Anonymous

It was February, and the winter was still there. It was on the streets, where some of the dirty lumps of snow had thawed but then frozen again; it permeated the air, dense with the sticky mixture of moisture and cold; it sat under people's skin, and made itself felt despite the layers of padding and buffering they wore.

A man, a woman, and a boy were walking in the nearly empty downtown. It was early evening, and they were going nowhere in particular. The weekend and the thick darkness, undispelled by the feeble street lights, made the city seem drowsy, hibernating, but also bigger, more spacious and somehow, theirs. They passed by a small skating rink fenced off with panels of changing fluorescent purples and greens, with a couple of parents and kids making the most of it. They walked by the river, where it was darker and completely desolate, and where the banks of wet snow on the sidewalk were beginning to melt on the edges and form deep and expanding lakes -- the man and the woman gingerly stepping around them, the boy rambunctiously running through each of them. They went back to the main street, passing by closed stores and then entered a brightly-lit bookstore, still open, whose sliding doors emitted a welcome wave of warmth as they opened. They browsed, unhurriedly, without the intention of buying anything, then went out again, and turned towards a stone-paved street with a row of small bakeries and restaurants which seemed open.

The man walked slightly ahead. The boy, strangely elated from the night on the town with adults, deliberately fell behind a little, with a plan in mind, and the woman lingered, waiting for him. He looked up at her with a little smile and said in half-whisper, motioning ahead, "Go up to my dad, I'll catch up!" She saw the silhouette of some playful intent in the spark of the boy's eyes, so she smiled back and walked on ahead in long strides to be quicker. When she leveled up with the man, she looked at the man quizzically; his face, turned ahead, wore only a knowing but vague smile, located somewhere around the eyes. As they kept walking, she looked over her shoulder and saw the boy take a few steps back, stop, lean his entire body backwards with childish elasticity, and then lurch forward into an exuberant trot towards them.

It took just a few seconds, but it made him so happy to run up to them at full speed from behind and then squeeze himself through the narrow space between the two figures walking side by side, his arms opening up as he pushed through and ahead, as if he was flinging wide open a double door of a gate. And then it was over, and he was laughing, and it didn't look like much but it was. It was some secret code, a sacred gesture that only the boy knew but all could sense; a flourish of childish magic that dwarfed the adults in its wisdom, that linked and protected each one and all of them, that opened the gates to a world unto itself and enveloped them into the simplest and the best of humanness that three people, walking randomly, somewhere, some winter evening could feel together. A radiant moment which expired the very next second as they walked into the sweet-smelling bakery for cookies and pastries, a trio of hungry ramblers; an anonymous moment which, like all other such anonymous moments happening anywhere, is registered, remembered, and stored for safekeeping somewhere, by something or someone out there.

How to Hold

Whatever it is,
hold it
like it's the only
other thing out there
in the nebulous vapors
of circumstance.
Like the firmness
of foundation
and firmament
depended on your
holding it.
Like the same
fluke convergence
of factors
that brought it
into your arms
is not repeating again.
Hold it,
this armful,
this lucky chance,
this grace,
like there's never been
or will never be
anything
or anyone
outside of that
embrace.