Paper + wind, five minutes, go

    A paper blowing down an empty street. Nothing unusual about that. A blown paper wrapping itself around my legs. Unusual, but not particularly weird. A blown paper wrapped around my legs with my name on it. Below a picture. Now I’m paying attention.

    What had I done to merit a picture on any kind of paper, let alone one that had wound around my knees like a hobble and would barely let me walk? I peeled the paper off and carried it to a recessed doorway out of the wind. It took me a minute to find my name again among all the other words, long enough for me to think it was all my imagination. At the point where I was ready to ball the thing up and throw it in the nearest bin, the print jumped out at me. Two words. My name. An image. Me, from above, as though from a window.

    It took me a minute to make out the location. I was in a crowd, following the stream of foot traffic north on a busy sidewalk along Ordinary Boulevard after work, on my way to the market for a bottle of wine or a salmon filet or some salad greens for dinner. I don’t remember anybody asking my name on what could have been any evening during the last year or so. And yet, there it was in the caption below the picture.

    “Radiante Oblige....” That was me. And they spelled it correctly, too. “Radiante Oblige joins the crowd on her way to a meeting with destiny.”

    Chills raised the hair on my neck. I was torn between shredding the paper and letting the pieces be scattered by the wind and taking the page home to keep as proof of its own existence.

Tearing it up wouldn’t rid the world of this strangeness. There were likely thousands of these pages blowing around the town or folded up on driveways or lining cat boxes.

    But how was it that this page, out of all the loose paper floating down all the streets and alleyways of this city, had found me? This question was slightly less terrifying than questions about who was taking pictures of me, what made them think that a trip to the market was a date with destiny, and why on earth was this information was considered to be fit to print?

    Destiny. Not an idea I devoted much thought to. If there really were such a thing as destiny, wouldn’t it be inescapable, and wouldn’t everything you did be part of your journey?

    It was getting colder, and here I was in somebody’s doorway contemplating metaphysics. I took one last look at the picture and its caption, then folded the paper into sixteenths and shoved it in my back pocket. I pulled my coat a little tighter and stepped back out into the wind to continue home.

    From somewhere behind me, I could have sworn I heard the click of a shutter.