The Little Moments

The sun seemed to burn brighter then. The nights were darker. More depraved.

The mornings cradled a childlike spark. A magic caressing the streets as they began to stir.

Everything was attainable; ideas were original. Pure potentiality teaming in the ether, dancing endlessly on the periphery of your awareness, ready to be seized like snowflakes on an outstretched tongue.

In your world, there was never any haste as you watched good people compulsively fall between commercially orchestrated obsessions.

Lost in a sea of culturally sanctified distractions as you drifted to the next great adventure, whatever that was, aghast at people’s willingness to throw their lives into the 9–5 blender as they hurried to their offices drinking overpriced coffee and mindlessly scrolling, all stiff and stress.

Rousing at 60 and realizing they’d been hoodwinked.

And you’d wake up, write, read, and then write again. Cast adrift somewhere between delusion and ultimate sanity.

Figuring all you needed was enough money to keep your soul and spending what little money you had left on books and wine after you’d fed yourself, paid rent, and furiously applied for jobs to sustain you until something better came along. 

And you'd applied for everything from a "Boatbuilder" to a "Pastry Chef," eventually interviewing in Frankfurt for a job teaching English to 5-year-olds in China.

The pay was average; the hours were terrible, and apparently, you were required to bring "props" to the interview, something you were scolded for as you waved the blue wineglass in front of the camera, insinuating to the Philippino instructor representing a classroom of imaginary Chinese children that it was B. L. U. E.

After removing Dani's skin-tight suit jacket, you decided this was the line in the sand.

You'd spent your 20s re-stumping houses, lifting fridges upstairs for weeks on end, and laying tin roofing on 35-degree days, yet somehow, this was worse.

Your savings were dwindling into the ether, your dreams seemed to be going to the dogs, and you'd no idea where to go next, but when Dani entered the living room, you couldn't stop laughing, so much so that you both had aching cheeks for days.

A scene that, even years later, would still produce uncontrollable laughter.

So you filled two plastic cups with whiskey and wandered the quaint Christmas streets, returning to write half-baked drunken ballads together all night, a reminder that true friendship's the great balm of life.

A week later, you threw the I-Ching one afternoon in Hamburg while listening to an Australian couple fighting at the next table, the sound of the coins repeatedly hitting your plate drawing stares all around you.

Those coins threw you into a howling vortex that sucked you into a windowless room in Oporto and spat you out into a plush apartment in Amsterdam months later.

The Dutch winter was colder than you'd imagined, and the women were more exquisitely liberal.

Most days, you’d walk for hours around the canals, listening to Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, drinking Syrian coffee, meeting girls, and scurrying home stoned to offload some seemingly profoundly divined idea that, just a day later, you’d cut into pieces.

You thought you’d seen it all by then, but it didn’t hold a candle to what was to come.

Because the rug was pulled from under you so frequently, you eventually committed to living without solid footing.

Ready to jump ship at the first rumors of mutiny. Convinced that any truly living thing in this world was perpetually transfigured in a state of change.

And when it all went to shit in Amsterdam, you packed your things and went to Spain.

Standing at Centraal Station with your only worldly possessions, watching the commuters discuss dinner options after another day of selling their souls to the man, you momentarily ached for normalcy.

You were jobless, homeless, and nearing penniless but free and alive, with youth on your side. And, looking around, that seemed a surprisingly better deal than most.

And you figured you’d better do what you always did when things got shaky: walk.

So, you hitched a ride to Paris with a recently divorced banker who dreamed of DJ superstardom.

Reading in the Ikea carpark as he returned the furniture they’d bought for their dream house, eventually detouring to Antwerp for a double date with two girls he'd met on Tinder.

The girls were boring, but the beer was good. So you cut your losses and kept driving until you reached Paris.

The following morning, as the sun rose, you walked over the Pyrenees, continuing until you reached Santiago, that hallowed pilgrimage you’d dreamed of years ago in Melbourne.

And the further you walked, the simpler things appeared, and the clearer it became that the people you met on life's little tangents were your teachers.

That life was about the mundane encounters: cold cervezas in beaten-up roadside bodegas with old Scotsmen, rain-soaked debates about the trinity with Baptist fanatics who frequently interrupted to converse with Jesus, the poignant, human moments embracing your recently widowed friend as you sat on cheap plastic chairs in the afternoon Galician sun.

It was always the little moments.