a photo album

We all have these moments. Ones we tell ourselves to hold fast, and remember. I covet these moments in a photo album that I carry with me where ever I go, somewhere between the place behind my eyes and my heart.

Sifting through the photographs I find:
Image #1: not the first, but the first that comes to mind. Taken from my bedroom window on May 20th, 2005.

It was surely my racing heart that woke me before dawn. I awoke with a sense of urgency, and after offering the morning prayer, I prepared to go back to sleep. It was like a magnet that drew my eyes out the window. This was a magnificent dawn ascending from the heavens. My eyes could not resist. Spellbound by the stoic tranquility of the clouds, as if they were waiting still for me to distinguish the multitudes of lavender, and crimson that dimly illuminated the background.

I lived the vague lull of sunshine, rolling in and simultaneously replacing the dark blanket that was the sky. There were distinct pockets of feathery white light refracting through the lofty clouds. A cold breeze blew in through the window, the kind of air that you can almost taste in your lungs. The dawn has an intense scent and you could unmistakably smell the morning approaching swiftly. I wanted the day to wait; I was not content with its transience, I longed for just one more minute to memorize it.

It is an amazing thing, about the dawn, how it somehow manages to rouse the heart. It precludes your eyes from closing, renders the soul to abhor a simple blink, for fear of missing a moment of its splendor. I wonder if it’s me that makes moments, or if these moments are always there.

Are moments made, or just noticed?

I suppose it might be me that discerns these minutes, me that refuses to let them go by unnoticed. I will be bold and say, that it must be for me that these moments are waiting, wanting wishing to be noticed. Existing to be noticed.

Image#2: taken on the #4 train, 3/9/06

Unflinchingly absorbed in my current read, I vaguely deciphered a young boy enter the train on my way home. He slipped so cunningly amid two large, I would say ‘thugs’. His small, slender body fit like a glove between them, occupying the scant area behind the metal support pole. Or so it seemed, his eyes revealed something contrary. It was noticeably evident, that this young boy, age no more than 10, has been exposed to more than I may ever know. With dark circles under his eyes, where was this boy going with no guardian to speak of? So curious, and engrossed with the child, I could not help but look at him intensely. We shared a glance, and in that moment, I looked through a window into his reality.

Here, was a boy navigating through the Bronx, a solitary mission. A level of independence at such a young age, I was oblivious to. His eyes than fixed on a group of high school adolescents speaking audaciously about some lewd topic matter, that I dare not recall. His ears open, eyes wide. This was his life, and for an ephemeral moment, I descended into his ennui. He sat, with a quiet calm, almost disappearing behind the pole. Invisible.

It is the nuanced collaboration of a community that shapes a life. In his eyes I saw the culmination of this community, within a single soul. The product. I am not sure why I was drawn to him, why it affected me that he was traveling alone. Why I wondered where he was going, wondered where his parents were, I am unable to articulate.

I turned my head, and followed him with my eyes when he got off on 170th street, unable to shake the image of his penetrating eyes that flowed so expansively deep.

I closed mine, and tried to sleep.

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…This is an ongoing album, I have some more ‘images’ to document, they will be coming up soon. Thank you for your patience.