A Moment with Mona and the Return

I had a moment with Mona.

She smiled back, an almost odd upturned lip, and for the first time I forgot completely where I was.

Nearly seven or eight languages swirled around my ears, as disembodied iPhones and Cameras clicked above everyone's heads and shoulders. My body pushed against the fencing like a rock concert. My feet ached from miles of Paresian streets, hell miles of Louvre alone today, and the promise of miles more. My Sahara sunburns had dissolved completely, and my hair lengthened back into a pony-tail tied with a nice Canadian's hairtie. Change is the way of things -- anicca.

But I was lost, just a few seconds, in Mona. Why this would happen with the most famous piece of art in the world, I don't know. Perhaps Da Vinci felt that too. But the universe around me dissolved, and I hung suspended in complete and liberating focus.

Now I wander, get lost four or five times, and eventually get spit out into darkening Paris outside a gigantic glass pyramid. The lamps switch on, and I turn up a busy street as that something feeling settles onto my shoulders. Only jazz feels appropriate in my ears and I block something of the chaos.

Paris scores again, and Chelsea fans collapse on screen as our pub erupts into cheers and screams of joy. This bartender cannot take his happy hands off the closing bell, ringing and ringing into the night as we spill into the streets and the city smiles.



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How is it over?

 I shoulder my bag and step into the warm air of Los Angeles. I left Chris' flat in Oxford fifteen hours ago, and my abused iTouch reads London time. The feeling that I might never return to any of this settles over me: how is that possible?

What about Andrew at Pembroke and coffee from Missing Bean? My route to 51 Walton Crescent through Giles and Little Clarendon? The trail circling county Kerry I swore to finish? The music in Jamaal El-Fin at night? Muhammad from Ouarzazate, Hassan in Merzouga? All the waves between Taghazoute Essaouira? My juvenile french, Nico and Charles in Tours, Max in La Rochelle, Paris at night...

Surely I have picked a single weaving path through this life, realizing moment by moment that which can never be repeated, which sits within myself and creates me as much as who I am creates it. I feel myself a tiny slice of the potential of the world, wider and deeper than before yet still wrapped completely in the perfect solitude of my experience. Time always locks the door of the past behind you, but the future is like clay in my hands. All things end and change, but

"There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black west went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward rises..."