As my body takes me to class, past the hordes of students racing through life barely looking up to see what road they’re on, my mind is still transfixed on that lasting smile I shared with a complete stranger a second before; she didn’t know I saw her, and I didn’t say hello.
I have not been in love with one, but with many; with nothing and everything; with beauty and with fear. But most of all, I’ve been in love with that transient moment of purity shared between your heart and your mind, rooted in gratitude of fortune, in compassion for another, in love of life.
I saw her leaving the gym. Her head low, her eyes looking forward yet stuck in a moment in the past, she was smiling. No one and nothing around her, she was in deep thought; perhaps thinking of a kiss shared, a friendship gained, a story with a happy ending.
Or maybe she just liked the way the wind made her arm hair stand on edge, the sun’s nurturing warmth on her skin, and the vitality of the rain on her cheek the night before.
She’s not the first to engage my curiosity, there have been others before her; people whose minds are not tied by the suffocating cords of their ipods, people who are easily cured with love, people with whom you have nothing in common but that instant in time, devoid of words and longevity yet brimming with substance and meaning.
Infected with her joy like a contagious laugh sweeping a crowd, I watched her as she passed me, her smile never quite meeting mine, our eyes never quite locking gazes, that moment all the more resounding for it.
They are everywhere, these moments; they are not solely in people, but in experiences. At the airport, where two people pass each other, smile, and turn around, catching one last glance before they walk away forever, complacent at the fact. On a subway, where the book you read makes you laugh so loud you become the soul of the train, tired commuters jealous of your innocence; and outside, where you are whisked away by the scent of the empowering winter breeze.
Beauty is the way we choose to define and be defined by it.
Turning around, I watched her; watched her feet move, watched her heart dance, watched her disappear, having only that memory to remind me of its reality. Overwhelmed at the simplest form of satisfaction that has gripped my curiosity and aroused my senses, happy for her and for this society, I smiled.
She’ll never even know who she is to me, that she is the heroine in the story, the woman who launched a thousand words. And I like that.