Timeless Beauty

“Here you are ma’am,” said the waiter, holding an elegant plate of smoked salmon in front of the elderly woman. The woman made no movement whatsoever to the voice and actions of the young man serving her. Had she fallen asleep, or yet, even worst, died at this very table? She seemed so very frail, making it so the man would not put it past change to act that way. But no, she was not dead, for her chest continued its slow rhythmic pattern of rising and falling. The gentleman stood in front and to the right of the table, waiting awkwardly for the woman to awaken from whatever sort of trance she had fallen deep into.

            The young man noticed something very unusual about the woman, however: her eyes looked very young. They seemed to reflect everything a woman of her age could have seen and felt, yet they seemed to absorb all new sights with a sense of infancy. Then the young man realized at what she was gazing. The woman was staring over beyond the balcony, and her eyes were reflecting the bright but fading sun hanging over the horizon. From where they were standing, on the terrace plateauing over the water, they could seemingly see forever. On the horizon where fire meets water, with the sunrays gleaming off the slight ripples in the glassy sea, there seemed to be a point of transcendence, where, if one looked, they were ensnared in a trance only brought on by beauty. The young man stood next to the table, with tray in hand, gazing with the same sparkle in his eyes as the woman. Finally the woman caught onto a ledge in the abyss of beauty she had so easily fallen and responded to the man. “Thank you, young man,” she said looking up to see him in the same position she was just moments ago. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? Such a rare sight, but what a beautiful sunset!”

            “Yes, very beautiful,” replied the waiter, snapping out of the trance. He set down the dish and walked away, pondering the woman’s words. Such a rare sight. Beautiful. The young man wondered how someone who had lived as many years as she could say such things. Surely she had seen hundreds, if not thousands of equally magnificent sunsets in all of the days she had experienced. Would this one stand out in memory above all the others? Would she value this sunset more than any others she had seen? The young man surely did not believe so. For how could one, after seeing so many things, be entranced by something so simple? Would not a sunset lose its worth after so many years? The waiter had no conclusion, for he had not experienced enough in his seemingly short life, when compared to the woman’s. But he did conclude that the woman was entranced, as he had been, by the sunset.

             He wondered now whether the trances were equivocal, or whether they were produced by something entirely different. For his trance was brought about by the magnificence of a sunset of magnitude of which he had never seen before. But was hers, he wondered, transpired from the recollection of other sunsets? Was the elderly woman remembering other moments in her life in which she had experienced the same emotions? Was hers brought on by something she had gone through in the past, rather than the experiencing of something new? For this he had no answer, but as he looked back at the woman before entering the busy kitchen once more, he saw that the fish had not been touched; she was again gazing into the star falling deep beneath the waves. She had been ensnared again; ensnared in the pitfall of beauty.