It was easier — no, more interesting — to define J by what she was not than what she was. After all, she often playfully skimmed at the boundaries of what she could have been but ultimately chose not to be, lines that seemed to grow more solid now and more porous next with each wave lapping the beach.
She was not unfriendly, in the manner of a neighbour who was happy to chat from behind white picket fences but had no intention of ever stopping by for tea and cakes.
She was not boring; her witty and unexpected, off-the-cuff remarks hinted at a variety of interests and a mind that keenly absorbed and studied the world, appending each new fact and idea to an ever-blossoming mind-map in her head.
But these fragments of conversation were never quite enough to complete the puzzle that was her; it was an informed guess at best and fanciful deductions at worst. Smoke and mirrors filtered her inner light into scintillating conversations.
She was not uninterested and unengaged in the world, by the same token. She could make you feel like the most fascinating person who had ever lived before suddenly drawing her attention elsewhere, back from invisible lines that you fear you might have crossed by accident as you recounted for the fifth time how your second aunt sent to America’s Funniest Videos a tape of you scooting across the kitchen floor like a dog on your naked baby bottom, and winning a consolation prize for her efforts.
Then you’d feel indignant, slighted perhaps, yet afraid that you’ve bored her with your self-absorbed chatter, but she would smooth your furrowed brows with her Cheshire Cat smile. Wipe the slate clean. Fade to black.
Then you’d meet her again tomorrow, or the week after, and the whole cycle restarts itself and you’re addicted to the attention she dangles before you like a girl playing with her kitten.
She was not happy most of the time, but neither was she sad enough to know how she truly felt.
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What few qualities she had were _____, _______, ________, ______ and _______. It was how she applied these to what she was not that imbued her not-ness with meaning. Just subtraction and elimination.
A fortune-teller once told her she spent her eons worth of past lives as holy men and women, cloistered away from one lifetime to the next in pursuit of God and the truth, lifetimes when she had not really lived.
Perhaps these reincarnations explained her seemingly spare personality — if facets of a person were tools of the soul, she never had to carry around much anyway as she lost most of her baggage coming back.
Cut from a different cloth, the warp and weft richer here and cruder there, embellishments were unecessary when the very fabric of her nature was complex enough.
