The Heroines of Our Own Lives

If they had been a curious people they would have wondered at the immensity of life, but they were not.  So they spent their days bustling along merely surviving.  They never looked outward from themselves or inward at themselves to question reality, or to fight a selfless cause.  They survived, which is how some of us do it—live this life.  Not Amelia.  She could sense the greatness of each individual.  She could feel it in the salty aftertaste of a sweaty summer day, and in the tender caress of the wind whistling through her hair. 

An unlikely heroine, much like Jane Austen’s Catherine, or Harper Lee’s Scout.  She had done nothing spectacular in her short life so far.  She had seen no image of ghostly grandeur except the majesty of a newly fallen snow.  Nor had God come down from the heavens and spoken to her in a flash of glory.  No knight had ever magically appeared, fallen in love, and whisked her away to his palace.  She had been born with no exceptional talent for the arts, nor creative intelligence for invention.  But, regardless, life happens, as is custom, even for the most mundane characters of which stories are never written.  We are the heroines in our own lives, after all, even if no one else is watching the story unfold. 

It was a cold day in July when they met.  The air whispered through the ice cream shop sneaking in through a small crack of the door, which never seemed to close, no matter how hard it was slammed.  The sun tried feebly to shine warmth through the window, but failed to do anything other than touch the glass.  Amelia stood before the sink washing the same dishes she had washed only an hour before.  Her hand gliding over an ice cream scoop, Amelia heard the door open and close with a jingle of the bell and she glided silently to the front counter, as shadows often do.

He walked towards her blocking the sun behind him, casting a shadow upon her face.  Which she should have taken as some kind of omen, but in real life, omens are never noticed.  They speak wrongly as often as rightly, and most of the time we’ve moved past them before we’ve even realized they’ve existed.  Amelia cleared her throat, almost soundlessly, as she was habit to do.  There was no other event in Amelia’s life that mattered as much as this one.  If only she could have known this at that moment, she would have paid closer attention.  How convenient would it be to have a copy of our biography to use as a guide for our life?  Amelia thought of this later, but not today.

Today, Amelia served him the ice cream he ordered.  Two scoops, one chocolate and one vanilla as simple an order as he was complicated.  Their hands slowly touched as he handed her the three dollars, and again when she handed him back the fifty cents change.  There were no fireworks, but merely the dinging of cash register buttons, and the clinking of the quarters hitting coins already in his pocket. 

If it had been a movie, she would have accidentally spilt his ice cream and offered to get him a napkin to clean up the mess.  They would have laughed.  They would have connected.  If it were a book, she would have felt the innocent forces of love drawing her into the arms of her inevitable soul mate.  In a music video they would have tangoed across the black and white checkered floor to the crooning voice of Michael Bublé.  His arm would have rested on her back and her lips would have trembled as he dipped her backwards into a tantalizing and soft kiss. 

In real life, none of this happened.  Instead, she smiled casually, and he smiled back, immediately turning around and walking directly out into the now setting sun.  There was no spark; there was no hint of their future together.  They barely spoke, but the wheels of fate were already turning, regardless of whether they noticed, or not.