Then there was the day, that special day, one in which everything rhymed. I looked out of the window and I saw a blue bird. It was just as you had said it would be but not to me. Between the grasses and branches, between the sky and earth, dancing on an easy wing. Gripping the finest perch, letting go in a millisecond then alighting, so gently. An unfamiliar sun was moving around a foreign sky, all to a pattern and formula, the very correct details that somebody else had worked out. I watched it for what seemed like hours but the study was over in minutes, perhaps less, all played out in elastic time. The image however has stayed in my mind, like a tattoo or some beautiful ordeal or torture I can never quite forget. That deep and lazy blue, the divine colours blending in form and feathers and a tiny, pounding heartbeat, there inside. Heartbeat, wingbeat, strange pulses and the lightness of the golden moment.
It was also on that same day, I saw you, the far side of the quadrangle, walking away, looking back, then moving on. You had your own choices of colour, chosen and worn and on display. You didn’t quite see the blue bird, you were elsewhere, in thought, meeting yourself headed in another direction, perhaps. My thoughts stopped and then raged and then engaged and formed up in a time stamp. A black and blue mark that was never to heal. How careless of this fragile mind of mine, the only one I shall ever know, to see and hear these things so briefly, for such a small amount of time, only then to blindly and so easily let them go.
