Right now, someone is playing “Per Amore” by Andrea Bocelli very loudly in their backyard. It’s floating into my room as I write here at my desk, and there is also a dog who won’t stop barking, and I just heard someone laughing hysterically in the next yard, and in the distance, someone is impatiently pressing against a car horn, and upstairs I hear my neighbors lumbering around, and while I woke up this morning feeling rather low in spirits I’m also feeling very grateful at this moment for the subtle textures of life, the mundane moments that feel somehow cinematic.
You know how the kids sometimes say, “Last night was a movie” or “My life is a movie,” that kind of thing? I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I can speculate that it has something to do with excitement, novelty, glamour, and graphic exhilaration. In other words, things are happening that are out of the ordinary, that seem like something straight out of fiction.
But I feel the delicate structure, the grand narrative, and the glory of life most keenly in those quiet, uneventful moments that break up the big stuff. I’m talking about the transitional stages between the excitement, where nothing’s going on and no one’s around. The dish-cleaning and the nail-clipping and the coffee-making. Taking out the trash, going down Wikipedia rabbit holes at 3 am because you can’t sleep, watching reality television, rolling your eyes at a ridiculous tweet, sending memes to your crush, complimenting a stranger, deciding what to eat for dinner.