Inktober - A Flash Upon Me

It was gone as fast as it came. A flash. Four days ago. One minute I was my 50 year old self, fighting the downhill momentum of age, pedaling my 21 speed road bike, and a second later I was flying carefree on my red BMX pedal bike down my childhood street. Smiling, hair flying, with all the recklessness a boy of 10 has on a bicycle. The world held no limits. I felt it, it was real.

I don’t know what it was that transported me for that one unexpected second in time. Something like this has happened to me before, a flash memory comes back, ephemeral. But never this tangible and vivid. I feel it truly happened for a second. 

Maybe it was a smell. I was near an asphalt factory that has been there since I was a kid where they still fill huge noisy trucks with steaming loads of black asphalt, the rich sooty smell of hot tar sharp in your nostrils. The smell is distinct. But I smell it most days riding past here. 

Maybe it was the angle of the morning sun flashing in my eyes through holes between leaves on trees just a certain way, like it must have sparkled a billion times into my 10 year old eyes. They say flashes of light can invite our memories to dance with them. 

Maybe it was the exact way I leaned on my bike, pedaled, and steered around the manhole in the center of the bike path below me, for that is exactly what I was doing. Did the specific position and motion of my body trigger this connection to the past?

I suspect it was maybe a little of all of those things. And maybe 20 other things I wasn’t consciously aware of. A one in a million convergence of small factors which lined up like interstellar bodies that will never line up just like this again, at least not twice in anyone’s lifetime. I consider it a gift and do not expect it to return, just as I did not expect it this time. 

But it happened, I’m telling you. I really was back on that beautiful metallic red pedal bike. Back where I spent most of my childhood summer days flying free, free…

I know you can never conjure a moment like this at will. It alights upon you at the most unexpected time, like a butterfly who lands on you when you aren’t expecting it, and who never would with hours of trying to get it to. These moments cannot, will not, be willed. They have to come to you, you cannot go to them. And I believe this is probably good. For if I could choose to go there, I might never return.