It's Like The Little Prince

A woman I'd just met started to tell me my fortune the other day, or rather, to describe my inclinations.

Indulgent, she said. Check.

Dreamy. Oh yes.

She was a striking woman. Long dark hair, some kind of Middle Eastern heritage, but she was from Sweden.

I was drinking wine, which I seldom do anymore (and for which I paid dearly the following day). We were sitting on large cushions on the floor at a party.

It was a strange party.

All the women there were exquisitely beautiful. There were only four men, and two of them were a couple. Around them flitted tall, long-legged international supermodels.

Okay, they weren't actual supermodels; they just looked that way. They were restaurateurs, writers, photojournalists. My friends are very interesting, and often quite decorative (or decorated), but they don't look like this crowd.

I teased the host about having a hobby of collecting beautiful people, and he gallantly gestured to me, as if to say, yes darling, that's why you're here. It took two tries before I realized what he meant.

Over the weekend I bartered my playmate into sitting for me and the Nikon, but it took some doing. He dislikes having his picture taken. I often think taking photos requires the same skills as taming wild animals. You have to distract the subject with something - a little soothing conversation, a little soft noise, so they're looking elsewhere, so they forget you're there with a big black lens.

The photos came out beautiful, even for me. I sent him some, and he wouldn't even look.

Sometimes it takes someone else to show us to ourselves.

I think we all have an image of ourselves, or maybe several of them, and having to see the external face and body captured on film or video is unsettling.

It makes us realize that our self-image is of the internal us. And that while we may occasionally meet others who can recognize our Selves shining out of our eyes, or being transmitted in the way we move, laugh, or dance, that's not what is visible most of the time to most of the people we come into contact with.

That's disturbing, and so we hide from it.

I liked that woman at the party. She wasn't the person with whom I had the easiest, most smoothly moving conversation, but she was my favorite of the people I met that night. It was something about her eyes, and her warm energy.

And I'll tell you this - I have fallen in love at first sight a few times. In each case, it wasn't romantic love. It was just - I met a person and instantly felt who they were, could see it radiating toward me.

Sometimes I wonder whether people get that from me, too.