May 30th

ex boyfriend. one of the last nights before the move. lovely while it lasted.

It wasn’t the kiss; it was the moment.

A moment when time did not stand still, but wrapped itself around us.

In the car, windows rolled down, flying in the shadows below the buzzing, brightly lit freeway. The foothills starkly illuminated against the gasoline black of the night. Eternity so close it is tangible, as if one could reach out through substance and time and stroke its silvery hide.

He wouldn’t understand.

Later, staring at the skies from a nondescript suburban front lawn—

“Have you seen a shooting star lately?” No, not since the eclipse last summer, though he mentions that there was a meteor shower some months ago.

“I see one!” A streak of light slicing the oily black. Impossible. Incredible. (And how cliché.) Smiles are so instinctive, impulsive. It must be against nature to try and suppress one. I don’t.

“Don’t forget to make a wish…”

Immediately: I wish things would all work out. But what does that entail? Loss, confusion, some eventual end? Thoughts and questions rushing like water through a dam, inundating. I wish I could remember this forever.

(I hope I will. I wonder if I will. Is that why I’m writing this all down?)

The stars. So close through the branches of the prematurely budding trees, yet millennia away.

Would he… Could he comprehend?

“Have you ever felt so close to eternity you feel like you could almost touch it?”

Silence.

The idea of eternity scares him. Time for him is measured in steps: two years of junior college, on from there. Two more years of university, go on from there. Waiting, waiting and waiting, waiting for some ultimate end.

But what if there are no steps, there is no future? In eternity all mechanical sense of time is banished, that feeble human creation of hours and seconds ticking away life vanishes in the presence of the
                                         Infinite.

The predictable: everything will be all right despite his fears, because God will be there and we will be with Him. But how can one sit and simply be with God if one is constrained by time?

God is outside of time, said a priest. Time is an invention used to track and organize our lives, said a mother. Eternity is frighteningly endless waiting, said a boy.

(A boy.)

Eyes are again drawn upwards, trudging through the murk of the city lights then soaring through the soft black heavens. Eternity is a frightfully long time, no doubt. But when there is no time, then what is there in eternity to fear? When there is nothing to be late for, nothing to plan ahead for, and when the future and the past are too infinite to be comprehended by the fragile human consciousness, eternity is being.

Simply being. Being in the present. 

And so I touched eternity. The stars and planets (and Lord knows what else) winked from eons above as I turned around and kissed him. The present was in that kiss, and it was a soft, sweet kiss, with no undertones of that desperate teenage lust that often trivializes such moments. The future, which I confess I fret about far too much, disappeared.

I was there, he was there, and we were.

And I wish I could never forget it.











May 30, 2008
11:48 pm-12:15am
c.
 

Author's Note

be gracious, as always.

Reviews

[Marc Marlon Villaflor]

Beautiful piece! keep writing!