want you to see

Last night marked a milestone in a young girl's life.

It was not a milestone in the same way that a first day at school, a first kiss, the arrival or departure of a loved one, a publicly celebrated achievement, et cetera, might be looked back upon as milestones. The precise contours of the night are - as are those of many a fun time before and since - at risk of becoming misplaced in the girl's ever expanding, not infrequently overwhelmed, memory palace (to borrow a catchphrase of Hannibal Lecter's). Indeed one could get away with regarding the night as unexceptional - albeit only in the sense that Hilary Swank winning her next Academy Award, or Bill Gates making/losing his next gazillion dollars before breakfast, could be casually dismissed by some as unexceptional.

Thus it must be against all odds, for any length-of-time to rise above all the other no less entertaining and no more forgettable lengths-of-time, for it to thereby shun the fate of oblivion. What stacked the odds in last night's favour, was its marking the beginning of a special something. Something rich yet intangible, a lifelong love affair perhaps - as bad blurb writers say.

Last night, between the hours of twenty thirty and twenty-two hundred in particular, the girl in question was
- aged eight years and four months;
--- wearing a white tee with three little blue flowers front centre,
--- a knee-length denim skirt her mother had helped her pick out the weekend before,
--- no shoes;
----- standing (far from still) some fifty metres inland of the Indian Ocean,
----- between zero and sixty centremetres, dictated by rhythm, next to her nearest fellow human being;
----- not more than ten metres in front of a polytechnic stage flanked by speakers twice her height.

The girl was having her very first, live and up-close with a popstar, experience.

Should her mind ever be directed to revisiting this experience, it will not inform her of the popstar's mainstream status and his consequential lack of credibility in the eyes of the artsy / intellectual / left. It will not reliably retrieve the composition of the audience, the condition of the venue, or the identities of the people who had brought her along. She may well recall something of her big sister's friend/suspected bf's extreme enjoyment of every movement and sound made by the man on stage, but will not dwell long upon why.

What she will remember, however, will do her good. Lights that put highlighter outlines around everyone on stage. A handsome man singing and eliciting inexplicable screams to which, before long, she was contributing. A sea of waving hands, some holding cameras. Clear-plastic rainbow-coloured beach balls dancing above and across the crowd. The way her feet felt against the moist lawn, her hair in the air, her and her sister's arms entwined, as they each marvelled at, and succumbed to, the power of (even so-so) music. ...

And if she doesn't remember all, or most, of this, I hope she will at least retain that feeling - like eating icecream, for the first time, with jelly and cheesecake.