- It’s 3 in the morning and you are burning the dance floor of your favorite club, in a state that transcends inebriation, and just then the DJ swings in a nostalgic number from the 90s. The people around you whose faces look like the negatives of a non-developed film roll, look at you, you look at them, and the environment around you vanishes. It's no longer a club. It could be anything — a park, your kitchen, your office, the airport. The song is a multiway bridge that connects all of us to the nodal point. We scream our hearts out, our eyes wail up, we jump, we hug, we look up, we look down, we form a circle and dance around it holding hands. The current of the song passes from the veins of one hand to the other. This could have lasted 3 mins or 3 hours — time is quite bendable. The nodal point of this bridge is our hearts. We never see each other again, their faces never developed into an actual photograph.
- A French author in the 1940s described exactly what you are feeling today in 2024. She did not make it to 2024, you never lived in the 1940s. She doesn’t know where you live, you have never been to France. She wrote down your diary entry of the stab you felt when your heart got broken or when you let yourself consumed and exhumed in love, which to the world is messy and unruly, but to you and to the French author it is the fuel that is keeping you alive yet killing you at the same time. She wrote in her diary how you zoned out at the supermarket, how you missed your train, how you sacrificed a year thinking about nothing else but this “messy” love of yours, how every other person seemed to have his name, how every conversation would somehow have some reference to the place he was born or the occupation he was at. Maybe heartbreaks and longings and desires are the same in France as it is where you live. Our French author knew!
- That one-year-old baby girl dressed in a white bunny cap and a yellow knit dress you met at the airport waiting lounge now would not let go of your index finger. The baby is sitting on her mother’s lap with her head twirling all around trying to make sense of the wide world. She looks at the strings of led lights on the ceiling, the flickering blue display screen, the giant windows looking out at the tarmac, the kiosks selling coffee and sandwiches, and to her left it is you. She has her eyes fixed at you for a little more time than she did on everything else she just saw. You notice her and plaster a fake smile on your face. She smiles back and jumps to reach out to you. The mother looks up from her phone at the sudden movement of her body and notices you. You look harmless, she ignores her baby’s move and goes back to her phone. Now the baby is extending her dough-shaped arm towards you and tries to touch your shirt. You lift your hands and wave at her and instantly she grabs your index finger. Her eyes light up, she makes a gargling sound through her little mouth and speaks some gibberish at you. There’s hardly any pressure to a one-year-old baby’s grip but you have never felt anything heavier than that. It felt like all the love that you have lost in your life has been wrapped around this ball-shaped hand and transferred to you with lightning speed. She shakes and twirls your finger and keeps making all kinds of sounds — all this while her eyes are completely fixated on you. There’s nothing much happened after that but you noticed that she was speaking and you were listening. Your phone is still lying on your lap unattended with the half-typed sentence to someone. Her hands, your finger, her sounds, your ears were all that was there that day at the airport — rest everything was a blur. The baby must be a grown-up woman now somewhere, living in one of the places mentioned on the display board of the airport. But you shrink a little in age every time you think of her.
