Connections, Missed and Otherwise

Today I learned about this particular artist, Sophie Blackall, and her project, turned into a book,  Missed Connections.  The illustrations are sweet, nostalgic picture-poems about almosts and if onlys.  They set you to thinking about the slender threads that link us to one another, fragile things really, the difference between touching and not, knowing and not, loving and not.  There's no telling really why sometimes we let the moment pass and others we must say something, do something.

The young man of this missed connection saw a woman he thought stunningly beautiful and was filled with desire to ask her out, but didn't.  There was enough juice in the attraction that after the moment was missed, for some time, maybe for a lifetime, he regretted it, but there wasn't enough to make him act.

They get me thinking, these captured moments of nearly and almost.  It wasn't that long I made a choice to reach out, to forget what if and say 'yes!"  I might just as easily not have.  I could have sat days, weeks, months down the line wondering what I missed, trying to make the connection I denied.  I might still be where I was, but for an action made and answered.  What makes the leap though from nearly to yes?  That still eludes me.  And why is one call manifested, the other just a dream?  It's hard for me to imagine that someone could look at a picture of me, read my words, and fall in love enough to brave years, distance and circumstance, and yet this is what happened.  Of course, I did just the same.  Actually it was just words and voice for me, and I moved mountains.  And maybe it's projections, and maybe it's chemistry, and maybe it's just magic of the most potent kind.  I don't know and I probably never will.  In the meantime, though, there is life and its myriad connections, missed and otherwise.