Sunday, October 11, 2009

Love as Childhood

I remember Love as I remember childhood: both vivid and vague, distant and ever present. I remember love as a goal to reach…no, rather a goal to be reached, but not reached for. Love as something to happen in spite of, not because of. Not like other goals was Love; not a thing grasped at and fought for, but a slowly occurring phenomenon, like high tide, upon us almost before we know it.

I remember Love as a magical thing; almost embarrassing to even admit now, but once true. I think of Love as childhood. I remember the call of Love most vividly. Not its glaring reality, but its fringes, its edges, which pulled at the subconscious; a feeling almost exactly like agony, but oh, so sweet. I remember that Love from long ago, or not so long ago, as years are reckoned, but eons in the heart.

I remember it in stages, like acts in a play, and I remember its color and flavor and all its hideous machinations and its way of sliding along the edge of reality like a peripheral sunset, all encompassing, and unreachable.

And then it was upon me, in memory. It was a full feeling, like overstuffing, like ripening. It was a sickness in the way it tangled mind and body into a mess of emotions and used me as a plaything, then, tossing me to and fro. And I, chasing after it, ever, even while in its grip, like some ethereal opium addict… and just as addicted.

I don’t remember where I lost it, by the way: that feeling…no not the feeling, but the ability to feel it, rather. The anticipation of Love and the pursuit, oh yes, those things are as strong as ever, but in my steadily advancing age, young as it is, I seem unable to reach that cathartic moment of actualization, that moment of bursting; that end of all things, and eternal vanishing in one moment- Love. Are loss and regret its only remaining catalysts?
Is it even truly a memory?

It is accompanied, too, perhaps gladly, perhaps not, by the loss of the other side of the thing, the shadowed face, that of love lost (which is to say: grief) and that of mourning. There are strings attached to Love you see, and when those strings are severed, regardless of time or distance, there is a great unraveling in the soul. There are strings that exist in me still, some pulled taught in anticipation, strings that will strain and pop inevitably when those whose Love I still hold die. Held by family and friends, mostly, these strings are, arguably, the most important. Those are constants –grounding cables- and they hold me to the mortal coil, if you will. They hold us all.

But new strings of Love, un-platonic and uncontrived, strings born on halted breath and grown on heightened pulses, strings that strengthen rather than deteriorate with time: I wonder now if ever they truly existed. I am impatient; I know this about myself, and have known it. But the impatience I feel over this dilemma is not akin to boredom; it is the dawning fear that perhaps those strings have all been burned away, that perhaps the very ability to form Love has been lost. Or worse, perhaps that it never existed as such, but only took on a stunted half-life in the eyes of a child, like moon-cast shadows…like so many imaginary things.

This is no new crisis; in fact, in the grand scheme of things, it is utterly banal, done and redone, beaten into dog food.

But it is new to me. And it is terrifying. And not magnificent, like horror, but terrifying in a slow, plodding, rolling way, much like the high tide, upon us almost before we know it. And perhaps that is why this terror tastes so familiar. What is the word for the fear of fear?

And so, without that, or the hope of that, or the twinkle of that possibility on my horizon -ever waxing, ever waning- what now will I await?

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Lost

We said our goodbyes in a crowded airport. We parted ways steadily, not looking back, not crying; we knew that soon we would once again be together. We were both old enough to mask our distress, to hide our turmoil, and we said our silent goodbyes with dry eyes and heavy hearts.

I made my way to the airplane, stoic and brave. I resisted my Orphean impulse to look back.

My luggage was carted off with rough hands. Jostled and manhandled; I do not like to think of her journey: conveyed on black belts, through the very heart of the turbulent airport, to the hold of the small plane which carried us from New York to Washington DC. But she is no amateur, she has done this before; She can handle herself.

I tell myself.

I felt some small measure of comfort, there above the clouds, that beneath me, in the belly of this miraculous engine, she sat, biding her time. Our reunion was assured, and so I waited patiently. Below, I imagine that she, too, held her peace, secure in the knowledge that our journey, though long, would be taken together.

Perhaps this is only fantasy, to ease my impotent guilt; perhaps in the hold below, in the darkness and the cold, she felt the impending crisis. Did she cry out to me, my faithful bag? Did she try to warn me, as I sat above, in sunlight, reassuring myself that all was well? I pray that it was not so.

At Dulles Airport, the layover was so quick that there was no time for worry on the mad rush to make my connection. In my haste, I spared barely a thought for my mistreated suitcase. And as I ran the one way, she was dragged another.

Pulled roughly from the plane and thrown unceremoniously into a curtained cart for transport, she must have known it then, looking around her at all of the other bags. I can only imagine her horror as, in the dimly filtered light, she made out their destination tags: Denver, CO, one and all.

Did a malignant breeze, then, drift by and lift that dreaded curtain? Did she look out towards the fading terminal to see me, breath uneven, legs pumping, running away from her? Did she think I purposely abandoned her? Oh god…did I?

The flight to Beijing was restless. I know now why. At the time I thought it was only the usual coach experience: the sleeping seatmate using your shoulder as a pillow as you yawn and shrug to “accidentally” dislodge them without offense; the noodle meal when you SPECIFICALLY asked for the sandwich; the 3 inch wide screen, giving you a choice of watching the impossibly slow progress of the aircraft, or endlessly streaming pre-teen musicals.
But it was none of those things, I now conclude. Somewhere, in my heart of hearts, in my very soul, I knew that something was missing.

In the terminal at Beijing, I clear customs and immigration expeditiously. I climb aboard the shuttle train that will take me to the baggage claim. 41, the number of the carrousel bearing my flight’s luggage, repeats over and over in my head like a mantra, as I try to still my worried heart.

As I stand and watch, bags are spewed out and retrieved all around me. I am a still life painting surrounded by a waterfall of activity, a solitary figure haunting carrousel 41, until at last there are no bags left.

Mechanically, I inform the lost and found of my predicament; I fill out the requisite forms like a zombie. The bottom has dropped out of the world.

I don’t remember the cab ride home, only the all encompassing absence in my heart, so cavernous that even the comforting weight of the carry-on bag in my lap could not fill it.

The next day is a blur, I drift in and out of consciousness like a fever patient, and all my dreams are of her.

I imagine I see her, sitting lonely on a carrousel in Denver as I fly through the air, oblivious. I imagine her outrage and shame as she is hoisted away by strangers, again, jamming her wheels in protest. Did she wish to wait for me there? Did she think that I would come for her? Was her faith in me that complete?

At midnight the following day, I am awoken by a knock at the door. I stumble from the couch, blind in the darkness, ramming toes and knees in my haste. I pull open the door and as my eyes adapt to the hallway light, she slowly comes into focus, my fidelitous companion, my faithful carrier, my poor lost luggage.

And still, she has a smile for me.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Word

I love words. I love the way they move, seamlessly streaming together, tying tributaries to rivers to oceans of immaculate sound, like a drumbeat in my head echoing the beat of a heart much bigger than my own.


Words sound so different in the real world than they do in my mind. I can sew them up as tightly as I like, bind them into shapes and hang them to dry in the noonday sun, yet still I return to find them bursting at their seams, shifting and churning and reaching their broad leaves to some new and unintended literary sun.


Words dance in my mind, constantly, like tireless nymphs in some forgotten garden. I wake to streaming words like puppets strings, and I am a marionette twisting to their designs. It may be that I create the words, but often it feels as if the words create me. They shout at me and whisper softly in my ears. They tell me that they love me and they laugh at my pain.


Am I too a word, spoken long ago, playing out my definition endlessly upon some earthly page? And where am I placed; in what sentence and paragraph do I make my home? Perhaps I am an exclamation, or a sigh. Perhaps I am the opening of a monologue.

But I do not know the speaker.


I look back at these words even as I type them, and at the shape they take: they are a sideways city, a mountainscape; they are a line-graph chart, an unorganized bookshelf, a forest, a rising challenge, and the notes in a song. Above all of these things, they seem to be a code. A code that if I only look at them long enough, if only I continue to watch the words in their endless ebb and flow, perhaps I could decipher.


If I keep writing, perhaps I’ll see the picture, the mural that these words create. Or perhaps not.


Maybe I am just a word, no sooner spoken than forgotten. And my words, likewise, the thoughts of a momentary thought, will be forgotten.


But for now, I am vibrant, alive, full of hidden meaning and intrigue.


And I will lay my thread in the tapestry.


And I will keep my secrets.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

dreams

Sometimes, it is in waking that I sleep.

Who has not felt it? I slough the dreamy fog of days and wake to worlds alive and bright. In my dreams there is a mission, a purpose, a gasp of breath, a shout. There is horror also, and fear, and hate. There is a darkness older than man, and I am let to wallow in it as I claw my way back to the world.

And in my dreams, too, there is a burning sun warming an endless sea. And there is hope. And there is love. And the bounds of earthly concern are loosed, and I am set upon the sky a constellation. And I am wrought of sterner, stronger stuff than in my waking dream.

I have lived full lives in my dreams. I have gone from child to man to old man in the space of a night. I have left the memoirs and testaments of lifetimes in the impression on a pillow, and I have seen those lives fade in my mind’s eye as quickly as their epithet.

Do they watch me from some other place, my dream selves? Old and young alike. Do they dream of me even as I dream of them? Or are they simply wisps carried on the breeze of imagination? Perhaps they live in me somehow, even as they fall victim to morning’s light. Perhaps they gain life eternal, locked in some small part of my mind that remembers their existence if not their stories.

What tremendous responsibility I bear, then: the weight of those thousand pasts all resting on my shoulders. Have those of me who have gone to pasture in my mind bestowed upon me their will to be? If I am their only hope, if only through me can they reclaim their forgotten world, then I am a scion to that forgotten pantheon. The one last hope.

And have I hoped, in my dreams, not to fade? When I open my eyes on a new day, and, for a time, look on the world with a mind not my own, but that of a dream-self clinging to life, I truly think so.

And I like to think there is triumph when trailing tendrils of sleep wrap themselves about me, and I am borne again to the sea.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Sino-Malady

I was told by many before I got here that the first thing that you are required to do upon arriving in China is to get sick. Every traveler I’d met told me to prepare for the worst; they told me that the mixture of smog, questionable drinking water, un-FDA-ified food products, and general filth was a sort of reverse catholicon, ensuring a uniquely horrifying sickness experience for one and all.

And so I arrived in Beijing determined not to succumb to that dreaded infirmity. At first, despite the mixture of jet-lag and confusion lowering my overall immunity, I felt fairly confident that I would make it. I was steered clear of shady food by my friend and temporary host, Chet, I felt none of the telltale signs of sickness that I have come to know so well, and I avoided tap water like the plague (which, ironically, it possibly contained).

But 5000 years of history and viral circulation was not to be denied, and on my 6th day I awoke well before dawn with the first of many hints that I might be succumbing: uncontrollable diarrhea. From approximately 3:30AM to 6AM, I made at least 15 trips to the bathroom, the last few during which I’m almost certain I evacuated several of my back teeth. At 6AM, however, I received a much needed reprieve as the flow of traffic suddenly reversed, and I, in the space of a few seconds, reenacted the entire consumption of my dinner from the previous evening in reverse. It was quite a show.

Exhausted by the performance, I curled up for a quick nap on the bathroom floor. After a few moments, however, the rumblings in my stomach suggested that I take that nap sitting up, which I did. Eventually I dragged myself back to my makeshift bed in Chet’s study, and sank into a deep coma-like sleep.

Around 7:30AM I received another clue to the origins of my ordeal as Chet approached my door, swaying unsteadily like a zombie, to inquire if I, too, was feeling ill. I informed him that not only was I feeling ill, but that I had been sharing some disturbingly intimate moments with his guest bathroom for the past several hours.

“Throwing up helped,” I weakly suggested to him as he staggered back to his room. Later, what sounded like a bear attempting to sing Pavarotti began to audition in the master bathroom. The most I could muster was a muted chuckle as I pulled the blankets over my head and was consumed again by sleep.

Apparently, the food that we had ordered delivered the night before contained traces of some nameless evil that rendered the two of us useless for the remainder of the day. I spent most of the day sleeping, and the rest waking up in strange places and wondering how I got there. For variety, I interspersed this with uncontrollable shivering and more bathroom escapades.

Curled up in the bottom of the tub with shower water beating down on me, lying prone in a patch of sunlight on Chet’s living room floor, sprawled across a wooden bench with a Tonka truck as a pillow, and sitting at the kitchen counter with my moist forehead resting perfectly in the rim of a lukewarm mug of tea were only a few of the strange places I regained consciousness that day.

Chet and I crossed paths occasionally, in our wanderings around the apartment. We would grunt what neither of us was sure was a greeting or a dry heave at each other and continue on our meanderings. We were much like the walking dead…only aimless as if all the humans had already died. Suffice it to say that we both eventually recovered. The next day we were both more or less convalesced, leading us to believe that it must have been one of those 24 hour poisonings.

In my errant anticipation, I had thought that the sickness would come for me from the skies in the form of bad air quality lowering my immunity. But, as if sensing my wariness towards that angle of attack, the insidious affliction hid itself in an unsuspecting carton of sweet and sour chicken. I almost wish that I had been less vigilant and let nature (well, actually, the opposite of nature) run its course, for in my futile calculations I failed to factor in the risk that my friend and comrade Chet might become the collateral damage of my initiation illness.