Reverb 10: Moment

Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

I touch down in a ruined city that won't die, vivid colors poaching the gray and sad, flood washed streets. Houses vie for revitalization, identical twins of houses, one paint-chipped and sagging, the other freshly washed, painted, standing tall. The smell is musty, dirty and insistent, like sprouts pushing up in dry gravel, tiny plants blooming in cracked sidewalks. Everything is dirty and bright all at once, the energy of a city bringing everything to vivid light.

I step into a crowded old bookstore and sift through old postcards, eat seafood in restaurants settled into crags in alleys, walk the riverfront, dust powdered sugar from my fingers at the famous cafe up the street from the hotel. Oh, this sweet fried dough, nestled honey brown in mounds of soft white sugar, the crinkle of the plain white bag as I sift my fingers to the beignet.

Music burgeons from underneath a white tent on a street corner. Crisp, strident tones of jazz beat into the heat. At the farmer's market, a man tries to sell me a snake ring. Later I walk through a cemetery, roam the centuries-old tombs, note the Xs marked on the voodoo queen's grave.

The city swells and deflates, a strange inhalation and exhalation of movement, and I am so much a part of it, particles of the flood in my lungs, and out again, and in, and out, and the city lets me take the tiniest bit, even though it doesn't belong to me.

:::

Touching back down in Dallas after a long trip away, I am beyond thrilled to throw my arms out and accept my beautiful daughters into them. Their hair so soft against my cheeks; their grips so tight, so fierce. I didn't realize how much I missed them until I got back, and I feel the slow vise encircling my ribs, ever tightening while I was away, let go all at once, and I am flooded with love and intense gratitude for these perfectly beautiful, wonderful daughters of mine.