:: Birthday Grace ::

We both watched the fly buzzed with verve against the window pane of the Italian restaurant R and I were in yesterday afternoon.

Its wings flitted urgently, humming with a consistent velocity. Such ugly energy, I thought. It's another useless testament of how the weak will always be defeated against the strong―matter against matter, and you realise, like a child's nameless rhyme, that hey-ho, nothing really matters.

But I looked up and met R's eyes and know instinctively that she also saw the fly, and that our thoughts might have spun in different directions but they circled around the same object, because we see the things many others simply wouldn't.

She smiled with the same secret acknowledgement, and I returned the smile, because that matters. Trite as it may sound: happy birthday, soulmate. Your existence is a graceful, timeless accident, and our friendship is the height of serendipity.