Hey stranger, it’s not very common in this side of the world or even in our realities to be unfolding a piece of paper sent from across the waiting area of an airport but hi, I’m a dreamer with a head lost in the clouds, any chance you can help me find it?
I saw you from across the room as I was listening to Eko by Coldplay and realized two things:
- We only live once and;
- I want to get lost in this world with you.
At this point, I’ve closed the distance between us and in the sit next to you about to spend the next three minutes trying to make you realize how awful and cheesy and yet how amazing the second realization is.
At this point, your once resting face moves from bewildered to a graceful smile that knows it’s natural habitat is your face. In all this, you listen to my ramblings of the possibilities, what can, could, can’t and just might be. The actual possibility that for the first time in a while or maybe even ever, you just might cease to exist and live.
“What do you say?”
My final words as I round up my pitch.
As if on cue, you laugh. I’ll be damned if I say that didn’t take me by surprise. I did anticipate the laugh, but this, this was illuminating.
But you’re a realist,you know as I should, we are too old to do these things, jump off a bridge, out a plane, into a jungle, without some consequence of some sort. So you decline the offer.
Maybe it would have been better when we had more time, more energy, even less money. Maybe before we ever loved and lost. Maybe even before we lost ourselves. Or maybe it would never have been a good time.
But jokes on you, because all the while, I realize this brief conversation and your facial transitions have been in themselves an adventure for me. As the Public Address System announces my flight, I realize as I head to my terminal, that I’m not sad how it ended, this encounter which brings us back to the strangers we were about 10 minutes before. I’m happy it happened. Maybe I’ll bottle this experience and use it as fuel to recharge when I’m down. Or maybe I’ll write about it somewhere you’d stumble upon it and smile.
Maybe.
Photo by: Jacob Gomez
