The First Meeting
The seminar was supposed to be routine—a day of lectures, networking, and a presentation I'd been meticulously preparing for. Nothing extraordinary, just another event on the calendar. But as I scanned the room, a face caught my attention, and everything shifted.
She stood at the back, clutching her papers, her brows furrowed in concentration. The world around her seemed to blur, leaving her at the center of my focus. She wasn't striking in the conventional sense, but there was something about her—an aura, a presence—that commanded attention without demanding it.
Our eyes met.
It wasn't just a glance; it was a collision. A moment so charged that I felt it reverberate through my chest. For a fleeting second, the noise of the room disappeared, the crowd dissolved, and it was just her and me. Something about her eyes—dark, piercing, yet somehow vulnerable—gripped me.
I couldn't place her. She was a stranger, and yet, she wasn't. My mind scrambled to make sense of the familiarity that tugged at the edges of my memory, but there was nothing to grasp. Just this overwhelming sense that I should know her, that she was significant in ways I couldn't explain.
I tried to pull my gaze away, to focus on the task at hand, but it was impossible. There was a pull, magnetic and relentless, drawing me back to her. It wasn't just her appearance, though she was undeniably beautiful in a quiet, understated way. It was something deeper, something intangible.
It felt like recognition—not of her face, but of her essence.
As the seminar began, I forced myself to look elsewhere, but my resolve was weak. My eyes kept finding her, as though she were the anchor holding me steady in a room full of chaos. Each stolen glance came with the same unsettling sense of déjà vu, a whisper in the back of my mind telling me she mattered.
When it was her turn to speak, I leaned forward in my seat, my breath hitching before I even realized it. She moved with a quiet grace, her voice steady and composed, though there was a tremor beneath it that only made her more captivating. She spoke about the rhesus factor and its effects on pregnancy—words I should have been analyzing and absorbing, but none of them stayed with me. All I could focus on was her.
The way her fingers gripped the edge of the podium, the slight quiver in her voice, the fire in her eyes when she spoke passionately about her research—it all felt familiar, achingly so. I couldn't understand it, and the more I tried, the more frustrated I became.
When she faltered, her voice catching for the briefest of moments, I felt an unexpected pang in my chest. It was absurd, this need to steady her, to reach out and assure her she was doing just fine. Why did I care? I didn't even know her name.
The applause that followed her presentation barely registered. As she stepped down from the stage, my eyes tracked her until the crowd swallowed her whole. And then she was gone.
I stood there, feeling hollow and restless. The pull I felt toward her hadn't faded—it had only grown stronger. Who was she? Why did I feel like the universe had shifted because of her? And why, despite my inability to remember her, did it feel like she'd always been a part of me?
The rest of the seminar was a blur. Conversations floated past me, presentations dissolved into white noise. My mind was stuck on her, replaying every detail I could remember—the way she looked at me, even for that brief moment.
And now, as I sit here, staring blankly at my notes, I can't help but feel like I've missed something important.
Whoever she was, she had left a mark on me. And I had a feeling that mark wasn't going away anytime soon.