Snapshots

It’s a summer born of sunshine and vanishing. Light bleeds through the essence of every evaporating moment and I can only think and feel in fragments. Countless silvery instances, polaroids of experience, flutter all around like so much confetti on the breeze.

We slip through the shards of an eternal Californian summer. A cool morning of mist whispering of contentment and purpose; an afternoon blooming bold, yellow-drenched and golden-grained; an evening sliding away, consumed by camaraderie and dark comfort.

I walk one day San Diego way, in Solano Beach. The water and hills loiter with intent while a quietly warm happiness, perched on a gabled roof, fluffs his feathers of whimsy. Minutes stretch and then stretch again as my feet move steadily onwards through oceanside life; Southern California in its purest form. The silence. The palms embracing the sky. The hues of purples, pinks and gold with that azure expanse of liquid space setting each instant afloat again on a sea of endlessness.

It’s always the ocean. Standing, I watch the rolling waves continually redrawn. I’m pulled under the sheets of time, between memories, layering one over the next. It’s fifteen years old now, our American life. As I gaze across the true blue, it occurs to me that to mark such an occasion is of vital importance and simultaneously of no great matter at all.

I drive ceaselessly. Do we move or just stand still? The monster of the freeway roars to life, snapping his concrete jaws, ready to devour the relentless traffic which he carries on its never-ending journey.

We sit in our living room my son and I, cast in the delicate haze of a late Los Angeles afternoon. An ordinarily extraordinary moment I’ll remember forever. He idles on the guitar and the edges of appearance melt. A song I used to know slips onto the airwaves. Time bends backwards and the past springs forth. I’m lost, as little pieces of my heart fly away down a tunnel of light, leading me back somewhere that once felt like home.

I dream in poetry with melody entwined all around. Of dark and bright, light and night, sorrow, beauty and pain. With the Bard, Byron and Bob as words and music sear my mind. I wake and find I’m sitting in the garden, watching the early sky lift her inky veil. Suspended I hang, between one movement and the next, as echoes ring out all around.

And beneath the music I hear the fountain. My beloved spot. As light bleeds so water eddies, gently mocking our fixation with frozen moments of experience.