A Meteor's Moment

A meteor burns a trail into the pre-dawn sky. Had it entered the atmosphere even twenty minutes later, the ambient light from the sun would have drowned out the only chance the meteor had to be noticed.
At the same moment, by nothing but pure coincidence, a young man walks out of his front door to let his dog out to pee. With his eyes still adjusted to the darkness of a winter’s night, the burning of the meteor holds an exigent contrast. The young man, who is chock full of wishes, is so surprised by the meteor’s presence he forgets to wish at all.

In the second after the meteor has burned away in entirety, leaving not even a trail of smoke in the sky, the young man closes his eyes tightly and takes the dim afterimage left on his eyelids as enough proof that the meteor had been there at all. He smiles at the happenstance of this moment, taking it as a good omen for what the rest of his day may hold. He never thinks about the wish that he failed to make.

It would be outrageous to presume that the man could somehow be aware that out of everyone in his town, he had been the only one to snatch a glimpse of that particular meteor burning at that particular moment in that particular part of the sky. If he had known, perhaps he would have found that moment a little more remarkable; perhaps he would have tried a little harder to remember the color the meteor burned or committed the feeling of the night air to some corner of his mind, but to him it was simply the luck of a well-timed moment. A moment he was certainly grateful to have experienced, but how could he know that it was a moment which belonged to him alone.

Even more impossible for the man to know, was how grateful the meteor was that this moment belonged to anyone at all. Even if the moment went unshared, even if that young man failed to tell a single other soul of that split-second of uniquity before it was lost to the forgetfulness of change. The meteor had spent it’s entire solitary existence traveling the cosmos. Perhaps it knew that one day a certain gravitational pull would drag it towards its beautiful demise . . . perhaps not. Once its fate was written, a moment deemed unremarkable by the annals of time, it knew.

How lucky one should be to share that final moment with another.