The Principle of Moments

She is small, ephemeral as dry bedsheets stirring in a south wind, and gravity has never hung heavy upon her. She dips on her feet, bending at the knee to peer at the sun’s reflection on the surface of the water, and it seems that she could take flight and leave the restraint of the ground, and I say nothing, heavy limbed, half-sleeping, moving into the tedium of midmorning. I move forward one place in the line for coffee, or a glass of milk, or that chocolate mousse cake I always consider getting, but am never willing to pay the price of a fast food lunch to get, and also wonder if it wouldn’t make me sick to my stomach, and on the way back, with my customary drink that I buy because I don’t need exact change to purchase it, I see a woman in a leather jacket, kneeling on the carpet to peer into an oddly placed computer screen, and I consider the implications of kneeling, and the hidden, darker remembrances of another year, now hardly seeming as if those events ever happened to me. And then I am gone, and the morning is gone, and the beverage cup sits at the bottom of the garbage can, and the annoying song they use for commercials plays on the radio again, complete with all the insipid lyrics they cut out for that purpose, and all the people who hear it are tethered to the earth, and their desks, and their computer terminals, and a man with sandals walks an old Labrador retriever by the window, and they each are filled with a terrible pang of envy.