A couple days ago an old friend tracked me down across the years and found me where I am. So I called him up and we chatted and reminisced, and exchanged pleasantries to be sure; promised to meet each other and go for a drink, maybe spend a summer weekend with the kids along the coast!all good and fine.
Yet, somewhere, in a dark shadow beneath the surface I felt the pang of time, the passage of dreams like fast moving clouds in time-lapse imagery dissipating across the patterns and designs of our ambitions. I walked out of my haunt into the warm afternoon glow with a momentary heightened awareness of my surroundings and froze in my tracks.
All around me — as I were indeed at the epicenter of the universe, my universe — I noticed stories in slow motion, lives being unfolded, folded, lights burning bright in gleaming eyes, extinguished flames, folks waiting to die while going through the motions, others buried deep in layers of abstraction and consumption!
A fellow with a slight anger furrowing his forehead was driving a yellow pickup, going to his mother’s house to pay the phone bill; elsewhere, a slightly overweight man with a heavy accent was smoking a Marlboro cigarette and talking about taking custody of his kids to a disinterested fellow who was thinking about painting his garage. All three men looked at her as she passed by.
Her walk, the steps, the crisp sound of her heels marking time, wind passing through her auburn hair painting the air with cheap perfume, it all crackled with blood curdling clarity. Intertwined moments!
For an instance, my eyes saw past her alluring style, past her sensual flesh, the structure of her bones, the pulse of her heart, the command of her nerves, past all that to the glow of its soul, no longer of this illusion but a being in a vessel!a radience of ether in corporeal garb.
Someone’s fortune cookie strip was soaking in a puddle of engine oil next to the flaking yellow curb and I snapped back into the weft and warp. My friend’s voice had sounded tired!
-I.A.T.
