Beguiled..

It is as though she does not go away when the night ends, when the bar clears, and the collective chatter dies down to the last few quiet voices recounting the evening. Perhaps it is because she does not make herself seen or heard in a loud way. It is that she is quiet, and because of this quietness you watch her when you tell yourself not to. You do not find yourself looking at her only because she makes some kind of exhibition of herself, some way that draws all eyes toward her. But you find that something about her is ‘quiet-ish’, a magnetism that makes you watch her even when you tell yourself to stop. It is not a boldness or a demand for attention. It is not something like that, how she walks around the bar in silence, and you find yourself watching her for longer than you would like to admit.

She would sit at the bar, her fingers nervously working their way into her hair, twirling it round her fingers or pulling a loose strand behind her ear. It was a little gesture, one she probably didn’t even feel herself, but that gesture is her. It could be in the smallest things, in the flicker of kohl rimmed eyes, the neat moons of her nostrils, the planes of her face, her head tilted slightly to the side, as if she was thinking of something, and you were hearing it reflected back to you across a void.

The first thing I noticed about her was her bindi. It was not flashy, but it was profoundly unmissable. How it sat so precisely in the centre of her forehead, how it seemed to pin everything there. It was not a piece of jewellery or a fashion statement or a nod to a mythical past. It was a part of her. The small red dot a tacit, inconclusive statement about some depth, something that held her together, that I might never fathom. And yet, every time I looked at her bindi, every time I blinked, and it came back into focus, I felt as though her entire universe was suddenly inscribed inside my own.

She was not one of those women who needed to be in the company of others, or of talk, she often sat in solitude and silence, for she was loath to intrude on others, even in a social setting. But that silence was not a lonely one; it was a silence of the stillness of one alone who is not lonely but content in her own companionship. And it was a wise stillness, a stillness with an inner awareness of its own identity, not needing to be expressed outwardly to prove its own worth. She did not talk much, at least not to me, but in her silence, there was a quiet assuredness.

I would watch her, although I doubt it looked like I was watching her. Not secretively or slyly. It was impossible not to, really. It was like she had this “thing” about her that you could sense; like you were in the presence of someone who saw things differently, who felt and thought in ways that most people could not. I think it was the tattoo on her arm that gave her away. It was a quill etched into her skin, a simple one. Something about a writer’s spirit, I think. Someone who lived in the world but could not help but leave a part of herself outside of it, observing, thinking about things, composing in her mind, using words not because they allowed her to communicate but because they allowed her to understand, to make sense of things that were too much and too confusing to do any other way.

She was a moving work of art. Not in the performative, garish way of someone who wants admiration, but in that everything she did, even small movements, was done with care and thought. Even how she picked up a glass, how her fingers would rest on the rim and move it absently as her mind drifted elsewhere, was the same way of being in the world: aware of it, but always reaching elsewhere.

It was her eyes that were most striking: huge, dramatic, lined with thick kohl that only seemed to heighten the melodrama of whatever was happening behind them. She needed to say very little to assure you that her mind was not boring. It had lived, it had felt, it had absorbed all the experience that the world has to offer, both good and bad. And yet it was soft, there was tenderness in them, a welcomingness that made you feel as if, if you took a moment to sit alongside her, she might tell you something.

It wasn’t just what she did; it was how she was in the world. Her stillness made the world around her feel louder, more frenetic. She wasn’t keeping up with the world; the world was keeping up with her. The restlessness under the surface, the electric vibrancy of her silence, is what made her endlessly intriguing. There was a sense of a storm building in the distance. She was silent; you knew there was so much more going on beneath the surface.

And that is why I go back, and I go back, and I go back, a thousand miles, in the middle of the night, when all is quiet, a thousand miles away from her, and I think of her, not so much in the way one would think of a romantic attachment, as in the way one would rather think of something left in the middle of a story, a thread that’s never completed, a conversation that’s never taken place, but still remains in my consciousness, waiting to be picked up at the right moment.

And I don’t know that I did. The fact is, I will maybe never know her, and perhaps that was the magic of her. She will always be a puzzle, quiet and unheard, and not here to be solved, but to be seen, to be viewed for the few seconds it might take before they pass, unseen and unrealised, and yet. Even now, a thousand miles away, I am thinking of her, and I am thinking of how some people come into your life not to stay, but to leave a lasting impression on you, quiet and forgettable: to go the way they came, reminding you that some people come into your life to teach you how to glimpse that which you never thought you would.

And I think of her still, not with a demanding romantic ardour, more with a tender quieter insistence. I think of her slumped at the bar, alone, in her own thoughts, her fingers tracing the rim of a glass, her gaze a million miles away, yet never entirely. I think of that bindi that held my attention in moments when I would have otherwise wandered, and I think of those eyes: they seemed always to have something to communicate and were seldom silent.

She remains with me, even now.