It was magical...

It has been a long while since I last wrote. In the last two months, I have often wanted to write – sometimes because I was angry, at other times because I was hurt, and at times because I was sad. But today, after a long while, I want to write because I am happy. It’s not that the last two months have been unhappy. They definitely haven’t. But writing requires a certain state of mind – and that has been eluding me for quite a while now.

Yesterday was different. Yesterday was beautiful. Yesterday made me happy.

It was the Rooftop Film Festival. A bunch of friends and I were attending it. And though they were around all the time, as were a couple of hundred others, I felt alone. It was a nice kind of alone-ness. Not the sad lonely kind, but a happy kind of solitude.

We were lying down under the open sky. Whenever the film or the talk got a tad tedious, I would gaze at the stars. The friend on my right was an astronomy enthusiast and pointed out some of the constellations. After a while, I drifted off from our conversation and began inventing constellations of my own. Here was an elephant’s bum, and there was a lady with long-flowing hair. And up ahead, to the right, was the little boy with a bat in his hand.

The first movie began. It was one of my favourites – Before Sunrise. And it contained one of my favourite scenes. The one in the church where Ethan Hawke tells Julie Delpy about the Quaker wedding he had been to. It’s the most romantic description of a wedding that I have heard. The couple kneel down in front of the congregation, and they just stare at each other. Nobody says a word unless they feel that God moves them to speak or say something. And then, after an hour or so of just staring at each other, they’re married.

At the end of the scene, I had a weird sense of happy-sadness. Happy, that something so beautiful exists. Sad, that I had no one to share that moment with.

I slept through the latter half of the second movie and most of the third. When I woke up, at the end of third film, I happened to glance upward. And what I saw, took my breath away. There, on what I had thought was a moonless night, stood a slim crescent shining bright in the eastward sky. It was magical.

At the end of the fourth movie, I glanced upward again, hoping to watch the crescent as it faded away. But it was already gone. Instead, in its place stood a bright, orange ball. I smiled to myself. So what if I only saw two of the four movies completely, I got to witness two miracles. I am happy, once again.