Wonders like these

 

Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by "their happiness" is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. 

(Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto)

This afternoon everything was standing still, all was calm, the wind ceased its rattling, the sparrows in the bushes sat fluffed in silence, everything frozen under an enormous pale sky. I wanted to be part of this calm and took myself out for a walk, listening to an audio book on my cell phone once again, making my way over the ice on the wooded path, feeling the jolt of the heat run through me with each slip and the occasional crackling sound in my headphones as the cold gripped the wires.

I keep thinking of that first snowfall in February, when the snowflakes fluttered down and covered everything in a thick blanket of white. The snow was so remarkable that day, and all through the evening, the sky glowed in hues of violet and orange. We stood by the kitchen window and watched it coming down, even with the light switched off it looked as though night never came. I tried to take photographs but the results failed to capture how magical it truly was.

I keep thinking of how everything is shaped in the context of memories. I came across a passage in a book that made me laugh, the part about an NSU Prinz that goes aflame every time its owners placed their groceries or passengers on the seat where the metal springs made contact with the car battery. I remembered sitting in the back seat of a car as a child in the winter, dangling my legs while my parents were inspecting something under the hood. It was cold and I could see my breath clouds inside. The car had caught on fire because my parents turned on the heat, and my dad was waving his hat at the flames. Seeing the look of horror on my mom's face told me I had to get out, and I opened the door and fell face down into the snow. I was okay and the fire put out, but my dad singed his hat. I wonder how much of that memory is actually true, or if it something I built in my mind from the stories I heard growing up.

I keep thinking how I am subconsciously creating a shared experience in an effort to connect. Somedays I brew the same tea for myself, read the same books a friend or stranger recommends, watch the same series on Netflix, all in an effort to experience the same context. When our eyes gaze at the moon we are looking at the same object and each seeing something different, existing alongside another in this shared space - alone, but not alone. The world is full of wonders like these.