While having my second coffee today—no, I reckon it was the third—I began to stare into space and looked at the sky with its odd mauve hue of winter nothingness. I forgot I was with my friends for two or three seconds, and in it, I thought of the sheer volume of time that has passed through me, and that I have passed through in return. But then, I avoided being caught up in the trap of my own mind, and I felt neither sorry nor awe.
As I said, it was only two or three seconds, and after that, I was with my friends again. We had coffee and some food. I clasped and rubbed my hands together and tucked my head into my scarf as a breeze blew. The otherwise sunny and light-filled outdoor seating was warm differently this evening. It was warm, like a walk in the narrow paths of a hilly town, with its cobblestone roads and trails moist and wet with the rain from the night prior. If we sat there for another twenty minutes, I suppose we would have frozen to death or, hyperbole aside, caught a cold, but for the time we were there, there was warmth, too. This is an evening I will carry till the last day I spend in this life, this and many others like it.
Only one kind of happiness stays the test of time, and it is this one—the one of comfort. Everything fades. I have been happy, ecstatic even, but all of it has been conditional. Happiness has filled me one day, and the next, it has spilt through the cracks in the phoney bone china heart of mine, broken, of course, on accident, as if that is any excuse anyone could give for breaking something that was not theirs. Alas, there is happiness like that—fragile, delicate, brittle and frail. It breaks the moment you get a little too comfortable with it.
Then, there is what was on the sticky wooden table in the garden today. You cannot take it away. It stays with you in all its barren coldness. You remember it because it makes no sense when you’re in it. But then, time passes, and you realise you would do anything to return to it. Moments like these are present all over. I suppose I have learned to spot some of them ahead of time without the crutch of hindsight.
I wonder why that is, but that, too, is not my concern tonight.