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"don't say it," i thought, "no, don't say it." i recoiled from those other moments.
it was those moments when she spoke the naked truth. a truth i chose to avoid. i longed to remain blissfully ignorant in those moments, completely sated by warm thoughts of the better moments - the moments that palpitated hearts and raptured souls. but she continued. she broke our embrace again, then stated it. she said it was misaligned. she pointed to it.
we had always picked and prodded at the things we knew to be true, stress testing the foundations of all that we believed. and sure enough, there it was. a small crevice, near the seam at the bottom where the glass rested on the base. an imperfection in our hermetically sealed world of perfection.
initially, we stood together, her hand in mine, amused at the syncopated rhythms of the gelatinous bubbles, the giant pockets of air, gently percolating to the top of our domed glass ceiling. it was captivating at first. but the rhythms became more frequent. in turn, far more turbulent.
a slight trickle became a deluge as we suddenly felt ourselves slipping, caught in the torrents that inundated our foundation. we became disjointed in the agitated current. indeed, things rapidly changed in our hermetically sealed world as air displaced the fluid of our interactions. our world was no longer impermeable. we were no longer untouchable and no longer in touch.
we called out to each other in desperation. but we were unable to recognize the way our voices resounded in the air, now echoing against the glass walls. we could not communicate. we failed to communicate. and the words we spoke now sounded hollow, shrill, caustic. i was the one who noticed the fissure. a simple fissure. this one at the top of the dome. it seemed the weight of the world outside bore down on the vacuous glass enclosure. the small fissure gradually snaked along the meridian until it grew multiple heads, as if medusa had bore a hydra's son, each begetting more fissures exponentially until the glass enclosure could no longer bear the weight of itself. and so it shattered into a million pieces, showering us for a prolonged moment, as the shards of everything we once knew jingled on the ground around us. we found ourselves exposed to a world so dark, so cold, so utterly heartless, and of infinite size and magnitude. suddenly, we seemed infinitesimal. we were alone and cold in this new world, no longer protected by the barrier of our glass enclosure. her eyes sparkled when she looked at me. i thought she was beautiful.
on further inspection, they were not sparkles at all. they were something far more forlorn. her eyes were moist; the dampness simply reflected the glass shards still falling around us.
i pick up a few shards, trying to piece them together. "i... i don't know how to fix it." it was a hapless moment.
i found myself inverted in despair, in complete denial of the fact that there were moments when i am weak, when i am dependent, when i need to reach out, latch on, and vainly tear at the nets of any connection i might make.
i needed someone to guide me in these moments when viral darkness clouded my sight. but the one voice that could offer me solace and comfort now seemed shrill and caustic in the open air. the air overwhelmed my lungs as i became crushed by the realization that she wasn't the one who could help. she couldn't lift me up in these moments when i am weak and it reaffirmed my belief that i could only be alone. and there will still be moments where there is no one.
but my expectations were naive. it was unreasonable to place my burdens upon her. i had to accept the expectation that i must be a certain way. i needed to realize, at times, there were moments when i am weak, where i fall into darkness, when i must retreat, retreat into the dark recesses of my mind where i alone remain. where, i too, must learn to see the beauty in imperfection. for our souls are shrouded by layers upon layers of lifetimes and years of experiences. and within it, beneath it all, we still remained one and the same.
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| they say a writer's journey is the quest to collect the words to describe any given moment. to captivate and descriptively state, in colloquial terms, a sentiment, a mood, a circumstance that is otherwise intangible. writers bottle that intangible and spread it over a page, lending permanence to an ephemeral experience that can now be picked up and relived at a moment's whim. then there are moments - moments so rare and so undefined that they seem to transcend the narrow boundaries of linguistics. these are the moments that send writers into a frenzy, frenetically scouring copious adjectives, modifiers, and descriptors to aptly capture that moment. but as a writer, these are also the moments when i realize my failure. because if i were to gather every existing word to express the magnamity of all that i felt, it would still fall short. so i began taking pictures. because they also say that a picture is worth a thousand words. so i took a thousand pictures. with a scrutinous eye, every studied gaze, every measured glance, every single sweep of the iris was an attempt to conjure a million images, so you could understand just what it was that i felt. but brilliance of the moment overexposed the collected images in my mind until all that remained was blinding whiteness. and the magnitude of what i had chanced upon made it so hard to breathe that i could not even bear a gasp of discovery. you see, i had always thought the statistical odds of this discovery were so insignificant, its permutations so innumerable, that the chances of this were so minute, even impossible. yet, here before me, i had undeniably found perfection in an otherwise imperfect setting. all my life i've had to give myself reasons why i was attracted to someone, why i was drawn to them. for the first time, i found myself giving reasons why i should not be attracted, why i shouldn't be drawn to you. yet, the subtle truth was undeniable. despite the rationales, no matter the reasons, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. i tried to make sense of it all. i tried to deconstruct and reconstruct, scouring your body from head to toe, feature by feature, taking you in with every sweep of the iris. yet, i was still unable to compute what my eyes beheld. for these were the moments that drove good men mad. good, rational men. for these moments confounded rationality, distorting and contorting the bounds of reason until only carnal instincts remained. for the veracity of what i believed in that moment was confirmed by physicality. confusion beget curiosity and i needed to know that this was real. i hungered for tactile confirmation, for sensory input of all that i felt. and so, i longed to let my fingers explore every inch of your skin to learn every contour, every dimple, and every curve of your body. but my mind could not escape the inherent ironies and dichotomy of your existence. you were foreign, yet familiar. distant, yet dear. you said you felt uncomfortable being scruitinized. but as i let my fingers trail your face, there were no feelings but adoration. still, the inopportunity of our timing further reflected the cruelest irony in this twist of fate. for everything in that moment blurred the lines between the rational and the irrational, the palpable and the impalpable, the physical and the meta, the black and white, the right and wrong. the more i tried to process it, the more maddening it became. yet, despite all of the scrutinization, the processing, the confusion, i could not help but admit how right it all felt. so i have relegated myself to just that. feeling. and i have decided to commit myself to doing whatever just feels right. and so, my dear, you must forgive me for my inability to articulate - for these words still do not do any justice for those moments with you.
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"it feels like i'm living in a snow globe," she said, "and there is some demonic child out there just violently shaking my world, and incessantly, too." she described the chaos as one where pillars crumble, foundations crack, and friendships deconstruct in the forefront, not the background, as if the battle raging in her mind was set in the lost city of pompei. her despair tugged at the strands dangling from my heart, and i let her words draw me in until i found myself transported amidst the swirling chaos of her snow globe. i longed to hold her tight, to steady her with my embrace, and still her heart until it beat at a manageable pace. because in every instance of chaos, there is a moment. an ephemeral moment of clarity when everything shimmers, slowing to a half-step, disjoining us from the brutal pace of reality. it is in that fleeting moment when everything stops, frozen in that eternal second, that beauty exists all around us. beauty that is best experienced in its transience. a lack of permanence that prevents it from being experienced by all. because permanence breeds a banality that slowly corrodes with the overgrowth of apathy.
rather, most people miss this evanescent luminance, distracted by the cacaphony of the hustle and bustle of life around them. she, too, became overwhelmed by the lack of order in crumbling pillars, cracking foundations, and the perpetual swirl of synthetic flakes of snow. i drew her in, lifted her in my embrace, and brushed my lips against hers to whisper, "i want to stop you, to make you see the beauty that surrounds you. the beauty that exists in the dilapidated and decrepit. because disorder is the natural order of things and there is beauty in imperfection. you must embrace these moments. capture them. because these fleeting moments grant us reprieve." we broke our embrace, leaving only our emotions to linger, as she turned to embrace this hermetically sealed world of ours, suspended in various states of decay. i plucked a lingering flake, frozen in time and space, and placed it upon her nose. she giggled in bemusement. how i truly loved it when she laughed; her reckless smile could launch a thousand ships. but gradually, the flakes began to swirl again, gaining in speed to a double-time until it caught the shaking pace of reality. eventually, the shaking ceased. we were left again in silence to gaze at the synthetic flakes fluidly swirling above and around us, freely falling, until they gently settled into the pieces of my heart. for another moment, she gazed at me, until the violent shaking resumed. chaos ensued. and the flakes flew out of my heart again, swirling into the world surrounding us, leaving a chasm where they so neatly packed before. she stumbled back into my embrace. so i squeezed her tight against this chasm, amidst the chaos, if only to remind her that when our world seems to be wildly spinning, there is that defining moment, however brief, when the world spins around us.
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