Bookmark #663

There are recurring ideas in these words—reflections of reflections. It often makes me wonder whether I can get by writing about the same things one after the other or if I should branch out, as they call it. Then, just then, I find myself in a cafe, waiting for my friend, and I look around at all the tables—empty and occupied alike—and it occurs to me that to notice something in a thousand ways has the same merit as seeking a thousand things. Perhaps, this is an attempt to console myself, but if you were there in the morning, sitting and sipping coffee, watching, you would know how long a moment can feel if you’re looking at the right things. The servers rushed about, filling orders on a bustling Sunday landscape filled with people walking in and out, ordering their coffees, teas and juices, and talking. There was so much to look at! Couples, families, people sitting by themselves, the pancakes and their sugary aroma wafting about, and the sun—oh, it was wonderfully brazen, bright through the window without holding back any of itself. It was a warm start to a simple day. It may be hyperbole, but if that second lasted a lifetime, I would have sat there, waiting.

My obsession with the mundane makes me curious, not because I cannot write about other things—politics and the world—but because I find it vulgar to talk from citadels towering over the very world I talk about. To talk about the world, in all honesty you can bestow to the act, is to walk through it, to live in it. Then, if you notice a pebble, so be it. You must talk about it until you get it right. Perhaps, I could do it like the others: sit and talk in straight sentences that feed you my ideas, my thoughts word-for-word. Maybe, I can stop these run-on sentences, with commas peppered all over them, as a semicolon finds its way in, too, and perhaps, I can stop using these perhapses and maybes and tell you of things as they are, directly and without any nuance. I could do that, and I could do that in fewer sentences than what I wring out of myself, and it would make it all better and much, much easier for you and for me.

But then, in one sentence, I could also ask: where is the magic in that?

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