Sometimes we miss

Sometimes we miss.  So I missed the moon, but still I could see it in my periphery throughout the conversation I was having with the woman, a conversation that lasted the whole of the night, from moonrise to sun-up.  One thing led to another, and in the end I missed what was to be the most magnificent supermoon ever witnessed by human eyes.  Luckily, I thought as I reached the perch from which I could take in its pale yellow splendor soaking the fields with light like a stage just before the play begins, or just before it ends, I was able to catch something of it from the corner of my eye.  Sometimes we miss what would be our highest blessing due to something trivial, sometimes due to something profound.  Sometimes, we are fortunate, or unfortunate enough–it depends, really, more on what you feel you can bear missing than on what you think you deserve to see, to experience, to feel, to be witness to–to, more than know what we have missed, say because we are told the following day by someone who was properly positioned to see the beautiful thing in full, to actually taste it, to realize and be present for our missing something, from the start, when we see the thing rising in the indigo sky and we should be there, we should give up on being right for a moment and just take a good long stare at what cannot be seen again, to the end, when we would do anything, no matter how many times we have asked the cup to be passed and refused the opportunity, to become a god, put our hand on the face of the earth like the corner of a dial, and turn it so that again the moon is where it should be, time marches back, the night will not end for hours more now, even if our tampering with things in such a way will set the whole world awry.  We will gladly reconfigure everything as long as such molestation contributes to the fulfillment of our quietly-borne duty, our unannounced, undemanded, demanding duty to bear witness to the world, or at least certain elements of the world, like the moon and its vicarious light.  I would have gladly taken away that hours-long conversation with a dying woman–we are all dying, after all, but not all of us see what we are meant to see–in order to have caught anything more than a glimpse of a faint and quick sliver of that moon, in order to have caught, but for an instant like being stunned, that full moon that night, the quiet, serene, undelayed glory of it.