Almost
any moment can do it, cause such strong emotion that you cry or at least
the feeling of tears behind your eyes and the tightness in your throat. It's those moments you
stop for a minute - from rushing to work or home or the store or the bank - you stop and you
look around you, and you forget that
your bills are late, that you've lost
most of your dreams, that you haven't had a good night's sleep in years. You forget all of that and you
stop and you just see something, anything.
The way a 2-year-old girl grabs her
father's hand, huge and strong in her tiny palm and holds onto it tightly
because she knows he's there to protect her, and she trusts him completely. The
kind of trust she'll only have for a few more years yet, and as
the harshness of the world gets to her she'll lose that trust and she'll stop
grabbing for her
daddy's hand and she'll enclose herself within walls that were
never meant to really be there. But it's okay, because right then she does trust him and she holds his hand and you can see it in her
big brown eyes.
Or that couple that
walks down the street, the couple you would normally make faces at and vomitting sounds because they're so
disgustingly in love. But at that moment it isn't disgusting.
They see nothing but each other. You can see it in their touch, in their
glances, in their shy kind of laughs, where every look and touch still
means something.
The way your
hand looks when you
really look at it, every curve and line. The way
your palm is always lighter than the rest of your skin and softer. and the lines are getting deeper and
more defined with age. Just watching
your hands move over the keyboard, fluidly and natural, or wave through the air slowly.
I close my eyes to the
music, inclining my head ever so slightly with the lights off and the
candles burning. The music is playing, probably
Tori Amos or
Radiohead, and I can feel every beat
pulse through my body. When the music slows down my
breathing follows, when it speeds up I can feel it in my chest and I hold my eyes
tightly together and nothing but the music can be thought or heard. But I'm crying and it's not because
my heart was broken again or because
I failed another test, I'm crying because despite the f*cked up crap in the world there's moments like that when
it doesn't even matter because you realize there's also so much
beauty. And it
touches you and you can feel it and you're connected to something and it's
an urgent kind of feeling within you that turns into a
calm acceptance.
It just hits you
now and then, if you
stop and look around, or stop and close your eyes and just sit still. It doesn't matter, look up at a
friend and really look, really listen, really touch. And it makes you
cry.