I’m
traveling through time. Over one body of water, from one piece of land to
another. I’m high up, in the air, where there is no time, where there is no
ground, and I’m thinking about how I know not what’s next, except for the
obvious, the concrete, the empirical.
I
consider NYC my home and yet it’s been years since I physically inhabited it.
Since I walked its streets daily, hourly.
I’m
going to NYC for practical reasons. It’s closer to Europe, to London, where
I’ve lived for the past year, albeit tenuous, precarious.
When
you travel you lose yourself. You lose mirrors and memories and history. You
step into another history, another language, another neighborhood. You’re just
around the corner and no one can find you. You can’t find yourself. You have
this whole life behind you, but you left it at the airport gate.
While
it’s impossible to become someone you’re not, it is possible to re-invent.
Perhaps you were stuck where you lived before you traveled, and after doing,
what you had always done, you wanted to do something new, and getting the
upstart to kick a transformation into gear felt like molasses stuck to an
elephant walking through swampy mud.
Traveling
sheds. The airplane takes off and your feet can’t touch the ground. You are a
child in a big seat. You swing your legs, feel lighter, float in the seawater. The sky looks so different from here.
It
feels possible, whatever the it is you want to get to. Even
if you’re not sure what it is, you know you need to make a big change.
Or maybe the move came to you and you just followed the breadcrumbs.
Risk.
Adventure.
Spontaneity.
Making it up as you go along.
You
are one or the other: Roadrunner, Coyote. And whether you stop just short of
the canyon, fall over it’s edge, or make it to the other side because you’re moving
cartoon fast, it’s a journey you must make.
Got
dusty? flattened yourself in a ravine?
No
matter.
This
is what transformation is about. It’s about the sun being so high in the sky,
shadows appear to disappear. You are your shadow. Your compass is broken.
The
people you love are left behind. They write and you write, they call and you
call, they plead for you to come back, but you stay.
Some
chapters are better saved before published, indexed before edited. Some
chapters are better written by hand.
People
ask you, when you go to New York, 'Are you moving there?'
You make a joke. {You
think it’s really funny.} You say you don’t know if you’re moving to New York.
You say you’ve asked g-d, but he hasn’t replied. You say that if anyone who has a
direct line to g-d, can you please let me know, because as far as you know, {the only thing you know} is you
are moving, Officially,
To
Limbo.
O.
And there are a few complicated pieces. Secret Lovers. Old loves. Loveletters.
A flat you secretly rent in a place you’re not supposed to be living. A {restaurant} kitchen you’re not supposed to know as
well as you do.
Because
you’re going back to the place you’re from, you plan on looking for work.
Postman’s Holiday. You can’t wait to work there again. It’s been over 10 years.
You never meant to be away this long. In fact while you were living on the
completely other coast, in the most rural setting you had ever come across, you
lost your desire to live in a major city. You decided to make Northern
California your permanent home, and even called it that.
Until
you moved to London exactly one year ago. And everything changed.
I’m
traveling through time. Time Travel.
The question is: am I going from my future to my past;
my future to my future; my recent past to my stopover, and then back to my past;
my past to my past; or my question mark to my question mark?
I
don’t have any answers.
Just
questions.
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