A few days or weeks or years went by, and the smoke-filled coffee shop took its toll on me. Gagging on smoke and text, I couldn't ingest anymore. My lungs burned from the combination of sea water, smoke and dirty, precocious, esoteric air. My heart beat rapidly at times--inflated by the adrenaline that comes with ideas and the same (different) adrenaline that comes with difficulty in breathing.I pulled myself up--raised out of the nausea of that coffee shop--the sea of text and smoke. I had no reason. I had no purpose to do so. There was no revelation. No epiphany. It was a pre-conscious, instinctual movement. At some point, something said it was time to go. So I walked.
On the boardwalk--between the sea and the shop--I saw a girl I knew once, walking. As always, she had one eye on the water and one on the people all around her. Everyone she saw, contacted, met, or just smiled at had a better day because of it. She was unique in this way--a revelation. She seemed to have an energy unfounded and an enthusiasm for breathing unjustified. But, don't get me wrong, this wasn't an annoying, cheery person, equivalent to human cotton candy. No, within the enthusiasm there was charm. Supporting that smile was wisdom. I couldn't take my mind off her. It was uncanny how the water came so close to her, yet the people remained all within reach. No one else is able to walk between both, so finely, so delicately, so preternaturally. It all seemed to balance in, on and within her. She seemed so beautiful because she seemed so human--so vulnerable, yet so whole; so enthralled by the water, but never enough to lose her way on the boardwalk; so magnetic, so enthralling--transcendent and immanent all at the same time.
I wondered if within-on-through-by her if an-other could be. I wondered if an-other--in an I-Thou, not I-Other, relationship would unbalance that balance, undo the harmony.
Most of all, I wondered if she wondered the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment