I shouldn’t go talk to her.
It could go really wrong, is the main thing. Like, catastrophic, drink thrown in face, tossed into a dumpster by a bouncer, that kind of wrong. I’m not tactful. Not suave. I don’t know what’s okay to say to a girl vs not.
I like your scarf. Probably fine. I like your belt pouch and fishnets, is there a con in town? Probably not.
They say everyone you meet in a dream is someone you already met in real life. They’re wrong, of course, but it is true that your brain can only build people out of pieces you already know about. And perception is construction, in a sense.
Most people, girls especially, fit to a type. At least, that’s how they seem to me! Because of how my brain works! I once TA’d a class with thirty students, and twenty of them were whitish-blondish girls with names like “Jessica” and “Ashley” and “Samantha.” I had to just call everyone “you.”
But this girl, standing at the bar by herself (?) with a belt pouch and a rum and coke (I think) and her hair coiled up in a braid and her face not looking like anyone else’s face I’ve ever seen before… she’s not just one type. Maybe that’s why my heartbeat has sped up and my mouth has gone dry. She’s a mosaic. A work of art in mixed media.
Oh god, I really shouldn’t go talk to her.
Maybe her components, her features, are all panels of stained glass. Different at first glance, but the same substance underneath. Beautiful but fragile, liable to break and cut if mishandled. By, say, a poetic-neurotic grad student with chronic foot-in-mouth disease.
Or maybe I don’t understand her at all. Maybe she’s her own type of pokemon, and not a mashup of anyone else. Maybe the panels of stained glass aren’t in her construction, but in my perception. Maybe the thing I’m so afraid of breaking is my own fragile window out onto the world.
Maybe we only know ourselves as a combination of the components that we’ve observed in others. The nerd. The loser. The goofball. The loner. Maybe if I always play to type, I’ll never find the life that I want, or become who I’m meant to be.
She’s looking my way. Her stance confident. Her eyes warm. Her mouth tentative. Her posture open.
Wish me luck.