I just had this amazing experience, and I wanted to share it with you.

Except pictures really can’t capture this experience because they only capture one window of what happened. Like the Joplin tornado, it takes more than a flattened image to show the whole of this scene. Especially if it’s an Instagrammed photo. I put the picture of the white door up there ^ just to show how unlikely it is for me to paint this moment in the appropriate colors with an image.

So I scrapped that idea.

Also, video doesn’t really suffice since I don’t have the $15,000 equipment I’d need to really… you know… capture this particular experience, butterfly and net. And Vine won’t work because six seconds isn’t enough, especially if it’s a stop-motion story because then we’re really just back to still shots. Things happened in between the stills, you know…

I would write a novel about the thing, but that’d take three months for a rough draft, three more for a revision, three for a peer review, three to submit. After all of that, we’re talking at very least next year before you can hear about it and even then it’s all through changed names and places and… well… I think the moment would be marred beyond all recognition. And you’d have forgotten that I even mentioned it a year from now…

Comics would be cool, but I’d be too tempted to make it funny when it was serious like the funny papers or epic when it was intimate like Marvel.

I thought about Tweeting, but 140 characters doesn’t do it justice.

420 characters might, but then it’s a poem. I’d love to write a poem about it, but it’d be the kind of poem I’d want to publish and there’s no money in poetry… not that I’m doing it for money… it just wouldn’t be worth the submission process. So poetry’s out.

I’m not a very good dancer so interpretive dance, especially one that would be broadcasted on YouTube, would ruin the memory. Especially for me.

Same goes for painting, sculpting, pottery, and nearly anything else I could sell you on Esty that sorta-kinda shows what it felt like to be there doing what I did and feeling what I felt and hearing what I heard.

Then there’s Pinterest, but let’s be honest — could an infographic of this potentially numinous experience translate into mutual communal experience of something amazing and then re-translate to ten thousand others through five-thousand repins? Or even transposed? Nah, Pinterest is out. Especially since I’m not even sure what I just said.

Redditors would make fun of me.

StumbleUpon wouldn’t ever find it and if they found it, they wouldn’t know what they found.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to realize that I experienced what I experienced. I didn’t have a camera, film, an easel or a typewriter. I didn’t have any apps, any WiFi, any way to microblog the event. I couldn’t share, upload, download, or buffer this moment for you to pseudo-experience this right with me, the moment I experienced it.

And that’s okay.

Because sometimes I need to do what I’m doing, and you need to do what you’re doing, and we both need to be okay with that so we can vicariously live through ourselves rather than through others. That way, out of our own depth, we can both bring our uniqueness to the table and find oneness in spite of our diversity. If we both be ourselves and find contentment in letting that… y’know… be, then most of our modern pressures to share and reshare and relive will be rendered null and void.

Because every moment suddenly becomes a Kodak moment, thus rendering Kodak (or Facebook tags) irrelevant.

Especially if this whole time I’ve been grasping at how to describe to you how much I enjoyed getting seriously sunburnt on a slow pontoon boat for eight hours straight. What a terrible sunburn on a lazy Saturday did for my contentment, my friendships, my marriage. My career.

My soul.

See?

Doesn’t even sound interesting to me when I write it down. I told you there weren’t words or images for what happened. Especially not on the internet.

And most of the time, that’s really okay.