Hide and Seek

I followed a few feet behind him, my thin heels crunching amid the hardened crevices of the pavement. Maybe the noise of the streaming traffic drowned out my footsteps, or maybe he was so deep in thought that the rush of the world was all but silenced. Either way, he seemed oblivious to my presence. I caught a glimpse of my uneasy stride in a storefront window. It was a salon called “The Essence.” I paused and watched my face become almost as clear as a mirror image, the beauty stations fading into the background. I put my hand to my face and felt the blemishes scattered upon my fair skin like a variety of seeds, obvious even in my transparent reflection. A flush rose to my cheeks. I fervently dug through my purse and pulled out my bag of makeup supplies, the most prominent and oppressive item I religiously hauled around with me. I clicked open my cover-up, “Studio Fix” in a special color designed to blend into the tones that composed my face and fix it. I swept and dabbed and swept and dabbed until I was satisfied that every pronounced imperfection had been dulled into a hidden package of pressed powder.

I searched down the street ahead of me. He was long gone. Still clutching my Studio Fix, I took another step in the direction I thought he had gone. My heel seized hold of the edge of one particularly prominent rut in the concrete and the compact slipped from my fingers. It opened when it hit the ground and the packed powder cracked, split apart and lay in pieces across the sidewalk, like my very face fractured and broken on the path in front of me. I picked up the compact, now emptied of its ability to cover up. I looked at myself in the mirror inside and failed to recognize the masked woman I saw in its tiny, round picture frame. So I tossed the mirror along with my image into the street and wiped as much of the veil from my face as my hands alone were capable of. I turned on the heel that tripped me and walked away with a stride so smooth I couldn’t help but smile.