Vignette of self-doubt

I saw a girl in a summer dress today, lying in the shade of an aged and blooming crape myrtle. The vanilla cloth stretched across her back, draped across the back of her thighs, and stopped at her folded-up knees. pulled up to her body in a lazy fetus. I smiled in the 85-degree heat, sweat trickling down my back, eyes squinting into the sun, at her leisure and beauty.

A perverse thought: I want to interrupt her. How could I disturb something so graceful? I became the essence of a clumsy, unwanted awkward stumbling cripple, and clopped by as sweat soaked into my wrap. My dress billowed and felt too short, too lumpy at the bust, too awkward with the sock-wrapped foot trapped inside a stiff post-op shoe.

I limp inside and the full glass windows let me see the pink flowers hang shaggily down to the floor, the girl a small figure in the distance. The sun falls through to the lounge in a pleasant, summer morning way, and I sit, sweat-soaked, peeling the wrap away from my back.

I look up. I notice a man by the corner in his usual grey vest and red tie, with his new one-month haircut, dark jeans and flat shoes. His eyes avert everything around me. This boy writes a brave, amazing series in the paper about his struggle with OCD, undiagnosed, and then diagnosed. I wish I could tell him about my recent bout with almost-orexia. I am not brave or humble enough.

He has stopped looking at me. Weeks ago I could stand in boots and draping sweater talking about nothing and he would be listening, or watching, or both. I walked and felt his cautious eyes follow, sat and felt his eyes wander away, and shoot back. Now nothing. (Deliberately?) averted gazes, sheer willpower, or OCD. Fuck.

I need his eyes. Not his male eyes, but his shamed-curious eyes, which wonder whether I am neurotic and quirky and insecure like him. Eyes that seek something that grows more beautiful by the day. The same curious eyes I shamed away from the vanilla dress flapping in the breeze, folded beneath the shade of the creeping crape myrtle.

Without them I am in danger of being unremarkable, invisible, worthless.

She got up. My fantasy vanished as I recognize her face walking towards the building. For several intense seconds I want to cover or strangle my body in bandages, and disappear.