In the Span of a Single Moment
A world-weary dreamer sees a kindred spirit.
I noticed first the listlessness of her gaze—not her blonde hair, her round doe eyes, her soft sweet cheeks, but those eyes that hungered for more than the present, for they were like twin sinks drawing me in to the bottom of a deep pool of water, and I, in my own obsessive confusions, felt kindred; here, at last, was someone who saw and wanted more than the present, like I, who wished for something greater to do, who looked around and thought to herself, “Dear Lord, this can’t be all there is”; she enraptured me with that pretty little gaze, one that came over me and passed along like the thinnest shadow of a distant cruising bird, unaware of my own complexions, my frustrations, my fears and agonies—for me, she had no time at all, so utterly absorbed in her own mind, and for this I loved her instantly, and could think of no faults, no error in her way, and wished for myself to be with her, so that we might gaze into the distance together and sigh and dream of a different world, a better world, where longing and yearning no longer exist, where desire is gone and fulfillment is reached, where every moment I no longer dread the waking hours and fear the creeping night, and at last I feel in myself a confidence and stability I dare not breathe into being here in this tortured corrupted world, where it can be twisted and shamed, humiliated, unmasked for its ugliness and faux profundity—this, I fear most of all—and I saw that she feared it too, and her fear gave me a sense of honest peace; if someone as beautiful and sad as her could look beyond the horizon wishing for better things, for more than the routine, than the constant fight of “feast or famine” at the mill, for more than reruns of old TV shows, more than this stoic, stale contentedness that postures as happiness—if someone as beautiful and sad could dream of more than all that monotonous misery, then perhaps my misery only amounted to the size of a mustard seed, and, in her heavy eyes, it may be observed and accounted for and then be blown away by an easy breeze, and together, together, perhaps that listlessness would go away for the both of us, and some modicum of peace ought to settle in both our troubled souls.
This I hoped for and more, all in the span of a single tip-tap heartbeat.
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