From her mind's eye, she watches herself reach into the deep pocket of her tweed coat, matching shape to memory to identify each object before extracting the lighter and extending it to the cigarette between her lips. She jerks her calloused thumb against the spark wheel twice before cupping the small flame and bowing forward to ignite her cigarette. She inhales deeply. Pauses. Exhales.

"You're a fucking narcissist," she mutters audibly to herself, shifting - correcting her posture.

It's like looking at your reflection in a storefront window. There are depths of seeing, but they all leave you feeling exposed.

First, you look at your reflection. Take note - maybe even make adjustments - pull down the hem of your skirt. But always, there is the worry of being watched, both from outside and from within.

So, simply you see your reflection, standing there with the cityscape behind you, but is there someone inside, on the other side of the window, hidden by the mirror-like glare? A secret witness to your self-watching? Or someone unseen, meeting your gaze - an accidental direct object just beyond yourself?

And outside too, on the street, there is a scene of people coming and going. Maybe a passerby, watching- breaks your self-captured gaze. Embarrassed, you meet their eyes. Caught and forced to acknowledge their power.

But they probably don't notice, she thinks. No one ever really notices.

She sighs a stream of smoke and shifts her gaze outward, blinking the neighborhood parkette back into focus. Another drag of her cigarette. A shiver, it's fucking freezing.

From this she remembers girlhood, the walk to school - the tips of her fingers numb from the cold. Her hair plaited in two long braids, saddle shoes, and a red plaid coat. Even then she knew what she wanted to look like. There was already a cinematic expansiveness to her self- observation.

A murder, she'd say out loud each time she passed the church roof lined with crows.

And here, now it's somehow those kid fingers, frosted in the cold, that pull cigarettes from the nearly empty pack in the sweeping scene of a woman staring into a storefront or smoking alone on a park bench.