shadows in sycamores

The first time

"In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first time I saw her was from my dorm-room window.

Each time was as a moment of particular awareness. This evening I had been studying in the hallway. Our floor, however, had a rarely-seen-but-often-heard drunk guy in the dorm room down the hall. He'd started drinking early and gained momentum as well as volume with his intake. So I folded up my books and shut myself in my room against the noise.

I stood at my open window, feeling the first warm exhalations of spring pass through the screen. The air was still chilly on my bare chest, but a nice adjustment to the room's stuffiness. My nighttime vantage was the lit open windows of the adjacent dorm. Once, a couple of guys were stripping their shirts to the catcalls of people below. Another time, I was captivated watching a girl paint her face. I did not intend to be voyeuristic. I just enjoy watching people.

Nothing caught my eyes right then, so I closed them to listen to the hum of the air-conditioner units, the higher pitched rush of cars on Fifth Street; one honked at somebody on the sidewalk. A group of girls laughed out loud somewhere down below.

I opened my eyes to see the blinking red of the radio/television towers across town and the changing red, green, yellow stop lights the next street over. A group of four males walked past, probably headed to the Student Union, on the sidewalk between the trees below.

The town has this four-lane road with a huge park like median in the middle and old large sycamores that canopy the entire street with their modeled white, gray & brown bark. In fact, our college mascot was the sycamore. Strange.

A golf cart with a blinking yellow signal carried two security guards away from me on their way to issue parking tickets. For a while after the amber light reflected against their side of the tree trunks.

Then I saw her.

I should say I felt her. I knew that, perhaps not specifically she, but something important was coming around the same corner behind which the yellow light had disappeared. She was a shadow before the light of the street lamp found her. Her form, however, stood out to me distinctly from the rest of the area, as though independently lit. She walked slowly, in no hurry to get where she was going.

The light bathed her. I saw she wore jeans. A brown coat buttoned completely up around her body. Her left hand was shoved deep in her pocket. Her right held the strap of a backpack slung over her shoulder. A brown stocking cap insulated her head, and the breeze blew a lot of shoulder-length curly brown hair back from beneath it. 

It was her face that intrigued me. Even in the shadow beneath her hat at such a distance, I could see her face clearly. For only a few moments before she vanished around the edge of my dorm, I could see a sweet, beautiful face, eyes cast downward. For the rest of the night I could not remove that face from my mind.

Whether I saw, intuited, or was given insight, is anyone's guess. I knew then, however, as I know now, that she was very sad.