With Bated Breath.

A reflection on the beauty and complexity of a single moment in time, and the struggle to fully capture and appreciate it.

She waits with bated breath...

"Nothing like the rising sun",

the voices in the silence had said.

"Easy for you to say",

She muttered,

With lungs screaming from the altitude,

With legs tired from the hike,

With eyes strained from her eagled focus,

With fingers that twirled from the angst of expectation.

The guilt of her past,

The anxiousness for her future,

Almost miraged over the Present;

The promised gift of today.

Her mind wandered,

From wanting to be beyond,

Beyond it all.

So, today, she said,

"I'll choose differently,

I'll hold this bated breath,

If only for a little longer."

Then, it dawned on her...

She felt the onset, before she saw it,

A weighted blanket of comfort,

That lifted her to weightlessness.

The moment,

An instant,

Fleeting, but eternal.

Some moment to remember,

Some moment to forget.

Reminiscent of a dance,

from that one Hotel in the West.

It was a portrait of perfection,

A visage beyond the reaches of wildest imagination,

And all she had to do was draw it in.

All the moments leading up to the instant,

All the moments that followed,

Felt justified and in place.

"Catharsis, is it thou?

Had I forgiven myself?

Has the world taken on more color?

Or did my problems just pale?"

She broke out of her selfish trance-

With the increasing intensity of the sun's brilliance,

And before she realized,

The perspective faded in brightness...

She tried to grab it,

Hold on,

But it slipped away...

Swift as that first moment of dawn.

She marveled at how something so instantaneous,

Could be so profound.

"Oh, to capture the moment in it's all its glory..."

But, She'd lost it all before the right words came to tell the story.

So, She prayed for going back to that moment,

The moment that helped her see more,

"More to die for,

More to live for,

More."

In a penance to earn another moment beyond words,

She offered her breath to the sunrise,

In exchange for breathing life into her instead.

And so, she waits with bated breath.