Welcome to Gaia! ::

On a gently-wooded trail with glimpses of water through some of the distant branches he met a fellow pedestrian: a brunette with a supremely forgettable face, her hair in a messy topknot and heavy gauges in her ears, walking with one hand in her pocket and the other dangling a pair of ancient sandals. She was walking barefoot in the grass alongside the path, equipped with a light messenger bag and nothing else.

The chance encounter was there and gone--she smiled at him with an awkward little shoe-encumbered wave as they passed one another, and then perhaps thirty seconds later the slap-slap of bare feet on the trail approached him as she doubled back.

He was carrying a rucksack and that automatically made him interesting, and she was still stung by her failure to get anything useable, let alone a photo, out of the big-eared a*****e with the backpack several weeks back.

"I'm so sorry," she said, breaking the silence. "Can I ask you something? Or a few somethings," she added.

She dropped her shoes and shoved her toes into them to extend a hand for a handshake that left something to be desired. She did not seem like the sort of person who often had an occasion to shake hands.

"Alacoque Kelly," she said promptly, if a bit flustered, as though she were also a person unaccustomed to formal introductions.

The grin helped, a little, although it wasn't returned. She had a serious sort of face, her oddly-shaped mouth set in a permanent expression of slightly sarcastic disapproval, whether she wanted it to be or not.

"I, uhm--" An awkward pause. When the words tumbled out, they sounded very much as though they'd been rehearsed and recited over and over. In truth the awkward pause was because this was where she normally said my name is Alacoque Kelly, and-- and she'd just realized she couldn't, thus totally short-circuiting the already-shaky script. "I have a--a blog, a sort of photojournalism project. I catalog Ashdown residents, and if you have a minute to spare I'd love it if you could let me snap a picture and talk to you a little bit about yourself." The words were coming smoothly now. "If you're not comfortable with having your photo taken I'm more than happy to just ask you a few questions instead." Definitely rehearsed.

"Oh, good!" She reached into the patchwork bag to procure a notepad with a pen in the binding, and then her phone, thumbing across it before adding: "I'll record you if you don't mind. It makes it easier to transcribe."

The phone, now recording, was safely tucked into an outside pocket with the mic facing outwards, and she whipped open the notebook with a distinctly journalistic flair.

"What did you mean when you said people wanted to keep you off photojournalism projects?" she asked promptly. And then: "It's helpful if you use complete sentences so I don't have to stuff a bunch of brackets in. I don't think anyone's ever answered that way before."

"Are you still in the Marines?" she prompted. And then: "Sorry--to be entirely honest I, uh. Have no idea how the armed forces work."

This seemed very likely, especially coming from a blogger with gauges who referred to what she was doing as "photojournalism."

Cokie, who knew all this, realized with chagrin that she perhaps ought to have been more specific when she said she knew nothing about the military. She latched onto the word civilian, which answered the question she'd meant to ask anyway.

"I didn't know if it was--how long you stayed around in it, I guess? Like, how you return to civilian life, or whatever. Welcome back to it, by the way. And to Ashdown. How long did you do it? Did you do any deployments?"