I envy myself the joy of that first meeting, when I laid my eyes on her for the first time in my life. It was right then and there that I believed. I felt cog-wheels turning inside me, a barbarian horde of emotions flying past me, disorienting my every sense. There I stood, disarmed, my every weapon taken away. My heart had left its dwelling place and could return no more.
It took me a long pursuit of passion to realize that it was not her I was in love with. I had fallen in love with that moment, the moment I had laid eyes upon the most beautiful girl my eyes had ever beheld. I realized that I had been chasing a silhouette, a glimmering hope of reliving that one moment when everything, everything had ceased to matter. It was as if I felt everything and nothing. I no longer felt the wind, but I knew it was blowing, stronger than ever. I looked away, but I no longer comprehended the world as it was. It was all a flurry of movement and a long stream of meaningless babble that held no significance to me. I was free, free from the manacles of society’s expectations, free from fears of the future, free from the dead weight of my past. Honestly, I did not even know if my feet were still touching the ground. At that moment, I was a god of men. Now I know that it was that moment that I was in pursuit of. It was that feeling, or that complete absence of feeling that I was after. Ne’er a man was as changed or as transformed as was I at that instant.
However, cliché as it is, all good things must come to an end. Time returned, and I became mortal once more. I became quite irrevocably human, complete in its incompleteness with its insecurities, fears and idiosyncrasies. Despair filled me, such great despair that it can only be compared to the feeling of realizing that the great life you thought you had was only a dream. Despair that she could never be mine. It was despair that I was rooted to a quest I could never fulfill, and yet some part of me, some tiny part rejoiced that I could spend my life in the journey, the part that had feared that I might someday reach the end only to realize that it had all been a mirage.
