As
he lay on his bed, cracking his old indie tunes on studio quality
speakers (he did have good taste and thought of himself as a
mini-audiophile) he thought about the last couple of years. Lately,
he thought of them as his lost years. Years which should have swerved
somewhere else, he thought. There are moments in one's life which are
definitions of the time. Decisions which change the courses of multiple
lives usually. And he was isolating some of the important ones. A
couple of them, he regarded as tragedies at first thought. He toned his
opinion down after a bit more thought. Those were not tragedies but
rather grave oversights, he revised.

He believed he had made
some mistakes in these grave isolated moments  (the observation of
which were probably true.) Thankfully for him, he had matured and
regarded them as events in life much like the flowing of water
paradoxically indistinguishable from one another  rather than
regretting over them at any great length. His seasoned conscious had
shown him that such thoughts, worries and grievances were pointless. An
exercise in mental gymnastics and no more.

His first thought was
of a night at a grand party in a mansion. He had been invited by a
friend and he agreed quite reluctantly to go. He went only to appease
his friend and nothing else. His intent was simply to be there. As a
reader of countless stories, you should know that the unexpected
happens to the protagonist at this precise moment when the stars
aligned. This was one of those moments. The quintessential moment of
truth for our dear "hero" or the knight in shining armor for the
maidens involved in this case.

He gazed into the eyes of a
beautiful lass. Her figure beneath that unremarkable dress was still
breath-taking. From a bored disposition which had set upon him and some
mental cursing upon his beloved friend for dragging him unto this party
in the previous moments, partially without his true approval, he
acquired a more pleasant demeanor upon the sight of this maiden. Her
smile was not special. Her face was pretty but not beautiful. But
something caught his eyes. Perhaps it was the way she smiled. He saw
some desperation but he expected that of almost any single person. He
was not a fool and he ignored that intelligently. He saw something
more. He saw her spontaneity; like a poet writing beautiful prose
without much thought, she stood there beautifully, without much
thought. Her lack of self-consciousness that night was appalling and he
thought that was a waste. Something he will have to sculpt, he made a
mental note to be forgotten in due time. He saw their future that
night, albeit with some vagueness.