“Diaphanous” is not a mood, not really, well, not at all.

Still, if he’d had to express how he felt at that moment, that’s the only word that came to mind.

Or “diphthong”, but that clearly was not a mood. He couldn’t even really spell it without the help of an intuitively clever spellchecker. It didn’t even have a synonym (that he could find). He didn’t believe in absolute statements so he had to leave open the possibility that unlikely as it seemed, somewhere in time and space (or time or space) diphthong at least had a doppelganger.

Diaphanous had a synonym, plenty in fact, and in fact, metaphorically, it could have been a mood. It wouldn’t even have to try all that hard. Not all that hard at all.

Next he wondered what the onomatopoeic inference of diaphanous might be. Then he wondered why he cared. Then it occurred to him that he knew what his mood of the moment, of the instant was.

He was bored! Bored silly. He was not really diaphanous at all, at least not as far as moods went. Then a thought occurred to him and he ran to check his image in a mirror.

Just in case.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently a strategic consultant employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.