Glimpsing

You pulled your hands out with a swiftness that seemed out of character. You sat straight up. Like a straw rising from a root beer float, through the uneven bone color of the sheening vanilla bean ice cream, melting slowly, in slow motion, as if your eyes are playing tricks on you (but they're not.)

I watched you. Pull your hands out with a speed that seemed unnatural, self-conscious, admitting of guilt. You pulled your hands out in a way that made no sound, but still managed to announce itself with the trumpeting of a broken Biblical seal. You moved too fast. With a gesture that simply blurted, "DON'T LOOK AT ME! DON'T SEE ME DOING THIS!"

But it was too late. I had not only seen, but heard it with my psyche, to use already dated terminology, with my soul. The part that isn't just metaphorical meanderings, split infinitives and bluster, disguised as conversation, the part that is just real human reality, shared by default, by the hand's guilty suggestion, rather than actual crime committed in public, as exhibitionism, or with conscious intention.

Dear gawd, where am I going with this? My confused and confuzzled mind isn't sure. But I saw you. At a time when you wished most not to be seen. Perhaps not wished the most ever in your entire rememberable life, but in recent recollection, I'm sure.

And I saw you.

And the weird and truly human part of all this is simply that, to this day, I still have no idea what it was that you were doing, nervously, feverishly, behind the barricade of your old dark-stained wooden desk.