Saturday, July 24, 2004
Twice this week I’ve walked through rain; once was happy and intentional, like floating through a sort of misty, airy dust, and the other time was, well, just sad and wet and soggy.
There was this once when I was going back home pretty late at night, and for some reason I had to cross an overhead bridge to get to the bus stop. And when I was walking across the top, it started raining. It was so sudden, the sudden appearance of all these little quicksilver streaks flying down in the golden-ness of the street lights. And it took me a while, but i realized, amazingly, that the other side of the bridge was totally dry. Not a drop of rain. That was a singularly arresting moment; it was almost like being in two places at the same time. Like standing right at the edge between two universes. I never really thought about the fact that rain
has to start and stop somewhere, i mean,
who does? But being in between, watching as the rain gradually extended itself to the other side of the bridge, well. It’s something i would like to remember.
It’s all these little in between moments in life when time arrests itself and the world takes on this sort of shimmering transience that make
living life seem so simple and easy. Like the brief period when the sun’s just coming out after a heavy rain, and the air takes on this cool, crystalline
clean-ness, and I can’t help but feel all clean and freshly scrubbed and happy to be alive as well. Or when the day just starts to get dark during that indefinable twilight period, when the sun fades into a mass of darkening sunset-coloured clouds. These are the moments that can exist purely as
moments, that cannot be grasped or prolonged, that must therefore be appreciated fully at their moment of being. They are indefinable because they only exist as in betweens; it is their indefinable nature that gives them their splendour.
This will probably sound horribly anachronistic, but really, I don’t need to make sense of the world; I just want to hold on to the fragments of fading beauty that remain.
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