A Perfect Moment
01.15.2008
"I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught up in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living in it." -Jean Paul Satre, Nausea
I am guilty for stringing together moment after moment after moment in my life (regardless of how interesting the moment actually is). I am super guilty for being nostalgic. If moments were tangible, I would be in psychotherapy for hoarding. And this is why I write. Hence I drew this snippet from the jaws of Sartre and jotted it down in a journal some six years ago. I related.
I can only think of very few "perfect" moments that are qualified by the sudden understanding that there is absolutely no place in the entire world (even Milan, Italy!) that I would rather be than where I am standing exactly at that moment. As someone who is often spiralling -physically or mentally- between three different places at once, these moments are rarely recognized.
Yet today I found another perfect moment in the most unlikely of spaces: at work crammed in the furthest back seat of a white mini van. Curled up on a gray bench seat with a boy who stutters, giggles, and eye rolls, I am staring at the back of four men's heads. Their pragmatics are all wrong (but so right), they talk with their hands and swollen fingers, they walk with quad canes, they say funny things that become funnier and funnier with time, and they are each so different and their journey through rehab incredibly amazing. We are on our way back from taking a long, therapuetic walk at Best Buy when the driver offers to drive us through Starbucks. I am laughing (almost concerned about wetting my pants) so hard as he tries to collect each gentleman's order. The orders keep changing and there is constant chaos and confusion and laughter and promises and whipped cream with the tall wait no whipped cream with the grande. It takes several minutes to order five drinks and we are confused by the sizes and the possibilities and the whipped cream. The sun has finally peaked out onto Chicago and it's been ages since I've been so overheated in the car by the sun that I strip out of my coat and scarf. In that very moment, uncomfortably smooshed while unwrapping my scarf, that I realize it is possible there is absolutely no where else in the world I would rather be. Once I stop laughing minutes later, I'm still wondering why.