There are moments,
short gaps of meaning, when everything takes on a new relevance. When
the truth in emotion and understanding is sharp and profitable. There are these times when the
novels, the
poems, the
songs and
paintings seem to touch their relevance to your life and take you. There are moments when the artist is right.
Sitting inside a cafe watching the people on the terrace. Watching him with his slicked back Elvis hair. White shirt. Wine being sipped. Three
women around him all gold bracelets and chains, heavy makeup. The women chat and talk and he sits, smiling when required, nodding in agreement. The lines of his face moving, furling and straightening in time to the conversation. And you know, you know just looking at him that all the stories in the horror movies all the tales of ordinary madness all the breakouts from suburbia that are meant to happen. They're true. He sits and uses this face as his cover. He uses this simple, this easy, this way to cope. And beneath? He hates it all, all that this empty endless chattering is and all the polite fitting in. As his face contorts itself to find the social so his mind flickers to scenes of escape, to his fantasy.
Breaking up, getting together. The first time you see them across a bar, in a party, at the office and it hits. Poems and love songs. The passion of romance in cheap novels. It's all in you and for a typo you feel it and you know they're right. The poets are right and it matters and it means that much, more than just the words on a page that get forgotten when the reader slips back to the norm. It touches you, makes you realise that they can reach that far and know that much of what you will experience.
Lying on your back in the park seeing reds and oranges smoulder dark clouds in a dying sky. Feeling like there exists a beauty beyond and before you, within reach. Not just above. Taking a sample from the palette of the painters, walking off into the sunset in a feel-good ending of another Hollywood big-screen. What you are is part of the canvas and you know it. Right there and then.
These moments are the poles that support the tightrope. The moments are the places where you can cling on to something and stop concentrating on going forward. When you have something that's helping you stand straight. It's not long and you know you need to keep moving, but it lasts long enough that sometimes, when you're balancing on your own on that rope just right for once, you can reflect back to that last pole where you stood and supported yourself for an instant on something solid. Something real that before you got to it, you didn't really take the time to believe in.