rudimentary ballet. 

A smoldering cigarette barely dangles from her bottom lip, almost completely vertical. She exhales thickly through nostrils; shrouded by a veil of smoke.

Who is this portentious prophetess? 

Vaguely familiar to me; profile a shadowy archetype from amorphous dreams. Maybe a moonlit figure I casually noted in passing. Perhaps, we were acquainted in a past life. What an annoying conundrum.

This female creature fascinates me.

I want to ask her name, her interests. I ponder her potential hopes for the future, aspirations, epiphanies. Could she contribute wisdom or pertinent information? A flurry of potentials and possibilities circumnavigate my skull.

Pandora's open box.

I pinch my thigh to stop the sensory overload. I clamp my eyes shut; slowly re-open them to slits. 

She is staring, stoically, back at me. 

It seems as though my perception plays a rather cruel trick. Chest tight, breath shallow, I realize. The stranger I struggle to recognize is my own reflected image.    

Who am I? Where has the time gone? What have I become? Where will I go from here? 

My immediate reply: deafening silence.