The blossom in the air drifts to the ground, like tiny ballerinas carried on the wind, falling gently onto the hard grey streets of the Victorian Square. The dark hair resting on my shoulder smells faintly of coconuts, and I lower my face gently to breathe in the aroma more deeply, and place a kiss gently and deliberately on her head.
She is miles, maybe even a millenia away, as she often is, but the sudden human contact brings her rushing back to reality. She looks up at me, with a light shining far beyond the real depth of her eyes, the colours dancing in time with her pulse. Breathing measured against mine, moving together and matching it’s speed. We were as one, relaxing into each other. Her smile speaks to me in a way that her voice alone could never hope to achieve. Words can be clumsy in the heat of the moment, like trying to paint a picture with a wallpaper paste brush, nothing there for the minute detail and passion, only the crudest of strokes.
Life moves around us, it is now late evening, and people are rushing home, to be with people that no longer made their hearts jump, so that they could prepare for another day of the same tomorrow.
Monotony and repetition were the rules of the game. We were different, and we shone as a beacon of what could be, what life could and should represent. People stopped in their self contained thoughts to look at us, and for a brief moment moved out to encompass us, as a mirror for their own lives. By just being there, as happy as we were made other people smile.
I, for once, said nothing. Not my strongest point in reality, knowing when to shut up, but something else was controlling me at that moment, utter love, adoration and the belief that I would somehow break it if I opened my mouth. I was operating on a different level.
We had been a couple for a few months, but I had known her for years by this time, so we knew each other well. In only a few months time the darkness of my mind would take me, and make me ruin the one thing that was right, but that devastation and desolation was yet to come. We were so right at that moment. Life is full of moments, choices, regrets, wrong and right decisions, and yet we all carry within us that one moment. The right moment, where nothing can possibly go wrong, and the world stands back and doesn’t interfere. This was mine.
The whole city kept a respectful distance, and seemed to be in a place of it’s own, and the reason was sat on the bench next to me. Breathing the same air as me, how could that happen? How could we be so close, such a beautiful person, with her own distinct thoughts and future, be sharing herself with me?
I could not believe that this was really happening, and of course that self doubt would be our downfall in the final act, where I would do my best to fulfill the thoughts that I didn’t deserve to be this happy by making her miserable, and pushing her away. A self fulfilling prophecy is the name for it I believe.
The traffic was almost close enough to touch, taxis, filthy buses, German cars with a lustre that would have made Hitler proud all moved by, stopping and starting like a scratched DVD. We paid scant attention to them, it was just a visual background noise, to the symphonic crescendo that we were moving towards.
I ran my fingers through her hair, and moved closer to her lips, the edge of her mouth lifting slightly into a smile, as she knew that we both wanted the same thing. Human warmth shared. We are all different, individual, and if you believe modern conditioning “special”. Yet almost all of us look for those moments that we share with other people, we define ourselves by other peoples opinions and feelings and this was my time to be me.
We have kept in sporadic touch over the intervening years, keeping each other updated on our lives and the way that things developed. In a way that makes it all worthwhile, although we shared so much in such a short time and then life took us in different directions, moved us apart, we still have a connection. A totally different one I admit, but it is there.
I am not claiming that this is the only special moment that I have shared with someone else, far from it, but it is the one that makes me smile the most. Odd really as there was nothing really going on apart from being in a beautiful place with a special person. No more, no less. Well, that and I had bought a new record, obviously.
