"Moments" by Juan Star

In a heartbeat your whole world can change, we all know this but human nature makes us forget about it until once again those moments sneak up on us unaware. As I walked to the phone my head was spinning, wondering if I had some how caused this break up?
I called Anne and we talked about her 15 year relationship with Ron, while we were talking.. her call waiting beeped in and when she came back to me she said "that was Ron."
So for a moment there she had two men who loved her hanging on the line.
I never did ask her that evening if I had been the one that caused her to reconsider her life, part of me already knew the answer, I just needed to hear her say it.
As things turned out she never did tell me what effect our conversation had. If you ask me though, I am pretty sure deep inside my words had some effect.

I worked through the dead of winter Christmas and New Year's, when my shifts ended instead of rushing home for my week off, I threw my things in the back of my jeep and headed for the airport. In the middle of a rotten winter blizzard I boarded a flight to Vancouver Island and slept until the green grass of British Columbia was visible from my tiny window.
I rented a car and drove up and down the Island stopping at little bars and motels and enjoying the scenery, but this was all done with part of me absent ..lost in a different landscape, wandering through the possibilities that only the unrequited could know or appreciate.
The last time I could ever remember feeling this way was when I was 12, I had a crush on my best friend's sister Butch. Butch was 16 and lithe of figure with a shoulder length halo of dirty blonde hair. She would occasionally deign to hang out with us as we tramped through the summer fields in search of tadpoles and snakes, and wonder of wonder she hardly seemed like a girl at all.
One afternoon I had ridden my bike down the dusty highway to the farm, Allan was gone, but Butch was home and we sat on the porch together sipping iced tea..the heat shimmered off the water of the pond and the air was alive with the buzzing thrum of crickets and beetles. As we sat there surrounded by natures calls of summer, the barest hint of strawberry fragrance came wafting through the air. Butch was putting on lip gloss, without saying a word she stood up stepped down from the porch and kissed me lightly on the lips and told me "you have to go now I want to tan for a while and I don't want any tan lines."
In that heartbeat my world changed, I felt like a rider on merry go round, colors sparkling and twisting, too many sensations and thoughts crowded my mind all vying for attention at once. For the briefest fraction, the warm feeling of her lips and the scent of strawberry infused my whole being and for a moment time stopped. Like a bubble in a piece of amber that moment is trapped inside of me, held in impossible clarity, so that even today the smell of strawberry lip gloss is a time machine dragging me back in an instant to 1974.
With a flip of her hair, Butch slipped past me into the house, the sound of her sandals echoing on the stairs.
I was still sitting there when she came back down stairs in a tiny green cotton bikini... a gangly 12 year old boy perched on porch with a stunned look on his face.."See ya" she said. Moving in a daze I walked to my bike and the part of me capable of any action began to pedal.
I was a half a mile away before I realized what she had said about no tan lines, I was half a mile and world away before the the reality of that comment sunk in to my still reeling mind..She's going to take her top off!
This along with her casual kiss was entirely too much for my little heart to take, for the rest of the summer whenever Allan and I hung out, Butch became very aloof and distant, as only a sixteen year old girl can be.
The flame in my heart burned brighter than ever and I'm sure I made a fool of myself in a million ways, picking her flowers and leaving her notes.
Wandering around on the Island was like pedaling home that day, I was only partly in the present, caught in tumbling cascade of future possibilities. Now years later I wonder what would have happened, if I had turned around and looked.. watched her lying topless in the sun..
If it had happened a year later I probably would have, but as it is, this memory of moments, the awakening of emotion, has remained untouched.
Anne changed all of that and at 40 years old suddenly I was that 12 year old once again.