The Calling That Got Away.

As in Sliding Doors, when Gwyneth Paltrow misses a subway train only to stumble into her alternative life, I sometimes wonder what my alternate path may have looked like.

I use wonder here because it feels like the appropriate construct, but really, I know.

I am one thousand percent certain that I would have been a spy.

Yeah, we all have a part of us that wants to be Bond, but I’ve got the actual chops to back it up.

And by chops, I’m not talking exceptional marksmanship or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon kind of shit. (Although, if the trainers had gotten their hands on me straight out of my prima ballerina days, that most certainly could have been the case.)

I’m talking the dark stuff: an innate ability to misdirect, to become and stay detached, to sit back and size someone up with incredible accuracy, to remain aloof or mysterious or to disappear.

Those kind of chops.

Not that I’m proud of this. I blame it on the stars. I am a Scorpio. We are mysterious yet oddly charming, excellent deceivers, seducers, secret keepers and dark little fuckers.

What’s all this mean?

It means I have a tendency not to people well, which would make me a excellent operative. I am more comfortable being an island than the center of attention. Add to this the recent development of jowls and I now have resting bitch face.

Whether I’m pissed off or happy, I look exactly the same.

This makes me very hard to read.

(Oh, but can I read you.)

In regular life, these aren’t the kind of qualities people put on birthday cards:

Jessie, your emotional detachment and ability to disappear without explanation make you such a wonderful friend.

But somewhere in Langley, Virginia, I feel like there’s a guy looking at my résumé thinking, Where the fuck was this woman twenty-five years ago?

And frankly, I’ve wondered the same freaking thing.

Maybe we’ve all got one of these. Some alternate profession where the things we’ve spent a lifetime trying to correct about ourselves are precisely the qualifications they were looking for.

Maybe the woman who’s been told she’s bossy her entire life should be running a Fortune 500 company. Or the kid who couldn’t stop taking things apart should be designing spacecraft.

Me?

Apparently I decided to sell chicken wings.

Same basic skill set, really.

Read the room. Figure out what everyone wants. Make your wings seem much more appealing than the other guy’s wings (even though they’re the same fucking thing). Give your target a knowing look.

Is that desire? Intimidation? Resting bitch face?

And boom, you’ve got the sale.

Holy shit.

Maybe I’m a spy after all.

Eat your heart out Bond. (And some chicken wings, too.)