Two Seconds

Times Square, NYC

We’re running around in circles, lost somewhere in space and sound staring into nowhere. No direction seems appealing, everything is boring and grey and the music in our ears is locked in our heads like the blurry thoughts drifting from side to side, never even resting for a second or two. We’re just nothing more than silhouettes and every face we see overwrites the memory we had of the last, in the sea of people they look all the same.

But maybe suddenly, between the swaying dry grass we see a face which catches our attention, we look into eyes we’ve never seen before, eyes we don’t want to forget or lose the next second. Our thoughts are on hold and we’re wondering, who is this person here, where is he heading to in this place without a name? We see those eyes and maybe a smile, but we are not sure because the world is a funny place where things are never as they seem. Our head spins a web like a spider around the daydream which flickers up, so innocent and new but yet so often dreamt. We see these question marks twirling in front of us and we wonder what would happen if we just jumped right into this ocean of faces and swam through the arms and bodies like we would swim over waves and water, just to put this person under our inner microscope and observe its beauty like it was a rarely seen insect on a hidden island. But we know, that maybe that’s true, maybe this is rare and a secret is waiting to be told behind the curtains.

Before we know what we are doing, before we can take a running jump into this crystal clear adventure, so alluring and amazing at the same time, the bodies move closer and the skies turn dark, and the two seconds which seemed like 2 hours and illuminated the grey silhouettes rush away like speedboats, leaving us wet and cold at the shore.

And so we’re standing there, surprised that it’s over, surprised our daydream carried us too far to leave it in time, locked us and held us steady in its damp hands. We are left forever wondering what could have been, what we missed in these two seconds, and what the head behind those eyes was thinking when they lost track of ours.

So we turn away, we turn away and leave this place, go into our heads again and enter the dream we had and the dreams we dreamt so often we knew them by heart, we hear the music again and the see the faces. We’re all lost somewhere in this place, and neither space nor sound can bring us back the eyes which made us feel found for two seconds in a city without a name.