It was
a spring evening. The sun was setting. The sky was a dark
azure blue with cadmium red edges.
Three buses were in the high school parking lot, running. Inside was the pandemonium of out of town musicians, practicing for the evening's concert. There was also this girl. We'd been doing the dance of courtship, getting close, spending time together. I was excited and afraid. I had to leave to clear my mind.
Outside, in the still autumnal evening air, I could hear the bus motors rumbling quietly, and smelled the diesel fumes. I looked at the world around me and commanded it to stop. This moment, this one, I would see, and remember every crystal detail, and this photograph would stay in the film of my mind. All futures branched off from this moment.
I blinked. The world had resumed its turning, and I went inside.
"... an insolid billowing of the solid...
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
The flecked river
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one.
...that in the shadowless atmosphere,
The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived." -- Wallace Stevens