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“I had this sudden awareness,” she continues, “of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots and what we call our lives are the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know? Like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars. I remember how, as a kid, I actually expected to be able to look up and see Pegasus spread out against the night, and when I couldn’t it seemed like a trick had been played on me, like a fraud. I thought, Hey, if this is all there is to it, then I could reconnect the stars in any shape I wanted. I could create the Ken and Barbie constellations…I’m rambling..”
“I’m following you, go on.”
She moves closer to me.
“I realized that we can never predict when those few special moments will occur,” she says. “How if we hadn’t met, I wouldn’t be standing on a bridge watching a fire, and how there are certain people, not that many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means — the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves. And there you were, right on cue, taking my picture. I had the impulse to open my blouse, to take off my clothes and pose naked for you. I wanted you. I wanted — not to ‘fool around.’ I wanted to fuck you like there’s no tomorrow against the railing of the bridge. I’ve been thinking about that ever since, this whole drive back.”
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