Strap

January 8, 2006

The phone call was simple enough. She called to thank me. It was an innocent, innocuous moment, but something told me that I had just encountered a significant point in my life. It was almost as if I had passed a great moral test of some sort. I never met her, but here she was, thanking me in broken English.

“Thank you, Greg. Thank you.”

It was almost as if life itself, in some sort of twisted incarnation, was telling me something pivotal – something meaningful. I could only stand there, in the abode of my bare empty kitchen, and accept it. Certain chills ran over my body I had never felt before. Something deep stirred within. Something subtle clicked within the recesses of my being. Her voice was emphatic, joyful. I was in the presence of elation. I was in the presence of what might have been life itself.

“Thank you, Greg. Thank you. I had many important papers and documents in it. Thank you. Thank you.”

I could only look over to Vivian. She was delicately stretched out on the sofa, the dim light of the room lightly striking her deep brown hair. The look on her face seemed fitting somehow; she looked at me in a way that told me I was hearing what I needed to hear in that moment of time. Her presence made the moment more substantial, giving my consciousness a dreamy, ephemeral feeling.

I turned my attention to the woman on the phone. I didn’t even get her name. I could barely understand her. The rest of her conversation seems hazy to me, for some reason. I could only make out the inflection and timbre of her sound. It was genuine and honest.

Why did I feel what I was feeling? Where were these feelings being stirred from? Why was I in this situation? Where was she from? Where did she live? Where was she in her life? What life did she lead?

By some quiet fated thread, this woman and I were joined on a level that will be entirely hidden from me for the rest of my life. But yet we were there, never to see each other face to face – never to know each other in the typical everyday sense, but just by our choice of actions that led to this brief fleeting encounter.

I wondered about the significance of what I had done, on a personal visceral level. I had just impacted a life in a way I had never done before. I felt a feeling – perhaps it was honor, or maybe genuine humility? – that seemed to introduce itself to me for the first time. My choices had made a telling, deep difference in the life of another person.

And as if she was a vapor, the woman hung up and left me there in that room, alone with my thoughts, my feelings, and Vivian.