Sirens

The way it goes in moments like these is that infinite curiosity and possibility and the shimmer of chance and it's suspicious scent of fate, in conjunction with the chatter of new souls whose eyes foretell all of the aforementioned, together comprise a score for the seductive, romantic, recklessly intoxicating pursuit of that which is so often hard to grasp: the New. Using little more than half a moon and the cool, salty night breeze that you can still taste if you close your eyes and try hard enough, under door frames built by the hands of a long-forgotten generation, moving with the best of strangers and friends who knew you long before you had nights like these.

Gasps around long bouts of tastefully awful pool magically occur in the imagined living room of the King of Water Street, the legendary emperor whose shadow remains, all of these years and nights and children and bittersweet memories later, largely responsible for tonight's stage. Uma Thurman serves your brew, stoic with perfected indifference yet romantic with age and those exquisite, perfectly arranged possibilities. Twenty-five feet "away" is where you really take off, though, cornered between the King's study and the now-dimming lights of tantalizing sail boats and the adventures that surely occur with regularity (but not too much regularity, for what could possibly be worse than the routinization of a once-loved adventure) aboard their pristinely salty decks. Lost, however briefly, in the smoke and shadows of shared understanding, your night begins to reveal, with increasing speed and momentum, the significance of this moment spent in the emperor's living room, under the phantom spell of events that shatter all plans and preconceived notions of how you're gonna get your Fill. Later you'll move much too quickly back across the water, drifting away from the King's castle and its smoky corners and table light cribbage and the supernatural joy of seeing another through that same foggy lens of dashing adolescence. And with a sad resignation you'll greet the heartbreaking acknowledgment that there is nothing more temporary, more devastatingly fleeting than moments like these.