There in the unattainable heights above some mysterious change had already taken place...  The sky had turned blue and bright; it answered his questioning look with the same tenderness, but with the same unfathomability.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 3, section xii


Wednesday night was the birthday of Yesi (pronounced Jessie), the front desk supervisor at Little Cayman Beach Resort, where we are staying.  Julia is her friend, so she was invited to her birthday party, and I tagged along.  I wore my sweet new altered maternity dress from Target (yay for Target and maternity dresses that can be altered!) and felt breezy and cute, so that was a plus.  I think I had even washed my hair all special.  (I'm not entirely sure since moments of getting wet, either in the shower or the pool or the ocean or with sweat, have started to run together...)

Anyway, the party was at this girl's studio apartment three stories up; basically a large box on stilts with porch around it.  It has an amazing view and the sky gave us quite a show of heat lightning on all sides.  We ate food and danced to a very short playlist of songs over and over and I won the limbo contest and the birthday girl's husband, Jose, danced merengue with me.  He started slow, but I've done some partner dancing in my time, so when I followed his lead in all the turnings, his eyes got bigger and bigger and we danced faster and faster with spin after spin after spin!  And at the end he declared me a marvelous dancer.

And by that time (which was after midnight), Julia and I were sweaty and pooped, so we walked back to the resort (which was all quiet and dark) and then jumped in the pool, party dresses and all.  We felt so movie-scene-esque.  ^^  The water was cool,  the stars were out, my dress was swishy in the water...  We giggled and splashed and did handstands.  It was marvelous.

Soon, though, the night sky lured us beyond.  We pulled ourselves out of the pool and dripped a path down to the end of the dock.  We climbed to the lookout porch and stood in the ocean breeze, watching the heat lightning glow behind huge piles of majestic clouds and light up the tips of choppy water.  My dress slapped against my legs.  I stood on a bench to get closer to the constellations, and I spread my arms wide, breathing in great gasps with laughter slipping out that tried to express the awesomeness of everything.

We walked to the very edge of the dock, out where the next step would send us into the water.  It was silent beneath the wind, a silence of great empty spaces like the sky and the sea.  With the roiling mountains of distant storm cloud and the flashes of bright light in our eyes, and the dark moving ocean at our feet, I imagined that we could have walked right out on top of the water, through the night, like a pair of elemental goddesses.  The sea and the air couldn't help but hold us up.  And then there was a shooting star, larger than any either of us had ever seen.  It streaked a gold path through the sky, so distinctly a ball of burning matter and so big that we half-expected to hear a splash from where it winked out on the horizon.


There just isn't a way to describe how this magic of the moment swirled around me and tried to fill my lungs to bursting.  I felt like a paper person in a whirlwind of light and sound and air.  I felt like my common self had no business inhabiting such an intense moment, like I didn't have a place to put it, like I would have had to break the skin of my self in order to assimilate such an outpouring of universal attention.  I was there and took it in with each breath, but I can't help but feel that I should have burned right up and been reborn a phoenix with all that latent magic crackling in the sky.

Eventually we meandered home and climbed into bed sometime around two in the morning.
In holding on to this memory, I want to forget that my life's dearest wishes are yet unfulfilled.  Because I am granted such a moment.  Shouldn't that be enough?  And I cannot help but be grateful.