There they stood on the old bridge over the stream, a breeze of air caressed their delighted faces, while they contemplated the mesmerizing scenery at sun sent. In the twilight, the rays of light dissolved into the dense water of the river, breaking down the golden rays into a symphony of color variations.
In the presence of the moment time stops as eternity serenely outpours from within to overwhelm hearts that have long since stopped beating.
They held hands, stared into each other’s eyes, and affirmatively nodded their heads putting a pale smile on their faces. The time had come for a long circumvented valediction. They turned their backs to each other knowing that it was the beginning of a new era; a new path for both… that would coincide or intersect never again.
At noon of the next day, he sat at the train station, hung over, with a burger in his hand. Leaning comfortably into a bench, in the blistering cold, the trees covered with frost, he contemplated the passersby. Sun’s goldilocks bounced off the slowly starting trains.
The indescribable ephemeral feeling that astoundingly struck him, as though electrifyingly knocked out by a lightning bolt, presented before him a harmonious view, not in any way similar to a mystical feeling, but an enchanting view of the order of things. He understood then and there, Cortazar’s section 67 from Rayuela (Hopscotch).
What does it all mean? Who knows, it was a moment of rebirth, like a butterfly leaving its chrysalis and taking off into the unknown. The burger couldn’t be any tastier, memories of the night before played in the back of his head as he comfortably accepted a new worldview, one that would cause him more trouble, inflict mental pain, and overwhelm him as he struggled to fend off residues of rotten ideas, a language and a divine presence that were not easy to scrap off and throw into oblivion.
At the airport, and shortly before boarding the plane, he wrote down a small poem that expressed his contradicting feelings.
“A dance of opposites
in the midst of an enchanted place
jolly carols accompanied by the sound
of mesmerizing guitar notes
and the taste of the moment
inebriates the lips of a future hope
strong sentiments hold grips of a broken heart
within an everlasting oneiric state.”
Three links:
Podcast: Latest Marketplace Discussions Episode: Building a Portfolio of Small Bets with Daniel Vassallo
Article: Why Do We Get Sick? The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine by Laith Al-Shawaf
Book: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Thank you for reading!