Earlier today, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, I was walking north on Fulton from Fry St. Kroger was my destination. Acquisition was my purpose. Sundries and accoutrements were my objective. Irritated was my mood, and defensive was my mindset. I had just woken up.
I was going to miss vigil again. I will most likely have already again missed vigil by the time this may or may not have been written. Since I'm writing it now, then it will have been missed after I will have thought about writing this, or after I would think, or would have thought, or will have thoughten to think about having wrought it, or after I had written it, hence it having already been wrought. I'm writing it now. I wrote it then. I missed. I miss it. I mean, I missed it, too.
Anyway. There's a high school on Fulton. Normally on Saturdays I don't have to negotiate the wiley wills of other motile meanderers, but for some incomprehensible purpose the kids were out in strength, and I had to look up from my eBook to negotiate a safe passage through the throngs.
I was almost to Crescent and had just gotten settled again with my eBook when, utilizing my peripheral vision, I sensed someone approaching from the left. My spacial awareness functions kicked in, and in their mysterious way, calculated that our paths would almost definitely intersect. I began my normal preparations for this type of event... I switched over to autopilot and went into lockdown mode, ready to defend my right-of- way against all transgressors. I looked up at the moment just before imminent collision for a last minute acquisition of data.
What I saw... what I saw was power. I saw something so strong, so immediate and demanding with its mere existence, so authentic and truthful and independent and needless of any weaponry or defensive strategy; something that wasn't playing the game... something so far above the game that even the idea of the game was rendered meaningless. Right there, directly in front of me, dismantling my projections, sequestering my variables, dividing my equations by zero, violating my momentum, usurping my impetus, manhandling my delta-v, discombobulating my geometry, unraveling my dimensions, warping my space-time, and interrupting the basic, uncomplicated math of my moment and assimilating it into the chaotic collective... right there in front of me, doing all that which I just laboriously described, about three feet and one and a half seconds away from imminent collision, was this smiling, radiant, beautiful, gloriously bright, youthful face, surrounded and framed by these glowing golden tresses, and in the middle of all that... eyes... her eyes. The shock of those eyes was completely unexpected. It was like being ambushed by a gentle and disarming benevolence, warm and inviting; lacking any trace of malice... those impossibly innocent portals into this soul that just happened to be standing before me, flung wide open and without shame. Those eyes. Inviting and trusting, naive and indestructible, and smiling.
When I looked up and saw those smiling eyes, it was like getting whacked on the side of my head with a reality stick, or a truth club, or a staff of revealing or something, and having all of the cobwebs in there - those things that confuse and complicate and tangle up and tie down my perception by crushing it all into this hard cornered, jagged kind of order; like trying to force together repelling magnetic poles - it was like having all of that cobweb covered crap just knocked right out of the other side of my head. It was like... there was that moment before, and then there was the head whacking moment, and then the moment after that... and the moment before was like a muddled dream, and the moment after was like being jerked violently wide awake. That's really what it was like. I shit you not.
All of my carefully crafted and calculated irritation vanished instantly, and I was dimly aware of a smile to match her own erupting across my face. There was maybe two seconds of pure honesty contained within those two seconds of eye contact, and then we passed each other; neither one of us breaking stride or missing a step.
I continued on with this goofy, dim witted, detached sort of grin plastered across the front side of my noggin, and I was giggling like a moron with my head shaking in this barely discernable gesture of not-quite-belief, muttering over and over to myself, at normal conversational volume:
"Holy cow, holy cow, holy cow..."
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