The Ancient Greeks had a word for it -- Kairos – The Supreme Moment.
At the heart of every love story is that one instant, balanced on the edge of breath. The world hinges on such moments.
The first thing he noticed about the girl on the bus was her hair -- the way she flipped it off her shoulder when she turned to smile at him. It was the color of sunshine. Her eyes were like a deep
blue sea that he knew he could drown in.
Later she said, "I wanted to be Audrey Hepburn when I grew up." The sun was hot and the beer was cheap and the music loud. He bent his head close. Her words tumbled into his ear. "Ya’ll know, that movie? Breakfast at Tiffany's? I saw it when I was a little bitty thing and it stuck with me like honey on a bear’s claw. I knew right then and there that’s what I wanted to be."
"What?" he asked to keep her talking, losing the meaning in the cadence of her speech and the brush of air on his cheek.
"A free spirit in a black turtleneck. I'd drink pots and pots of coffee and snap my fingers to jazz and the poets and someday I would walk onto the stage and stand behind the microphone and speak truths that would tear up the floors and strip the walls bare. "
"And would you become famous?" he asked, smiling, envisioning this wholesome girl with the Southern twang as a beatnik in an old-fashioned smoky room, declaiming unrhymed verse before an indifferent, beret-clad crowd.
“Not famous," she said. "Free.”
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