Frail Children of Dust
He sat in front of me in the pew. The cathedral, suffused with an ineffable golden light, smelling of old holiness, breathed deeply into its century’s old lungs, ready to grant a blessing to any who would sit quietly long enough to receive it.
A tourist in Uppsala, I had been giving my digital camera free rein, the lens snapping its greedy little maw, gulping every memory; a smorgasbord of images.
The old man in the pew took out his digital camera. From my vantage point behind him, I envied the larger screen as he raised it to capture the glow, the history, this moment in time to cherish when he reminisced about his trip-of-a-lifetime in Sweden.
But though the eye opened and the lens prepared to feast, something was wrong.
Human frailty.
The camera captures a moment in time, but the passage of time is less kind to mortals. I watched the image on the screen. The cathedral shuddered under the force of an earthquake, the picture blurred as the mighty gilded atmosphere refused to coalesce. Dust swirled, the altar almost toppled. He tried to steady his hand, but it was no use. Tremors from within could no more be controlled than the tectonic plates that hold this precarious world together as it spins through the void.
He lowered his camera, defeated. The tremors reached me, too, for I felt my heart crack.
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