"Excuse me, where are you going?"
She tossed her head backwards, her smile acknowledging the fact that she had never answered that question in her entire life. Her eyes, however, invited me forward with an impish glint that betrayed her eagerness to see what lies on the other side of the street.
The scarlet wings of her dress flew gracefully above the gritty pavement beneath her as she moved across the street with a succession of graceful hops. The whole movement of time and traffic seemed to stop around her as if the sun wanted to remain hovering just above the horizon so it could continue to shower her in its golden red glow for a few moments longer.
The lady did a small spin in the middle of the road, fearless in the face of the frozen traffic. The outer rims of her dress spun and wobbled on the axis of her enthusiastic burst of energy. For some reason, to this day I still don't know what powers of nature compelled me to do so, I pulled my camera up to my eye and placed the lady in red in the center of the viewfinder. Through the limited perspective of the lens, she really was the center of the world. The center of my world. My dazzling lady in red who stopped all of time for me.
I paused and dropped my eyes to take a look at the picture I had just taken. The photograph had perfectly ensnared the moment. The image of the lady in red seemed to almost move in front of my eyes, as if even the ghost of her essence could not be held in a simple photographic facsimile.
When my eyes returned to the street, the lady was gone. I knew, somehow I always knew, that she would disappear one day back into the sunbeam that she had appeared from. As the sun finally decided to slip back into the cover of the horizon, the traffic of the city roared back to life and I was left staring at the camera in my hands. It was left embroidered with the frozen moment of beauty and freedom, a final aprting gift from my immaculate lady in red.
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