The heat over the square was shaking like a translucent jelly, absorbing the reflections of the buildings into itself and turning them into mirages. In the very center, like a pagan deity altar, a fountain was thirsty - its currents, as fossilized by snakes, fired into the sky and fell down thousands of needles that instantly evaporated on the heated tiles. Children were around and screaming around him - barefoot, a wet, sun -shown tribe that performs his incomprehensible summer ritual.
They scream. Spotted. Collapsed. Their laughter, sharp as a glass combs, flown air, but somehow did not hurt it, but only filled with a life that seemed distant and alien to me as described in an ancient book. I watched them from the bench in the shade, the great observer with his frozen drink and a cheap existential burden, and I felt how irrational anger arises in me - not on them, but on the invisible wall that separates my world from their chaotic universe. Each of their movement, though random, seemed to have more meaning than all my thought plans and decisions. They were free not because they had no duties, but because their consciousness had not yet learned to create prisons for themselves.
One boy, maybe six, stopped at the whirlpool of the water, holding a frozen stick in his hands. He didn't look at me. He watched through. It was as if I was another fibrillation of the heat, another insignificant detail of the landscape. I sipped coffee. Too sweet, adhesive taste splashed his tongue and returned to here and now - to my body, to my fatigue.
He turned and rushed back to the water with a joyful cry, to his tribe, to that explosive, eternal present. Oh, I stayed to sit. Suddenly, as if a stranger to a stranger, what would happen if I had to go this coffee into the trash now, I would break my shoes and just put it to them? For a moment, that image turned out to be transparent and possible.
But I would become an obstacle for them. A foreign body. An adult who violated unwritten rules, a freak that destroys their ritual. Their joy was thirsty from within, unconditionally. Mine would be just an artificial, thoughtful imitation - an attempt to embrace myself where nothing is missing.
And then I perceived the whole mechanism of the moment with some difficult to explain the sixth sensation. I, the children, the heat and even the fountain - we all were integral to its parts, each performing its fundamental function. Their pure laughter, joyful screams and my mature admiration had constant contact points, so the whole system acted flawlessly.
Standing there, I the only one I heard the music emanating from the inside. The chaotic symphony of their joy, water decay and barefoot legs. They are the performers, immersed in their work. Oh, I'm a listener. One who turns noise into beauty and for a moment in meaning.
Their freedom to be and my duty to see are the two wings of the same moments!