He moves through the light and sound of his efficient machine, pulling levers here, pushing buttons there, trusting the process, a business acumen akin to faith.  He presents a mystery I don’t care to unravel, but now sitting across from me there is talk, and then there are the words between lines, unspoken but heard like thunderclaps.  We chatter about things pulled from the air to fill the space, idly taking inventory of possibilities.

He shifts, always moving, not just in body, but in mind.  Emotions and attention flicker and I wonder where the line is between his confidence and his fears. He would hate to know how he morphs so easily into awkward.  It would help him to know that awkward isn’t so bad. It is the awkward in all of us that endears us to others, wrapping tiny fragile tendrils around hearts.  It is the juice and gristle of compassion.  The very ground of tenderness.  The places we are all afraid to go.

I listen, watch, am perplexed and amused, but unmoved.  What he says means little since I am aware that it means little.  Instead I study the landscape of his face, for it is a curiosity to me, the bodies that our minds inhabit, and how the perception of the “who” is influenced by the “what”.  Peripherally I am aware of his collar because of its close proximity to his neck.  Some little corner of my mind collects the possibility of his scent, measures the pulse, and calculates the arc of electricity I would find if I touched my face there to breathe him in.  For it is in these crooks, these vulnerable joinings of this bone to that, softened by flesh, that we find the most extraordinary thing – the pulse of mortality.

Photo: The Searing Sound of Light – Ian Duncan Anderson (courtesy of)