There’s a moment when you realize that the best feeling you will ever have won’t last forever. The shot of joy inside your head and arms that gets you sky high. It’s only a moment, so you try to drag it out for as long as possible and right after the beautiful, wonderful, indescribable moment, you replay it in your head while the memory is fresh. You just kind of sink in it and ignore everything else around you and all you’re thinking about is the present moment. It makes you visually smile out loud. People around you stare at you like:
“What are you doing? This is Chem class. No one smiles in Chem class. What on earth are you thinking about?”
It turns out that all you think about is that moment that had already passed a day and a half ago. It circles the leftover juju … and you ride that wave for as long as possible.
The brick wall: gravity and its best friend, Time. It jolts through you like an electric current and pretty soon it falls leaving the air stale. The wave crashes and you go under the water and say to yourself:
“Hey, what just happened? I was riding that wave, couldn’t that wave have lasted just a little bit longer? Son of a b*tch, that wave lasted only about four seconds and now it’s gone.”
You’re stuck thinking to yourself if you’ll ever ride that wave again. You worry that you might never experience riding the wave the way you just did a day ago, a week ago, a year ago. You’re afraid you’ll forget that moment because if you don’t ever get to ride that wave again, well, you might as well keep the memory somewhere safe and preserved. You write the experience down on fresh paper: a fingerprint of your mind. It helps to keep the water from cresting and rolling back into the vast ocean of memories that you’ve gathered over the years. Those you want to keep. Those you have to keep.
If only God didn’t make bliss temporary.
Short Fiction