Danny James

The realisation had barely settled upon the consciousness when my face had been brought home into Sally’s hands. As she whispered my name and drew close, I caught in the instant, the glimmer of long obstructed joyousness in her eyes. Suddenly, with space enough to run, and a great gasp of the soul free in the world at last.

We stood there awhile, utterly delighted and engrossed with each other, amid the crowd before the coal-face of Friday night service dissolving. They’ve occurred before in glimpses, perfect these gaps of Nature, and you’ve figured since you couldn’t be granted many more miracles similar.

We talked at the centre of a hurricane with the sun smiling perfectly overhead at the mouth. Actualized and fully engaged with the moment, we felt the surge of a vast and thrilling current, brimming to the surface yet remained all the while at ease in the deep and holy intoxication that overlapped our traumas.
”I didn’t want to interrupt,” She said genuine, unblinking and ablaze. I wished as soon as it left her lips that she had, and I would have immediately let my responsibilities crumble for the encounter.
I couldn’t help but consider, as Sally spoke how that if she were not already spoken for, her hands were a perfect fit for mine; her waist, impossibly alluring and I could see us laughing at many good times gone by as we lay next to each other on a sunlit hillside overlooking the Steel City, some years ahead of tonight. Just as I had finished imagining these things Sally had motioned with a sideways glance and rather quickly, that she was in fact here with her fiancé and his family celebrating, something that I couldn’t quite translate through appreciating the rapture of her returning smile. Sally was always so infectiously easygoing and buoyant about the future and yet I was detecting somewhere here with her, moments of stuttered thought and a gazing solemnity with but a whit of an unresolved irritation.

We parted with proprieties and cautious glances and that, I estimated was unfortunately to be the necessary end. Stricken is the heart under spell of the imagination.