the stealer of stars

5000letters:

I considered those beautiful moments where I fell in love with everybody for a single second. That old man who’d tipped his beret at me and exclaimed ‘good evening, ma’am.’ The craggy lines of his face were cliffs, Dover, white edged with the foaming of the sea, whiskers and age old knowledge, and the grooves of his skin were etched with the years he’d lived and the happiness he’d felt during that time. I loved him for that moment where he was kind and everything was simple. The Italian boy who stood at the edge of the road, his hands digging prints onto the side of his waist, head cocked like a bird, he’d taken my breath away. I wondered if he was new or lost to England, if he felt the rain and loved it because it was cool on his skin and Italy burned gold haze into his eyes or whether rain was rain was rain, whether he was Italian at all it probably didn’t matter. I could have cut myself on his cheekbones and I loved him for that. I loved the child most because she’d seen something wonderful, I wasn’t sure what it was because I was not a child and could not find beauty in the simplest things but she had found it. She’d crouched at the pavement whilst her mother talked to another and the sound of my feet made her look up from that thing that had instilled joy into her eyes and that joy found mine (it had not yet faded) and for a second I felt beautiful too. Like I’d stretched myself into something new and wonderful. I wanted to thank her for that, I wanted to thank her for looking at the world like it was something to be admired because it was and I had forgotten that. 

I considered all the people we look at for just a second, eye contact and gentle smiles and a quick hurrying of opposite directions and I thought of the way that though they mean nothing now, our lives had connected. Once, for an ephemeral moment but connected nonetheless. And those lines, the lines of the lives we’d come across must exist somewhere inside of us. I couldn’t imagine that they don’t because the world is too big but we can feel it by falling in love with everyone for a tick of time, a blink and a watershed thought-sodden second.