I was walking along, skipping almost, feeling youthful, humming a happy tune.
I do that. I walk around with a song in my heart, feeling about 16 but without all the complications and angst of being a teenager. If I had my life again, I would do all that great teenager stuff again, but load the guilt on some rocket heading for space.
But I digress. The point is that I was happy and when you’re happy, you walk freely, you notice the flowers, you swish your skirt.
Perhaps it was this random swishing that was going on that caused my head to turn. Because there in the window directly beside me was a woman in my same swishy skirt.
At first, I simply admired her great taste in clothing. It was the first time I had seen that particular full-bodied, spectacular, swingy sort of skirt on another person. So I took another look because somehow that skirt and that skipping sort of gait looked vaguely ridiculous on her.
This woman was a bit hunchbacked. This woman was far from slim. And this woman looked slightly mad as she checked out flowers and whatnot. She had this curious manic sort of fevered look on her face and I was slightly worried that any little crack in the concrete would be sufficient to see her faceplanted at any moment.
I don’t want to be derogatory towards a fellow human but, let’s face it, she looked a bit like an old bag-lady doing some really silly and not very responsible things for a woman of that age.
I felt slightly sorry for her.
Clearly, she was completely misguided and hadn’t quite morphed into that sensible place where people about to receive their senior cards are meant to be. She may have been skipping but there was a limp in her skip. She may have imagined herself at 16, but not too many people around would have shared that vision.
She may have swished one skirt too many times on her little foray around the daisy beds.
But the biggest problem of all was that the woman in the glass window next to me looked suspiciously familiar. This was one doppelganger who was a little too close for comfort. She was in my clothes. She turned when I turned. She smiled when I smiled (complete with that fevered look in her eye).
Had I glimpsed my future? Or was it me?
