Capturing a Moment

You remember it. You know you remember it. There was sand, and waves. Remember the waves? Or there were trees. Big trees – the only proper overarching word is canopy.

Mountains, maybe. Mountains, if you were really lucky. Those swiftly changing high-up instant seasons, new each day, the sweep of sudden snow.

Alberta, maybe, with the dirty feral smell of the lodgepole pines running away up the foothills, the ranks of long straight trunks marching away from you into a grey wall. The small mountain flowers of the high meadow, too many for names, the mountain sage in fat and blue-green clumps; the sere dryness of it all. The tops of your thighs tired from the climbing always upwards, the angle too steep for any tissue to expect. That clean sharp air, that metal air, that air that makes you believe in the power of collected ions.

Or the city. The familiar city, the too, too-busy city. One hotel-room night with the sheets tangled at your ankles or your knees and the curtains open to the lights outside. So many lights, so many colours – but cold – these lights that don’t even know that you’re there. But it doesn’t matter. It’s better. So many people that it’s easy to be alone with someone.

A touch on your wrist – or your elbow. The shudder that follows, but that you won’t show.

There, at the nape of your neck. There, sitting at the table, in the booth in the pub. There, at the concert – was it there? Or better: On the street, walking, in the cab, at the door of the apartment you used to have. The one with the green door, the red door, the white door. The room upstairs. The one in the basement. His room. Her room. The room with the view of the street, down through the chiroscuro of the elm leaves.

There was the thump and swirl of loud music. There was flat and magic silence. There was just that one voice, one climbing note; there were many, falling like waterfalls, and there in all that white noise, you saw for the first time the smile that grew from the corner of that mouth.

A mouth, a spray of fingers, a shower of nerves alive with voltage, running up your arms, down your legs, making everything swim liquid like water.

There are universals – there is gravity and inertia, the legislated speed of waves and light, there are commandments and there are regulations. There is Celcius and Farenheit and Kelvin – with its frigid absolute. Atomic weights and molecular patterns, the ordered attachment of common materials.

And there is us. Your us, my us. In a summer’s field, on a blanket from your mother’s house, at a beach party where the bonfire climbs high and rails spark into the heavens, where your hair smells like smoke and the heat has made the skin on your face taut.

In that first car, that first kiss, that first great and wonderful mistake. Sweet tremolo, the pure and rapid repetition of a single magic tone, that sound that – if you’re lucky – you get to hear again and again, no matter when.

It’s buried there in you yet. And it doesn’t matter from where or when or even when it is now.

It’s there, it’s there like a vein of ore, conductive, that deep thrill that shudders in memory always. Things may change and curve and bend, but there are natural laws that must be obeyed, and there is that moment that will never, ever be forgotten.

Captured, like an insect in amber – but still alive, able to buzz, and to shiver.

You remember it. Don’t you? You remember.