It’s a dance we couldn’t hope to maintain forever, but we manage to keep it all quite smoothly juggled for the duration of apparent perception while waiting for the right moment to coax the possibility into sustantiality...
It sits there not knowing it was there. It sat there not knowing that there was a there to be in. We’re not sure whether it knew if it was even a thing that could be somewhere. This being said, it was definitely there. There was no question that it was sitting there. Anyone looking in its general direction with the right eyes would have seen that it was sitting there looking out the window with eyes that it didn’t seem aware that it had. It was watching a city pass by outside that it didn’t necessarily know it was even seeing.
This was the second or third possibility we’d seen on the bus that day. Potential so often rests on public transportation. People will get on. People will get off. Stops will be approached. Stops will be made. As always the journey continues for stray potentials and possibilities edging out over the stray connections and missing shadows breathing through the heart of every whisper. It can be difficult to get them to resolve into anything of substance. If it happened naturally, there wouldn’t be a need for us. That’s what we’re there for. We’re there to make potential meet with the moment into something substantial.
It’s not an easy job. Walk up to suddenly on any single possibility and it will vanish into the ether between two perceptions. Directly acknowledge it in anyway and it could evaporate into everything it isn’t by the sudden rush of evident relevance. So often great potential is crushed out of existence by a sudden rush of existence. We can’t afford to have that happen in our presence. We’re there to foster it into something more than a forgotten residue glimmering across the surface of substance. We are there for much more than that.
The possibility rests there on the edge of the moment. It is as unaware of the danger of its own destruction as it is of its own semi-existence. Our eyes meet. A businessman glances over at a derelict with full knowledge of what we are all looking at. Just as we begin to negotiate that unspoken semi-subconscious dialogue as to how to handle the precious, little thing, a possibility we hadn’t even noticed evaporates into a sweet-smelling nothingness. We glance back at each other knowingly feeling the silent tragedy of the loss of that which no one had noticed in time.
We sidle over to it. Businessman and derelict move into a delicate kind of geometry with a knowing barista and we’re all protecting the thing as we delicately divert anything from coming too close to the potential to unwittingly absorb it out of existence . It’s a careful dance between the three of us engaged in active diversion. The malodorous emanations of the derelict push oncoming riders in the direction of the businessman, who throws an imposingly cold air of authority in the right direction to pass through the reverse synchronicity of the barista’s unexpected beauty that shuffles the traffic through relative gravities away from the fragile potential.
It’s a dance we couldn’t hope to maintain forever, but we manage to keep it all quite smoothly juggled for the duration of apparent perception while waiting for the right moment to coax the possibility into substantiality. One of us begins to become a little too aware of what is happening, which tilts the dynamic of the relative gravity off kilter. The potential shuffles around from one seat to the next and everything is tumbling about in a dangerous juxtaposition which could shatter the whole effort into a kind of perilously trivial inevitability.
On the surface it’s little more than a casual shifting between strangers on public transportation, but those of us who have remembered not to forget to take some peripheral awareness of the potential it is a maelstrom of mind-numbingly overwhelming proportions. We’re all quite dizzy on the edge of perception without being fully aware of our own nausea. The residual tang of the possibility that slapped out of existence only blocks before hangs heavily in the air and we’re all about to be pulled into a full-consciousness that will shatter all potential when the bus reaches a stop.
A woman gets on with a little girl who gets on with a stray thought that she hasn’t thought that much about. It’s a fragment of an impression in an impressionable, little mind that seems to be swirling around the tempest with inadvertent grace. Somehow one or more of us is tumbling through the moment in a way that keeps the stray potentiality from moving in the path of total annihilation from a million kinds of ending. It hops and pirouettes, tumbling into a vague approximation of some kind of an arial rotation that cascade gently into the path of certain deletion.
We are all somewhere between utter horror and completely oblivious ambivalence as we are only able to grasp the full reality of the moment with scattered skittering edges of perception.
There is no doubt that the danger of the deletion is quite clearly there, though. It is as clear as everything we have ever forgotten to see and it is coming into everything in vivid 3D. We shudder and we shake as the end draws nearer to vanishing in total release on the moment. Then in an instant it ends. There is the knock of a sudden shock.
Those of us looking with the right fraction of open perception would have seen it when it was almost there. There would have been some fragmentation of a vague notion as the girl rushed out with the dizzy little half-remembered fragment of a sleeping thought that the potential had through luck and unknown judgment, somehow come to slide into. Potential and fragment had come to rest within each other as a sudden wisdom flashed across the fresh face of the little girl who was as unaware of all of this as we had all become the moment the light turned green once more.