Henna Girls

I watched the two of them for a while. They communicated an easy relationship between each other that I assumed was forged on the road, in their tent, in the face of the threat of abuse and suspicion heaped on them by the residents of this town, who were probably not as accepting of these two girls as they might have been, had they been their daughters, traveling around the countryside with a henna booth they set up every weekend in a new town.
They looked like sisters, but that's a guess and it may be that their identical dress just stretched that association over the two of them, like the blanket they shared as the sun went down and the wind picked up. They spoke only when they needed to and then it was only to the little girls and the young teenagers who wanted that temporary tattoo, perhaps as a test run for the real thing.
They stood in line at the stand that fed them, along with the rest of us, a poor diet of thin and protein-less hamburgers, French fries and poutine and also deep-fried chocolate bars and pop. Side by side, they were in constant contact with each other. A hand on the other's arm, their shoulders touching or their hips pressed together, as if the touch made them a single unit, more able to withstand the press of so many townspeople, who they feared as much as they needed. Their faces were marked by their loneliness and their movements were cat-like and they often turned, back to back, when they found themselves in a crowd of more than two or three people, until they had navigated their way back to the safety of their booth.
It was a small cube, hung with saris and sheets of samples with a table in the middle and a chair for those who wouldn't sit on the ground with them while they scrawled their designs on arms and backs and shoulders. When there was no one looking at the fairies, dragons and Celtic ribbons that could be etched into their skin, they sat huddled together in the back corner whispering to each other and every now and again they would peer around as if trying to find out where they were simply by reading the expressions in faces and the set of shoulders.

On the last day, Sunday, I walked past them and saw that they were folding their sheets and their table into small transportable packages that could be carried in little more than a couple of knapsacks and a carrying case and were getting ready to leave this strange place, where we came every year to watch the horse shows and to see the loud and obnoxious smash up derby, the local bands who wailed into their sleep, the constant barrage of AC/DC from the mid-way, the steady stream of locals who pitied and despised them, and I wondered how long a life like that can last before being swept into oblivion, translated into a cloud of exclusion and blown away like dust, the smell of freedom lost in a crowd, to be replaced the next year by whatever fashion would make them the few dollars they needed to keep on moving, to start and re-start their lives on a daily basis, always fresh to the cynical eye and appearing like a forgotten memory that begins in the mind and delivers a systematic dissolution to what it is to be alone and roaming the country with nothing but a change of clothes and a longing for new experiences.

Then, as I walked away, I noticed a sticker on the folded table that was waiting to be loaded into a beat up old car and it made me re-consider my tendencies towards overly dramatizing life's simple curiosities. It was about two inches, squared, and it said, "Carpe Deum". Not "Carpe Diem"-"pluck the day", which is a mantra so many of us use to dislodge ourselves from the habit of life, but "Carpe Deum"-which translates to "Take all that is holy from this moment." and I felt a shiver run through me. The gentle twist of perception that tweaks your nose and makes you realize that as simple as things seem there are layers of understanding and recognition that most of us will never bother to uncover in each other.
I stood staring at the two girls as they loaded up their traveling mysteries and wondered if God was having a bit of a laugh at my expense. Then again, it could have been the gentlest kick in the ass from someone who just wanted me to see something beautiful in that field, something outside of my experiences and something sublime in the way the fair collapsed around me and left me wondering why I was standing in the middle of an empty field looking up into the sky.