Frozen Moment

She was the epitome of punk rock chic: a buxom guerilla leaning against the bar, chewing bubble gum, and fending off the hipster-vultures who circled her body in search of fresh meat. These clumsy boys left her fifty kinds of bored, but she was not yet ready to go home.

A maudlin rogue — dangerous and introspective, sort of a pirate-poet hybrid — watched from across the room, bemused. Her eyes met his and their eyes smiled at each other without permission from the persons themselves, each one’s eyes telling the other’s a story that he and she only overheard.

The world first froze and then collapsed to two persons connected by a smooth silver-lined tunnel of vision. Sweet but not saccharine, they shared who they were and a vision of their future together from that moment until old age, retirement and death.

They blinked in unison, bursting the spell like one of her bubble gum bubbles. The crowd reappeared and a feeling of panic and loss came over them. He hurried across the floor, dodging the crowd, and arrived at the bar only to find that she’d vanished like a bright star at sunrise.

This entry is part of my journal, published April 2, 2004, in New York. Another piece written by reader request. In this case the words were: guerilla, maudlin, vulture, buxom, and rogue.