1 – Between
- 5 -
And then the ramp was pulled up and the loading doors of the truck were closed; closed, too, the door of the storage unit, now emptied of its cargo; and years of living lurched away behind that burp of diesel, as though I had never owned it, and it had never laid claim to me.
I assume these trinkets and kitchen kitsch and bedroom comforts will join us again, that side of the Atlantic, but who knows? There are no guarantees, and all shapes and sizes of pirate. Maybe we can begin again… again. I half desire it.
- 4 -
Desire: the fuel of In Between. Desire, the alchemical meeting of nostalgia and hope, a pastiche of pasts and the fragrance of a future that, squinting, you can almost (but not quite) make out through the mist. It’s a brew that concocts itself. Drunken, you wonder how the present, so full, became the present, so empty; a present so pregnant, so hungry to bear forth, so isometrically pendant, so uncompromising and exigent, yes, you must give to the last, the very last ounce of strength, that is the nature of birth, didn’t you know?
Didn’t you know when you started out?
- 3 -
The snow came today, as a surprise, though very little should come as a surprise in the era of digital soothsaying. I could have watched the storm proceed from southwest to northeast by rapid-fire radar. I could have listened to the whole message, when the town of Newburyport called to tell me to get the cars off the streets (it’s not my phone; I don’t snoop).
I could have been prepared… but was vague and inattentive to anything but my next task, so was delighted to see the flakes descend like cottoned silence on the streets. Why not delight? And if the shipment were not carted away, not today, what then? Three more months of storage, and a modern Catalonian gypsy camp: mattress on the floor, hotplate, the works. Convenience, friends, comes with chains that can bind your soul and bend your mind, and I don’t mind leaving that artificial world for a breath of fresh air.
The snow came down, as I helped the movers list and label and lug our boxes and family heirlooms into the truck. The snow came down and the light came down, and as the day ended, the work ended.
- 2 -
There are so many ways to fill empty space, that the Citizens of the Digital World can’t possibly believe in the void anymore. No void, no God.
Here’s this computer, here’s this phone, here’s YouTube and streamed film, and anything divine and everything profane, and all electric, ceaseless while there is coal to mine, or oil to drill, or (preferably) sunlight to convert. I am writing tomorrow’s news on a thread of sunlight: if you look closely, it looks like this –·-··-·-·–···-·-··.
I am filling the void by filling it (before it fills me). One might say, or one must say: the anguish of emptiness is the knowledge of the grave. It is an understanding you and I are born with but prefer – to be a functioning human being, yes I prefer – to indulge in selective amnesia.
I also prefer selective remembering, and In Between is a doorway that opens into light.
- 1 -
One is the number of days before I leave Newburyport, and the United States, again. I don’t leave for business (where I go to take, instead of receive), nor for tourism which is a form of rather expensive entertainment. I don’t leave as a traveler, for whom desire’s alchemy clears horizons and creates memories. I leave to be changed, knowing that geography and language, and challenge and love and, yes, loss are the angels of renewal, burn away those old clothes, fasten your emptied heart with white wings.
“Angels Party” by Hasan Almasi @ DeviantArt.com