I’d been working at the Novel Café when a cute woman with short black hair and dimpled cheeks sat next to me. She pulled out a sketch book, looked in my direction, rolled her eyes, smiled, and started sketching.
We sat an arms length from each other for hours while she sketched and I bounced up and down… moved by a series of crazy ideas having mostly to do with Avanoo. Each time I bounced, I remembered that she was next to me. And felt a bit self-conscious. Because maybe she didn’t like bouncy guys.
But I wasn’t too concerned because I hadn’t planned to say anything to her. And she seemed content to sketch. And smile at her sketches, at the ceiling, and at every person who walked by. I watched her smiling, and thought it was nice that some people can still smile like that!
*****
Fate intervened when her left elbow pushed a just-finished sketch onto my lap. Upon picking it up, I noticed that it depicted a guy typing on his laptop in a coffee shop while either hovering… or in mid-bounce. And the guy looked like me!
“Who’s this good-looking guy?” I asked, as I tried to roll my eyes like she’d done earlier. She rolled her eyes appropriately and showed me her other sketches. Which were of dozens of other people in the coffee shop.
Then she sighed. And smiled. And said, “Sometimes I wish that I could just capture all the world’s beauty. But it’s not possible. So half-capturing beautiful moments is the next best thing!”
I wanted to tell her that all the world’s beauty is apprehended in every sketch that perceives a moment as beautiful. And that her sketches were beautiful like her smile… because they revealed a desire to know beauty as an amalgam rather than as a moment. But I thought she already knew that. So I said nothing.
She laughed and said that she could read my mind. And that her father once said that beauty happens when time stops. And that if he’s right then perhaps her sketches are, after all, beautiful. “Because time ceases to exist when I try to bridge nature and my own nature.”
I asked if she believed in fate. And turned my computer toward her, so that she could read the words that I’d written moments before: Time ceases to exist when we engage a moment completely. Because she wants nothing else but that moment.
“Who is she?” she asked. I replied that she is a person for others and a metaphor for me.
*****
She winked. As if to prove that she wasn’t a metaphor. And I tried to wink. But inexplicably coughed mid-wink. And she laughed. And told me that, for just a moment, I looked like Captain Hook. And asked if she could sketch me looking like Captain Hook.
I didn’t mind holding a mid-cough wink pose for a few minutes. Because as she sketched, she looked at me in a way that I’d almost forgotten. You know… it’s the look when beauty is perceived, time ceases, and fairy tale characters again come to life.
