No Where Like Home

Late Sunday. For this P.I. an empty car park is a strange world. This mind-deadening cement, the exposed electrical veins—buzzing lights like white blood corpuscles, security cameras, fans, shielded conduit, it’s an uninspired grey matter. Yet somewhere in the design was a spark of light. Junia walked light-footed through the parking garage her head up, her face serene, confident, familiar. She floated along in a world within this world. I wasn’t paid to follow her. Six months ago, when I was doing another PI job, she just appeared. And here she is again! She moves from light to shadow to light again, each flicker of movement like a flash of light from a window. It’s not like a case file where I could close my thoughts about her. It’s more spell-like, my need to bask in her aura, wanting to do things for her so she’d reveal herself, her secrets. Can you see her?- the unpainted face with great beauty in the eyes. Grace, knowing. I think Junia went up the stairs. For a moment I lost her, but that happens when you forget to think like your subject. So, I shuffle down the stairs, letting her go, moving into a trance-like receptiveness until the minute hand sweeps her again onto my screen. In the photographs I took she never appears. Her blonde hair has dissolved in a triangle of sun. Her figure has disappeared into impenetrable shadow. Not one picture. Yet here she is. Right here. Looping through my mind in fragments. There’s her smile as she waits for me to notice her. A flicker off. A flicker on, and off again. I don’t have far to find her. And my only regret is that, earlier in life, I never had the insight to recognize her.

Girl asks sensei a question
Sensei looks south
as geese fly north.