The world made beautiful
While I am waiting at the traffic lights just past B&Q I notice two young boys walking along the pavement on the other side of the road, no more than 10 or 11 and bare-chested in the Indian Summer sunshine, their t-shirts folded so carefully and tucked inside the waistband of their shorts with such precision I’m sure they must have copied an older brother or a dad or perhaps an older boy at school … you know, the one popular with everyone for his style, his smile, how everything he does seems so cool.
And then the lights change but the boys stay with me as I drive home: their brightness, the way they almost bounced when they walked, laughing together, hands straying unconsciously to the folded cloth at their waist. And I struggle to name what I have encountered which feels like much more than youth and joy. But perhaps that’s simply what it was and the light magnified and distilled it all in that moment of stillness when I stepped out of myself and into the world made beautiful by people I have never met.
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