"I Didn't See You"

I am not a small person. I'm no NFL lineman, but I stand about 6'4" and my weight remains classified but on the high side of 250 pounds. I'm hard to overlook, let's put it that way.

Why is this relevant? I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work. I had had a migraine most of the day, and worse than that what I suspect was a basal migraine, where the pain is more in the back of the head just above the neck and not on the side of the head. I find these headaches disturbing. I smell things that aren't there. I have visual disturbances. I become very sensitive to light (but curiously, music is calming, even the death metal that I tend to prefer these days). My mood becomes odd. Not evil, not dark, just... odd.

The point isn't to brag about the severity of my headache. I'm just pointing out that I had a headache and decided to stop at the grocery store and get, among other things, carbonated water. Sometimes drinking a lot of water helps. Sometimes it doesn't. So I was walking across the parking lot toward the store entrance. Granted, I was walking with one eye closed because it feels better to close my left eye when I have these sorts of headaches. Actually, it feels better to close my right eye, but I can't close my right eye indepedently, only my left eye.

I waited for traffic to clear. A car stopped on my left. A minivan stopped on my right. I started to cross the last stretch of parking lot to get to the sidewalk and suddenly the minivan shot forward at more or less full throttle, and then came to a screeching halt about three feet away from me. So I stare at the alleged driver of this misbegotten heap, giving her my best one-eyed look of utter disbelief.

"Sorry, I didn't see you," she said from inside the van.

Sorry, she didn't see me??? She didn't see a 6'4" man in a bright pink shirt eight feet in front of her van, after she had already stopped to let me cross?

I think I am dubious.

So what could she have been looking at, if not the road in front of her? And if she wasn't looking, why had she mashed the pedal to the metal? Who goes to full throttle in a Safeway parking lot anyway?

Oh, I know what it was - I just figured it out. She was stunned to the point of incoherence by my raw animal magnetism. That must be it. I feel better already!