A small, college-aged woman is skateboarding down the street.
She’s going fast.
Each stride is so powerful, so confident. Her foot slaps the pavement in perfectly timed intervals as she gathers momentum. Moving faster and faster, everything in concert. She sails past trees, houses, parked cars, evades ice patches. She is an element of nature. A bird of prey coasting through a valley. A vector moving confidently into the future. In a few seconds she’ll be out of sight, but her image will linger. Such vitality in this simple transit, such evidence of a body doing exactly what it was designed to do.
There is no limit or boundary to what she might become.
Free in the world in ways she could not possibly yet understand.
And then she glances over toward me, an astonishment of tears running down her perfect face.
She does not look away, but meets my gaze.
This intimate mystery now a quiet fire burning between us.
And then she turns, strikes the ground a few more times with her foot, and continues forward, growing smaller and smaller before disappearing into this fractured and beautiful world.
