Fireflies

This is Oran Mor at the top of Byres Road. I passed it today and the window lights reminded me of fireflies, which suddenly bruised my mood and got me all whimsical and sad. Here’s why….

1. Firefly
tell me what you sit up all night waiting for?
Are you waiting for loneliness to paralyse…..

2. On Friday night I was at a Christmas night out. Full of fun and dancing and people slow puddling to boozy moves and fumblings.
At this night out there was a girl at our table – in a red dress – who was so utterly beautiful that she created a gravity field. I was utterly drawn to her. I had to suppress an instinct to just gawp. Her force field was so strong that I wanted to look and look, so intensely there that I think I was purposefully NOT looking or talking freely to her.

Thinking about my reaction I think that she dazzled so brightly that I started to feel it as light shining on myself and all my imperfections; and why it would never happen where someone like her would be interested in someone like me. As the light of a star is light from millions of years in the past, so she was like a beacon shining on exactly where I am in life’s continuum. I used to be there, and there was a time where something happening between us would have been at least possible. But now I am here, much further on in the time/space slide-rule and she is but a figment of my desires. A brilliant star in the sky, burning for lost youth, for that beauty of being in her prime, for the 20 year old stuck inside this aging body. Seemingly right there, but actually impossibly distant and buried in deep time.

3. Fireflies: they burn so brightly, wisps that drift in the dark of the night. You can bottle them for a brief moment but they will be gone. Beauty is nothing we can possess. It is a quality as to how we hold on to life. The harder we embrace and try to keep it to ourself the more it pops out of our grasping. There is nothing beautiful in grasping after beauty.

4. I was in Sri Lanka as a honeymooner when I first saw fireflies. We were walking home from the market on an early evening, back to my new in-laws colonial style house. Darkness fell. We turned down the lane to the house and there they were. Bright red impossibilities. And there I was, with the woman I loved seeing my heart dancing before me in a wee graceful drift of dotted lights against the dark of the tropics. As it danced on Friday night seeing that lass - another red impossibility - dance in the dark of a festive night.

And it was here and gone. Fireflies.

5. We are here and gone, fireflies.


Advent : 14