illustration

LOVE

| betweenstops

 We were in Barcelona, so we were going out to dinner at nine. We finished around 10:30 and then we walked down to Barceloneta because it was the feast day of Saint John in late June and there were bonfires on the beach. The bonfires would burn all night long. None of us were going home before sunrise.

I was looking for a special someone. I had been single about six months and was still furious that my last boyfriend had broken up with me. What made me most angry was he didn’t have much of a reason. When I thought about it truthfully I didn’t have much of a reason for getting together with him in the first place. 

My girlfriends and I were drinking sangria on the beach and with each glass we got louder. Some people had a beach ball and we began throwing it back-and-forth. Someone made a makeshift fence and we were playing pretend volleyball. A person started drumming on an upside down plastic bucket and someone else started to sing.

It was a joyful scene but I was sad inside. I was so sad that I walked towards the water’s edge and then I walked along the waters edge. It was around midnight and there were so many people on the beach. I felt like I was in a crowded bar even though I was outside. 

I looked around and then I saw him. He was standing in a clearing all by himself looking up at the moon. I recognized him. I recognized in him what was in me. It was like I was looking at the other half of myself. It was strange.

Just as I was thinking that, he turned to me and smiled. At that instant, all of the anger within me drained out the bottoms of my bare feet into the sand. I felt like the stars we’re inside me pulsating new hope home. With that tingly feeling throughout my body, listening to the sound of the sea, moving back-and-forth along the shore, I started to walk towards him with more certainty than I had ever felt before.

He stared at me with a serene presence, and I could hear a voice inside my head that said, “I know you.”  I wasn’t sure who was talking to who.

Hourglass

| betweenstops

If life is to be measured like sands of time, running from the upper hourglass to the bottom, I think it only fair the sands possess different colors for different periods. Not all of one’s life is the same color.

Once the sands of time have fallen through to a beautiful mountain at the bottom, the hourglass being flipped over to do it’s thing again resembles reincarnation. Even if I were to buy into the idea of reincarnation, (or purgatory for that matter) does it not seem ridiculous that one would have the same amount of time in the next life?

Perhaps the sand measures something else… Love, for instance…. However, if one hopefully were to progress as in evolve, would not there be more love in the next life? Looking at history of human beings on the planet, one wonders. Perhaps it’s the opposite.

Where the alchemical meets the mundane in etchings of hourglasses, they have wings. These wings signify that time flies. But it doesn’t always. We all know that. Sometimes it drags.

Then there’s those shattered hourglasses. Those tragically smashed all over the pavement in sharp shards. Like so many young black guys killed by ignorant policeman. A mad man with a gun in a school or a shopping mall throws that hourglass full of sand in the upper half against a brick wall. Sands released too soon.

Let’s forget about time altogether and consider the hourglass as a female form, in ephemeral youth, temporarily full of wonder.

Yet, maybe there’s something outside the physical realm. It’s like that sometimes. Sometimes things get lucky. Perhaps even magic exists and there is something that is not bound by time.