Fondly Crystallized

Prelude:
Mandela gestures something to me, I look back at the lit-up Big Ben, but an enlarged version of its miniature. But we are in such a hurry all the time, did I ever really see the world around me? Do I even recall the sight at all more clearly than a photograph?

I spoke of a time I thought I wasn’t quite happy. “When are you ever happy?”, someone says to me. Not that it was pertinent, but, to a speaker that doesn’t gleefully utter an empty word, I give consideration. Indeed, joy is not my expertise. I know that when I smile it is not with full abandon, that euphoria is not a language that I speak. But love of life and human can hardly be expressed in Earthly cypher, I don’t think. If only you could enter my mind, so you might see how much love there is in me, that I’ve no chance for a daily gesture of excitement, but am seized completely in personal interludes, unseen by the human eye.

But I thought of a smile, the other day. Whence before there sprung a secret contradiction, in her eyes, that by their sharp attunement to the truth shone brightly through her gesture, somehow there remained but a transparency of joy. It was a smile I never knew of, the muscles of her cheeks appeared commanded by some other than herself. There was one day, not long ago, that I too had smiled anew, a smile much wider, careless, freer and dettached. I do remember now, but hardly did I know it then, and neither shall I know it now, not until today is fondly crystallized in remembrance, years from now. So it is…