Skyfall
There is something about youth that makes you feel that all your experiences are deeply imbued with meaning. In some sense they are. These are your first experiences with the world at large; travelling abroad, experiencing love, first academic or professional successes and failures. And like a projectile launching out into the stratosphere, your momentum carves a pleasurable friction from the cascade of colourful, caustic life as it peels back to reveal blue sky.
At some point the chute opens and there we are, floating up above all we have known, inert but suspended along the trajectory we somewhat blindly set for ourselves in that mad dash away from home. It becomes clear that what felt like fated, charmed or cursed destiny softens and fades away, melting back as you skid across this rolling blue-green world; continents and oceans appearing and disappearing in the extant distance.
What sharpens into focus are the choices you made, and the obviousness of things over which you had no control. And moments of intimate connection where time and space stopped and you loved and were loved or hurt and were hurt. A field blanketed in Texas blue bells, soaked in the softness of morning light and laughter, of friendship before jobs, spouses and children. That imperceptible moment where a lover has become family to you (whether before or after any public ceremony) and their scent and presence is a new home where you have abided longer than you had the knowing to notice. That searing and dull pain of realising your individuation...that by your very birth you were ripped from a larger fabric, spun into thread and woven into the story of other beings who love and hope and ache for you though they may, will never tell you who you are...
It is Sunday. I am officially a year older and I will spend today with an old friend. And for that I am grateful.
At some point the chute opens and there we are, floating up above all we have known, inert but suspended along the trajectory we somewhat blindly set for ourselves in that mad dash away from home. It becomes clear that what felt like fated, charmed or cursed destiny softens and fades away, melting back as you skid across this rolling blue-green world; continents and oceans appearing and disappearing in the extant distance.
What sharpens into focus are the choices you made, and the obviousness of things over which you had no control. And moments of intimate connection where time and space stopped and you loved and were loved or hurt and were hurt. A field blanketed in Texas blue bells, soaked in the softness of morning light and laughter, of friendship before jobs, spouses and children. That imperceptible moment where a lover has become family to you (whether before or after any public ceremony) and their scent and presence is a new home where you have abided longer than you had the knowing to notice. That searing and dull pain of realising your individuation...that by your very birth you were ripped from a larger fabric, spun into thread and woven into the story of other beings who love and hope and ache for you though they may, will never tell you who you are...
It is Sunday. I am officially a year older and I will spend today with an old friend. And for that I am grateful.