Moment Encounter

I wrote this in March 2006 during my senior year of college. It was a flash fiction piece that I put together for a creative writing class. I think I like it, but I'm not sure if I was trying too hard to be poetic.

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Moment Encounter

You were a flash in my day, like sunlight glinting through the leaves of a tree, as the wind blew my hair across my face. I saw you there, your long body a sundial marking the morning rush hour as you walked toward me and I toward you on the way to the Subway. To the right the Brooklyn Bridge reached out its erector set arms to touch the Brooklyn shore and beneath my feet the subtle vibrations whispered nasty secrets about the trains whizzing by below. I paid you no mind. You are one of the millions.

But then you were before me, interrupting my purpose—step right, left, right. My path was blocked by your long trench coat and black suit, by the boxed briefcase in your hand and the amused look in your eyes and your smile. Your smile. It was then that I no longer saw you, but knew you, for a single moment—a byte of our lives was exchanged through gleaming white teeth and spread lips.

You needed no name. I knew you better than that. A chuckle reached up toward the blue sky and it could have been yours or it could have been mine or it could have, quite simply, belonged to the moment itself. A moment that was completely isolated and therefore free, free of the cars honking a path through the packed traffic, and the man begging for money beside the gated park cradling City Hall, and the garbage tumbling along the tainted sidewalk.

As if to underline the similitude of our minds, we suddenly both stepped left, sliding past into the next moment in which we were again strangers. One of the millions.