His frame (incongruously sturdy) landed softly with every step and he moved with a hesitance I could never connect with any particular gesture but it always struck me nonetheless. When he walked he did not obtrude upon the world. Deerlike he held himself in, always alert to the omnipresence of danger, one supposed, though what form he thought it might have taken I don't know.
Knowing he would pass by I had waited there a quarter hour to appear before him and with my presence say: I exist, damn it; I cannot be wished away. I recognized him in the distance by his walk. Unexpected: a paralyzing admixture of sympathy and terror. The words rehearsed a thousand times in my mind (conciliatory words, indignant words), how would I now say those words? Which ones of them could squeeze my swollen thoughts into a moment?
I hid till he had walked past; he didn't see me. The rest of the day: propping myself up with the hackneyed phrases with which one serves the public I hoped my impersonal polite well-rehearsed smile would hide that I was trembling.
Well said, darling.
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