(no subject)

Snap.

Walking the edge of a lake, staring down at the frost on the grass, the sun turning the ripples gold. Hazy vision... tears of cold, or...? Blink, and it no longer matters. They're gone.

Snap.

Peering down over the edge of an airplane's wing, same sun, years earlier. My brother brought an Atlas "just in case we get lost." Funny how that didn't make me cry then. Sitting back, staring now at words in a book, tiny neat letters spelling precise reality: after this day, life will never be the same again.

Snap.

Rain, warm and thorough, a curtain of drops, visibility three feet, maybe five. Arms outstretched, blacktop warm under bare feet, bathed in the cone of light under the street lamp on the corner of my street, in my own world.

Snap.

White crispness, pastels trembling, not touching the page, waiting for some signal and I never knew what it would be. And then it came and I was lost, caught up in the gold of wild oats and the dull copper of dry brush under them and the sky that aching blue that you only find near the sea, lost in forever in the empty lot next door.

Snap.

Eyes fixed on a television playing scenes from some war zone they said was ground I'd walked over not long before, head up and marvelling at how small and yet how powerful I felt, lost in that place and surrounded by the things men's hands had made.

Snap.

Children's voices floating in the open window, the sound of my music turned up so they could hear it, the curtain drawn so as not to impose an adult presence upon them. They danced. Days after disaster, they danced, with smoke still in the air and the scent of the dead on the wind.

Life is.

And we will abide.