How Are You?

It's amazing what carrying a few plastic bags with some sweat on your brow can do. It's the one-two-three glamour dissolver that draws exasperated looks and shrugs. That was me on the subway today. I was looking and feeling far more attractive and appealing earlier in the day, but somehow the heat, the bags, the sweat, brought me down to a level of protracted poverty-stricken pallor; I was the bag-lady in the car. Then, the unimaginable happened. No, I was not kissed by a frog-prince. Wish I was. It was, in retrospect, quite imaginable actually. Even apropos. Someone I knew, an acquaintance really, got in the car, and sat across from me. She saw me, disheveled, although, frankly, she wasn't looking her best either, and pretended not to see me. But I was feeling frisky, and I thought some active mischief would do me no harm, and even help dissipate the droplets of sweat on my brow, like in the spirit of condensation or something. Maybe I would even form a cloud that would hover above my head for the duration of the ride. That would surely draw some glares, especially if my cloud started to produce rain. Anyway, I digress. So, I decided to say hello to the woman across from me. She twisted her eyes from her important reading, and said hello back. "How are you?" she said, with pursed lips and crinkled brow. "I'm fine," I said. "It seems you almost have as many bags as I do," when she looked disapprovingly at my plastic companions. "Mmmm, yes." Her eyes went back to her important reading, and then, as if she wanted to be the good Sunday samaritan, continued with the line that really gets my inner goat. "Everything fine?" "Oh, yes, all is fine here," I heard myself say to her. What was I talking about? Everything was not fine. I wanted to say to her, if you look up from your stupid book for more than a nano-second, you'd see I'm not fine. I'm hot, and agitated, and annoyed by the fact that it's been two years, and someone such as myself, who has a lot to offer, cannot seem to be able to offer it in a permanent way, or at least offer it in the spirit of a permanent job. And someone like you is looking down at me and my bags; when you have just as many as I do, maybe even more. Except you're working. You did not quit your job like me, even though you probably want to. You have not suffered the quiet inequities I have, and you don't know how tired I am - of this bull, that is supposed to be evolving, or so our government and elders say. Everything is just passing along - right along with no noticeable "positive" blips. The woman, really a sacrificial lamb in my fleeting ferocious anger, went back to reading though, and I, to my scribble in my notebook - formulating this here blog. And as I am reliving this minor incident, I have to say I am not sorry for my previous thoughts and reaction. I also remember from a dusty corner in my brain, that the last time I saw this woman, I was getting into a black sedan, all dolled up, bag-less, save for a clutch, looking radiant, while she descended the gross sticky subway steps to go back home. Turning tables, and all that...It's kind of funny. I really wish her no harm, it's just that she/hers was the most immediate in a long line of strained replies.