Words conjured by sunlight and a mountain in Cape Town.
31 December 2022
CAPE TOWN, South Africa—There was a woman sitting in a window of a café. The woman wore a black tee and she sat hunched over a laptop and an empty plate. Then a man entered the café. He went there because he remembered liking the place from the last time he lived in Cape Town four years ago. The man also wore a black tee and he walked into the café and saw that it was different from before. He frowned and he ordered a coffee and a chocolate croissant and yogurt with granola and he sat by the hunched-over woman in the window. He took out his journal and he started writing. He liked to write. He did it for a million reasons, some of them honorable, others questionable, but, he thought, that is the way with things. He took a deep breath and felt that by breathing deeply, the way he wrote — the shape of his letters on the page and how quickly he wrote them — shifted in a hundred small ways. The sun poured through the window and it made the man happy and peaceful and those feelings worked their way into his writing, too. He saw the woman look over his way many times.
“What did you order?” The man asked.
“The salmon bagel. It was very good,” the woman said. The man was surprised to hear an American and not a South African accent.
“Are you visiting Cape Town, or do you live here?”
“My husband and my daughter and me all live here. We’re from Toronto but we’re here for six months. I just had my daughter three months ago and I’m on maternity leave so we came here to get away from the winter.”
“What do you love most about the city?”
She considered the question. “The view of the mountain,” she said with a smile.
“Yes, it’s good here if you like the outdoors.”
“We haven’t done much of that, but every morning the view of the mountain — it never gets old.”
Then the woman in the window got up and said goodbye and left the café, and the universe briefly lifted its veil for the man and he saw everything as it really was: billions of tiny little sparkling lights like glitter or tiny stars moving in a flowing mass made of grains of dark matter. He saw the woman walking down the sidewalk and he saw it was her and also not her; she too was a mass of little lights aswirl in the grainy dark matter flow, each light and each grain of dark matter its own piece of infinity filled with endless possible meaning like a million mirrors or a million gems all reflecting one another forever. Then the veil fell and the man stepped outside and looked up at the mountain and the view moved him like the deep breathing and the sunlight had done with his writing, and he wrote something with his body upon the canvas of little lights and dark matter grains that he knew was there all around him just out of sight: a smile. 