My life revolves majorly around two entirely different but overtly material things: books and ice cream. I don't know why, exactly. That's just the way things are.

Like right now, I'm in a mall and I'm walking, right? Well, not now now because right now, I'm typing. But I'd like to use the present tense because YOU might find it more interesting and in a writer's life, YOU matter the most.

Have you noticed how much we look alike? We could be blood sisters; we could be identical granny apples.

Anyway, as I was saying, you might find it more believable if I narrated this story as if it's happening now. It has come to my attention that I used to always start my stories with the phrase I remember, or That day, or some such nonsense, which is evidence, really of how I like reviving circumstances that are sooooo yesterday.I want to do things differently today so kindly cooperate and pretend that what I'm talking about is all happening to me right this very minute and I'm not sitting in front of a PC I'm renting by the hour, typing so fast my head hurts.

Pretend that I am there. I am walking inside a mall and glancing at clothes mounted distastefully on the shop windows. My brother is bound to arrive at about 8pm so I have lots of time to kill. From this distance, I can see For Sale signs inside one of the more pricey bookstores. There are stacks of books by the entrance and I look at the selections for a while. Everything seems so uninteresting but I'm thinking, if I had $3,232,084,242, I'd buy them all. I'd even buy a David Sedaris. Is he any good? It seems that his books are always on sale. How would you feel, if you saw a published book of yours on the sales rack? Like 10 copies of your goddarned unsold books huddled together and they all look so fucking alike it's annoying. Would you, honestly, buy your own books?

So anyway, I was looking listlessly at the titles and my eyes, oh joy! my wondering, ever-curious eyes were persuaded by some unnamable force to look a little to the left and I see... I see... ICE CREAM! So I go up to the vendor and select the flavor of the day, which is apple crumble, and I happily eat it while looking at the books on sale.

And then I spot a familiar face. The person is looking at a stack of books and is wearing a pretty black bowler hat. I'm hopeless with names, really, but I have a good recollection of faces. She is supposed to be someone who attended the same church that my brother and I did back home.

She moves away from the stack of books she was inspecting and walks away from the bookstore. I decide to follow her because I haven't made up my mind whether I was going to talk with her or not. She goes to five different stores and I still could not decide on whether I wanted to come up to her and say hi.

Her hair swings. That's right. When she walks, it sways from side to side, like women's hair do in shampoo commercials. Her left elbow, strangely, is higher than her right and she walks with a slight limp. She turns her head and I notice that she has a small mole on the corner of her mouth.

Reading Peter Pan for the first time drove me nuts. Seeing that mole makes me remember that time in my life when I envied Wendy for having that mole so when I moved on to Kindergarten, I drew a mole on the corner of my mouth using my father's black felt pen.

She stops in front of a shoe store and looks at the shoes displayed on the store window. That's when I decided to just walk up to her like a normal person would. She had this polite look on her face when she turned to me.

That look was so familiar that for a split second, I thought she was me.

Truth is, I think the years have changed us, made us look eerily alike. That was my face, I thought. I was in college and I was in a boy's car. I was screaming Pulis Patola! at the top of my lungs and I never knew when to stop, when to say That's it, I'm getting off now. I never do.

And this woman looks at me as if she's seen me for the first time in her life. I am dismissed within a span of 4 seconds, before she even fully turns away. She opens her mouth and says,

I'm sorry, I'm not Grace.

Oh, I say, my mouth forming the shape of the dot at a bottom of every question mark.

Oh.

We can store around 232778 words in our heads. Of course, I'm guessing. It's a guesstimate. Now isn't that smart? That's one more word so I can say that I have 232779 words in this noggin of mine. Isn't it funny, though, how in important situations, all we can say is

Oh.

I wonder sometimes about what I would say if I die on the spot because of heart failure or a car accident or a shark bite. Would I get to talk to someone I love, like characters do in movies? Or would I be able to say

Oh

and move on? Like the way I did after I saw that woman. I moved away and headed over to the ice cream stand. My brother isn't here yet and I think the flavor Strawberry Rush sounds promising.