This Fish Needs A Bicycle

azure and coincidence

There are some moments that might seem as though they never happened in the first place. A minute, an hour, a day – a span of time – where you wish you could have stepped out of yourself to view it from the outset. It was just that beautiful.

If you pay close enough attention, sometimes you actually realize, just know, in the middle of one of those beautiful moments that you’re part of a solitary occurrence, mitigated by time, place and coincidence. By fate. A first breath, a first kiss, a first time you realize the world actually can be beautiful and perfect, if only for that one moment. And you also know it’s not going to happen just that way ever again.

So your heart takes a snapshot, if you give pause to let it. And then you will always remember exactly the way the sunlight fell, or a specific shade of blue, or the hum of the refrigerator or the smell of clean cotton. Or the details of someone else’s skin.

The picture, the details are yours to keep, for when you’re immersed in darkness and blues are blacks, and the refrigerator drives you crazy with its constant buzzing, and it seems you’ve lost your sense of smell. And you miss the details of someone else’s skin.

What is most intriguing about these snapshots is how easily they can provide a measure of comfort as well as one of regret -- of lost opportunities, broken connections and irretrievable time.

Years ago, I witnessed the birth of my sister and my heart froze the moment she inhaled her first breath and exhaled her first cry. But it could not freeze time altogether. She’s now in college. And years later, I unexpectedly fell in love and recognized it the very moment that I inhaled a single kiss and exhaled a sigh – one that was somehow left with my heart attached to it. And I remember stopping to take a picture, knowing all too well that it was not to happen exactly that way ever again. It was overwhelming and tender and mournful.

If I had to explain, even to myself, how I felt at those moments, it could take a thousand words (as is the going exchange rate between such commodities), or it could take very few. A name. A date. A song. The color azure. The word inevitable.

Life may not be replete with the moments that pause your soul, the vivid memories of which cause your heart beat differently, or make it hard to swallow. And all the better. Much of the beauty of those moments lies in their rarity -- in the awe of being in the right place, at the right time, a partaker in coincidence. And in finding a reason to believe in fate.

Posted by This Fish at December 31, 2003 12:24 AM