snapshots

I watched the sun rise this morning over the city from my window. And I thought ... I could go outside with my camera and take a picture of how misty the skyline looks in the fading cold blue ... but I didn't. I stayed put. And y'know, then I got to thinking about all the pictures I've never taken. Of places, of events, of people. Of myself. There exists one picture of me with my turquoise and pink hair, and that's the picture that heads this blog. That's it. My hair was turquoise and pink for months, and I never bothered to sit and take a picture of it. In fact, in the chronology of my hair, very few pictures exist of it in the many many many different styles and colours I've had it in. Pictures don't exist of beautiful clouds, or parties, or the way my room looked before I rearranged it. Or for that matter, how the room looks now that I HAVE rearranged it.

I joke about the fact that during the year I lived in Hilo, I only took 23 pictures (ok, I just looked- there's 41- and that doesn't include the storm surf ones since I didn't actually take those). And there were some I could have taken, had I known the mountain was clear, but that's a different can of worms (she knows who she is and what she did). There's so much beauty in this world, in this life, that exists only in my head ... in fading memories, and in some memories so vivid I doubt I'll ever let them go. There is the sunrise over the badlands, at five in the morning- we were up at 4:30 to hike out and watch the land turn from black to pink and gold. I had my camera. I stood there with it, snapped a few obligatory shots, but then I drifted off from the group and sat on this little outcropping of rock and just ... watched. And it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Nothing in a picture can describe the way the light crept across the dark bluffs like hope. Nothing. Light and airy and beautiful. There was the time in Hilo, on the mountain, thousands of feet up- breaking the cloud cover and looking at the stars. Really looking at the stars. Seeing the Milky Way and Mars and probably a few of the other planets. Seeing the whole of constellations. Wishing and wishing and wishing that we weren't on the 19th parallel, but 30 parallels up, so that we might see Aurora Borealis. That too, even without bands of colour dancing across the sky, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

I saw my city glow this morning, at 5:04, and there's nothing to prove that it ever happened. But it was there, a snapshot now, and it was beautiful.