Sunlight like Amber Surrounded Her
Ah, life. But I love you, anyway!
Listen,
It was a sunny summer day in West Yellowstone, Montana.
A young man sat sipping soup, gazing out a restaurant window, when…
…a GIRL appeared!
She was near his age, yes, with curly red hair to her shoulders, white-rimmed sunglasses, and a pink polka-dot dress, decades after anyone on Earth was supposed to be wearing a pink polka-dot dress.
The young man watched in rapt attention, spoonful of soup hovering before his mouth, as the young woman threw her head back and laughed at the sunshine on her face.
Can you imagine such a thing?
She was alone! She had no idea she was being watched. She was performing for no one.
She was just incalculably beautiful and impossibly alive, and her smile was the most radiant, joyful smile the young man had ever seen or would ever see again.
Then, as if all this magic, as if all this triumph of motion and ecstasy and sunlight were not enough, this girl, this MIRACLE of a young woman, PIROUETTED over the crosswalk! She laughed all the way, and she was laughing still as she disappeared out of window-frame.
It was as if poetry itself had just taken female form and gone dancing by him.
Every instinct in the young man told him to run. RUN, YOU FOOL! his instinct said.
Yet, he was only a young man, after all, young enough to fear what she might say more than he feared not talking to her at all.
He sipped his soup instead and played it cool. Years later, he couldn’t even remember what kind of soup it was.
He never forgot her, though.
Way back then, on that sunny day in West Yellowstone, he told himself it wasn’t a big deal. He was still young, after all, and the future stretched out infinitely before him.
Surely, he thought, my life will be full of beautiful redheaded girls in polka-dot dresses pirouetting through the
sun.