the girl everyone had figured out

There has been a young woman sitting on my beer crate all week.

Not literally, of course.

Beer crates are only comfortable for one old man with a cup of coffee and a questionable lower back.

No, she has been sitting there in my head.

Her name is Emily.

I’ve never met her. She lives somewhere far away, on the sideline of a college football team, where she wears a neat white blouse while everyone around her wears headsets and urgency. According to the stories I’ve read, nobody can quite explain why she’s there. Neither can she. That, apparently, is unacceptable to a surprising number of people.

It’s remarkable how quickly people fill an empty space with certainty.

Some insist she must secretly be running the team.

Others decide she’s only there because she’s attractive.

A few conclude she’s useless because they can’t see her doing anything at all.

Nobody seems comfortable with the sentence:

“I don’t know.”

From my beer crate I see the same thing every afternoon.

Captain Leafblower spent half an hour last Tuesday explaining why the new family across the street never wave.

“They think they’re better than everyone.”

That was his conclusion.

Two days later I watched the father crawl under Mrs. Henderson’s mailbox to rescue her escaped cat.

He didn’t wave because, as it turned out, he was painfully shy.

The Bird Lawyer once declared that a teenager walking through the neighbourhood with headphones was “completely disconnected from society.”

Three afternoons later I saw the same boy patiently helping old Mr. Alvarez carry groceries after his shopping bag split open.

The headphones stayed in.

So did the kindness.

People rarely wait long enough for the second chapter.

Emily seems to have become one of those people everyone has already decided they understand.

The funny part is that, from what I can tell, the only person who isn’t trying to explain Emily… is Emily herself.

She simply smiles.

Listens.

Remembers people’s names.

Worries whether someone liked her mother’s cookies.

That’s hardly the behaviour of someone trying to become a mystery.

The mystery belongs to everyone watching her.

My wife wandered outside yesterday while I was, as she calls it, “performing neighbourhood research.”

She looked down the street, then at me.

“Now, Marcel…”

“Yes?”

“You’ve been watching that same corner for twenty minutes.”

“I know.”

“And have you solved the world?”

“Not quite.”

She smiled.

“Good.”

Then she went back inside.

She has an annoying habit of saying exactly enough.

The thing about sitting on an upside-down beer crate is that it teaches patience.

Cars pass.

Dogs bark.

People hurry somewhere.

If you watch for only ten seconds, you can invent an entire story.

If you watch for an hour, the story usually changes.

Sometimes twice.

Perhaps that’s what bothers us.

Looking takes time.

Shouting is much faster.

I’ve noticed that the loudest opinions usually arrive before the best observations do.

Emily may turn out to be exactly what some people think.

Or she may not.

I honestly don’t know.

And sitting here with my coffee, watching the afternoon drift quietly down our street, I’ve come to think that’s a perfectly respectable place to begin.

Not every person is a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Sometimes they’re simply someone worth watching a little longer.