“Mostly,” said the roof to the sky,
“the distance between you and me is endlessness;
But a while ago two came up here,
and only one centimeter was left between us.”

Eric Whitacre

On the tube today I sat across a girl who looked nice. There are girls who look pretty, and there are girls who look good; but this girl looked nice, and in this book, girls who look nice are better than girls who look pretty and girls who look good put together.

In this way, you could say that this girl was a Supergirl. Supergirl wore a wing on her ear, which was the first thing I noticed. The way it moved as the carriage stuttered along, as though it was waving at me, the way the swans wave at tourists in Hyde Park, beckoning for food in exchange for a photograph, in exchange for a moment. This was the way I was drawn to the way she ate her co-op sandwich, neat and tidy, the way I am never able to do.

I have a friend who studies art in New York and he came over to London a few days back for spring break. It is funny, this, the way spring does actually break the winter, the way the sun breaks the clouds so that we march into April, so that we may become June. Anyway, this friend of mine was teaching me to draw, and explained to me the importance of finding the ‘time of the figure’ because this gives you the gesture, and the gesture will give you alot.

So I looked across at Supergirl and found her face at half past six, which was about the time the sun rises these days, and just around the time it sets as well. She stared blankly at the ground and dawned upon the last bit of the sandwich, which was eaten in triangles. All this time she took less blinks than the average person (however many blinks the average person might take) and all this time I was thinking of what she might be thinking of. I was also wondering if she knew that I was subconsciously working round the clock – at three I looked right at whoever might have come on the carriage, even if the train was still in motion; at six I looked down and read a line from my book, and each line from Jonathan Safran Foer told a story; at nine I looked to see which stop we were at, obviously so I would not miss mine; and at twelve I looked to see if she was looking back at me.

Each time I noticed different things: the way her hair was not brown but was also not quite auburn; the way her blazer looked like velvet and looked like silk, but was probably not velvet, and probably not silk; the way I could not make out if the stripes on her bag were that of a zebra, or a tiger in a sixties noir; the way she fiddled with the nozzle of her Evian water bottle in the way that I did back when it was fashionable to do so in class; the way her freckles gathered around her eyes, as if they were waiting for a story; the way her eyes did not seem to have any story to tell.

I thought about an extraordinarily large number of things for a casual ten minute train journey. Then again, I usually think of alot when I think something casual. I thought most of all that I would like to tell her that she looked nice, and that I liked her earrings, even though I could only see one side of it, and no one – not even an angel – could fly with one wing. I thought about doing so when I’d get up for my stop, when I would walk past her and say to her in a casual fashion ‘hey I like your earrings and I think you look nice’ and promptly walk away so her ‘thank you, that is awful nice of you’, would be faint and I would seem casual like the movies, and fashionable like the movies.

‘Paddington’ came and I reached down for my bags, but of course as I did so she stood up too and walked past, revealing the other side of her wings, now flapping majestic. This is the way Supergirl took flight, and this is the story of how I have seen many come, and how I will see many go.

time travelling and feeling all silly about the clocks rolling back. so many things i'd throw back into time - hopes i wish i never hoped, fears i wish i never feared. but time will travel; 2am will come again and hit me hard with all the things i wish i never threw at it.

Do you think I’m wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple.
No, he said.
Why?
Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it’s only noon. You couldn’t be something that hundreds of others are.
Are you saying that I am not-wonderful?
Yes, I am.
She fingered his dead arm. Do you think I am not-beautiful?
You are incredibly not-beautiful. You are the farthest possible thing from beautiful.

-- 'Everything Is Illuminated', Jonathan Safran Foer

there is a point of time in each day when i want to tell you everything - it comes right before the time i'm too scared to tell you all that. i believe our fascination with time travel stems from our daily regrets. each regret a drop that over the week makes a puddle and over the months a river that runs back to a time when we forgot what we have forgotten.

we forget and then we remember; but what we remember are the things we are never getting back.

i seem to always be caught in second-thoughts. thoughts that hit me in a second, a second later than i wish it had hit me. i tend to think that these thoughts are the most magical i could ever think up, but magic only for the moment that has passed. one wonders if magic that will never exist is even magic at all.

one more drop and i find myself standing out at sea. i am sufficiently far out to realise that going back is the only way forward. perhaps this is how i will time travel my way back to shore. perhaps this is how these great lakes of mine will dry. i will watch each eventful drop rise to form clouds and rainbows in the skies. i will remember where i have left you, but i will forget how to get there.

I told Him there was only one thing I wanted to pray for and that wasn't the right thing to pray for and I apologised. I told Him I was sorry but that's all I wanted to pray for tonight. I told Him that prayer isn't what is said but what is felt, which is why at night I shut my eyes and ears and every other door to the world and let my heart speak out loud and sometimes I feel God right there next to my heart, directing all my senses, making everything all right. It puzzles me then that I can still feel like that tonight - is this His will or is this mine?

Tucked into her bed, a little girl asks her father why the sky was so dark at night, and so he tells her a story, telling it as though God gave us tongues for the sake of wondrous tales. He tells her that there was enough darkness in the world – if the roads were a lot darker, the walls a lot darker, the fields a lot darker and each building a lot darker, the whole place would seem a whole lot smaller and duller, and everyone would be sadder. So God took all the black in the world and threw it up to the skies, thereby we have night.

“This does not mean that the night is the time to be sad,” he continued. “Rather, God gives us this time to take a break from the happiness we enjoy in the day. It is God’s little way of closing the curtains and saying ‘we’ll be back right after the break’. Which is why each morning when you wake up you smile - you know that God has made a way for the day ahead to be bright and full of cheer.”

“The day is bright so we can see all that is good. We see the sky in light blue and we know we will see the flight of a hundred, thousand birds, joyous to be that much closer to heaven. We see green of the trees in the fields and hear how they clap their hands to the beat of dancing children, laughing and twirling and laughing again in the meadows. We see the flowers in the gardens, in the forest, up the hills, one in every colour, and we feel God’s creative force beaming all around us.”

“This is how I grew up feeling safe as I ran through the streets and rolled about at the playgrounds,” he said as he planted a kiss on her forehead, which fell as she closed her eyes. “This is how I know you’ll be alright when you’re out there, and I’m not with you.”

The rainbow is quite something. You cannot touch it, or see it, and it sure doesn't talk back to you. You don't even know when it will come out, but when it does you smile anyway. You smile anyway, and it's hard to see what else matters.

Crawdaddy: The thing I wanted to know is, like the song "Bold As Love", you tie in colors and feelings, right?

Jimi Hendrix: Like yeah. Like some feelings make you think of different colors. Jealousy is purple; I'm purple with rage or purple with anger, and green with envy. This is how you explain your different emotions in colors toward this certain girl who has all the colors in the world. In other words you don’t think you have to part (with these emotions) but you are willing to try.