Waiting Room Woman

I watched her coming into the waiting room. She has a pale face that is more pink than white, and an attractive look of wear rests lightly upon her skin. She tosses brunette highlighted blonde hair out of her eyes as she wheels through the door. The pink and white raglan sets off her skin, hair and eyes in a lovely medley. Her body is tight, and muscle cords in her arms as she effortlessly wheels the small chair up to the desk. I’m not really breathing as I watch her, just watching.
Her legs look too small, in light blue jeans and clunky brown shoes, and that seems to explain a lot. There is familiarity to her, it really stands out in her legs for a reason I cant quite put my thumb on. Her face too is familiar, and not just because she looks like Liz Phair. I have seen her beauty somewhere before. I cannot help but think a few lecherous thoughts, I cannot help it the chair doesn’t hide her beauty.
She sits in the cramped waiting room, between two rows of chairs backed against the wall, because there is nowhere else. She reads a large paperback; I can’t tell if it’s some sort of textbook or just another fashionably oversized novel. She is used to being alone, noticed all too much and invisible all the same. She is cocooned in an invisible shell of self, a maelstrom of being alone that seems to both shield and hurt her. I almost wouldn’t see the hurt her self-possessiveness gives her a strength and grace, a strong front to anyone just glancing up. It is deeply sexy to watch.
She loses herself in being alone, sitting there reading. She is right to everyone else she is invisible. They refuse to see deformity, crippling injury and other cruelties upon the body, these less than perfections. The chair especially makes her invisible to them. I can’t help but watch. She is lovely; in her small gestures; in the power of her movements; in the deftness with which she turns and rolls when the nurse calls her for a phone-call.
That’s when you see it, the body remains the same, the carriage of her frame upright in her chair, everything remains strong and beautiful, but her eyes change. When someone speaks to her, calls her by name, and she looks up at their eyes the tough shell slides back to reveal an almost desperate sort of hope. Her eyes are a crystal blue, beautiful like fire of ice, and filled with a desperate need, a hope that someone is there to make that better. Just as quickly as you see it, it is gone again and the beautiful but perfect eyes return, there is no need, no hope, her strength becomes a mask for dealing with a world where she is invisible.
I see a wedding band on her finger, gold with a diamond and I imagine what it must be like, waiting for her at home when she gets back from yet another doctors appointment getting ready for yet another surgery. It must take his breath away when she looks up at him and he sees no desperation in those eyes, and knows it’s not an act with him.