A sea of strangers and random shirts and magic

I walked up to the nearest stranger I could find and asked in hurried poorly worded French for the nearest ticket counter. He smiled warmly and kindly offered up English, ushering me with sweetness from place to place across the busy Gare de lyon train station. We hurried as we talked but somewhere in the midst of the rushing there was just the faintest glimmer of a sparkle. I had all of ten minutes to print my ticket and get on the train leaving from Paris to Bern Switzerland. In typical French fashion, no one would help, but he did, and he was tender in silent ways for mere seconds of my life. I felt like fairy dust wabeing sprinkled on me thru the sunlight shining into this grand French train station. I suddenly noticed his hansomeness as not a mere coincidence, his beard and a scarf just the right thing to soften his smart conservative attire. Kindly allowing me to avoid the slow drudgery of my own French by letting me borrow his as he introduced me to the train attendant and showed him my ticket. I said goodbye as I jumped on the train just moments befor it departed. I wanted to hug him and say lets be friends or maybe even kiss him for sport but instead I just smiled and said thank you. I will never see him again. There were sparkles. I saw them in the sunlight.

We bump into strangers like this, share these moments and then let them go. It happens a million times over the course of a life. 

Weeks ago I shared two passionate nights with an inapropriatelty young frenchman on my island home. We had candelight dinner on the rice fields, we drank red wine on the patio of my villa as the warm tropical night filled with fireflies. We shared sheet wrapped moments of fingers and toes tangled together, of stroking hair and feeling skin. For those two nights I loved him as if he were mine to keep. On the second day, I felt him pulling away, slowly letting go. I dropped him off as he gave me one last twirl of my hair. I squeezed his hand and released him. I knew I would never see him again. My gut ached like fresh heartbreak, like it mattered, like it was real and not the lusty short lived game we were playing. I walked the slow long walk thru the rice fields towards my construction site saying "ouch" oultloud to no one in particular. Letting the sound come out of my mouth like releasing pressure from a baloon. Letting out the ache in slow small grunts. "Ouch, ouch ouch". 

Logic was clearly not at play here. We had little in common, our conversations would not even carry us to the third night that was available before his flight home but was being silently declined. His position as a regional manager of all Parisan outlets of a common American clothing brand gave us little common ground. But there was sparkle, we passed it back and forth between us. But It was not a sparkle I was meant to keep as eventually we would need real topics of conversation and less distance of age to hold us together. The pain in my gut would subside I assured myself. The grass blew in the wind as I walked. I will not see him again. Ever. Ouch.

As a married person with a child you are like a small celestial body. It matters not where in the world you are, they are always in your small orbit, your people. Now I am this solitary vessle with no anchor to steady me I am left to float about. I am becoming comfortable with this idea. This sense that I am carried by the wind bumping into people and exchanging small moments. I am starting to even understand this power. The gift of this. I am starting to see what is possible. 

I now begin to look for these moments. Seek them out like easter eggs in the grass. I sit on this train full of strangers wondering if one of them could light a small spark in me. 

Days ago I imagined the process of searching for people as no different than wading thru piles of used jeans. Trying them on over and over again looking for just the right fit. Like Digging in heaps of broken and ripped and out of fashion pairs at a third world market hoping that somewhere is a pair that hugs all my curves and has just the right pockets and I don't have to bargain too hard to call them mine. This image for too long has left me feeling broken and hopeless, like repunzel being asked to perform the impossible task of spinning straw into gold but lacking the magic to make this happen. This morning as I sat in a perfectly parisian coffee shop eating a chocolate croissant and sipping a cafe au lait I found a small secret that I had until that moment kept from myself. In an instant and for no reason, I let go of this image of used and broken jeans. Without warning a new image floated up and out of my coffee. The image of a grand easter egg hunt. The kind thrown for the royals before it became unfashionable to be ostentatious. A hunt with real rabbits, unimaginably large cakes and women toteing parasols. With each sip of coffee this image grew stronger in my mind and I realised that It is like searching the corners of the earth for just the right kind of magic, this sparkle that only exists between the right combination of people. Something that fills you up and makes you explode. If you know that it is there, if you believe that it is there maybe even a million times over, then it is just a matter of looking for it. It may be partly hidden, and surely unrecognisable if you don't look, but it is there. 

The train rumbles across the track and the green swiss fields roll by. The sun sparkles. I am on a hunt for magic. It can be found. Magic.