Once I thought I knew what was the most beautiful sight in the world, and I told someone about it, because we were both walking by and so I could comment without seeming to come out of the blue with a stale image.
There was a girl sweeping the sidewalk in front of us and the sunlight was mid-morning, not too bright or hot, and I anyway was feeling good like you do after a drunk even when I hadn’t had one last night and you take vitamins… IT struck me, I was overwhelmed with the sensation of properness. “That’s the most beautiful sight in the world,” I told this guy.
“What?” he asked, oblivious. I almost got mad at him for being such an insensitive dumb-bell.
“What?! A pretty girl working, that’s what!” is what I replied. Then he looked and nodded, but you could see he didn’t feel it, he was just humoring me. It didn’t strike me that maybe he was higher up on some scale of initiation and had seen one even more beautiful, one that made all the rest look tired and commonplace.
But I wanted to go interrupt her working, it must have been a surge of mania but I felt like I could do so and not be stared at as if mad, I could go and say, “Let’s go!” and she’d go, or whatever, and it would work. Must have been an aftertaste or a residual of the perfect feeling I had, and I didn’t heed it because I’ve heeded those things before and found different. We walked by and left perfection because if we touched it like Heisenberg, we would have ruined it.
Now for a long time I lacked this, and the memory faded like they do. I played some Chess once in a while and got a Thang runnin’ like then, like this: when you’re on top of it all the way through the game, you’re concentrating Hot and not an illusion like the false confidence you get now and then which quickly gets slapped down. No, this time you KNOW what is happening, and for some reason it seems as if the enemy doesn’t really have any good moves to make! because even if the move is like, good, yours is better! into a cascade of joy when the other guy is playing automatically and you can anticipate it all, he’s not bad because he beats you every other time when you’re not at your peak, then the bold stroke, hah! and as a matter of fact some of the people at the Coffee Bar gasped! Ah, yes! Is he mad!? Refreshing.
Yeah, once I thought I knew what was the most beautiful sight in the world, and now I know, and I doubt whether it is okay to reveal the secret, if the gods be watching. I had a chance to see it some other times and didn’t, because I was too busy with the Matters At Hand as a manner of speaking, and I know that was a mistake now. You gotta look around a lot to catch them sneaky rascals peeping out of the corner at you just waiting to electrify everything and make your life miserable because they know they’ll be hiding mos’ the time where you can’t find ’em. You can look, and you can give chase, but for some reason they don’t want to be used too much.
But the more I think about it all the time now, the less I can hold it back any more. The most beautiful sight in the world is a rosy flush in a triangular area at the top of a woman’s chest, no lie. Simple, yet true, I swear. Damn!
archive: minifictions
