How much can 3 seconds really betray?
Posted by bloggila on August 13, 2008
Flicker of recognition.
Amusement.
Confirmation… as her eyes hastily dart away.
An inward smile, a word to the woman standing familiarly next to him, and taking the little girl from her arms, he looks towards the crowd yet again to see if she will steal yet another furtive glance at him.
She does. Silly girl.
He’s grown a moustache and yes, that’s his wife standing with him in the green outfit and of course that’s their little girl. She had spotted him long before she had caught his eye. Many infatuations had piqued and faded since she was that shy, little girl of 11 and yet, there was something particularly hurtful about encountering him in this way and being reduced to vulnerability in seconds. She was at his sister’s wedding, and was the only one of her friends to not be married.
Given the choice now, would she marry him? Probably not. She couldn’t have found in him the measures of pleasurable requitement that had sufficed her elsewhere. It only stung that in that one instant, of three brief seconds, she was still not spoken for while he had a wife and a child. And she stood, nose pressed on to the window of his picture-perfect life.
