When Mine Begin

“There will be days to stick your toes in the sand. There will be days for teary good-byes in the middle of a crowded airport terminal. There will be days for leaving, but just as many for coming. There will be days, even years, for loving and mistake making. There will be days for discovering, days for searching, and days for finding. There will be days for crawling under the covers of your bed and disappearing for a while, but there will also be days for pulling yourself up out of rock-bottom and trying again. For every day that you find yourself letting go, there will be another day full of hanging on. There will be days you want to erase; days you hate more than the boy who made you hate it. There will be days for missing home, days for wondering where home is, days for remembering all the homes you’ve created. There will be days etched with words and painted with music beneath a starry sky. There will be days full of saltwater hair and sun freckles, nights full of driving around with the windows down and wind that blows your hair behind you as houses that you’ve never been inside whiz past. There will be days for buying a shirt that cost too much money and you’ll only wear once. There will be days for your hair to never lay quite the way you want it to. There will be days for running away and there will be days for admitting you were wrong. A lifetime of days, and I’m just wondering when mine begin.”

-Unknown-

A Matter of Balance

Time is not even. Space is not empty.
There are lumps and gaps. Stretches and blinks.
It’s like a wrinkle in time-
where a straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points.
“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
To reconcile memory with truth or to reconstruct histories?
Maybe forget both those options, let’s build something entirely new.

Hope- the eighth deadly sin.
Pandora’s box wants to be opened, throw caution to the wind.
The very same wind that was present as you looked up at the stars,
accelerating past those who have ceased to live.
[Because that's when you feel the most alive.]

Proximity.
It’s all a matter of balance, like all the rest of life.
Sometimes it’s pressed so close.
Stomach on thighs, chest on knees, face on shins.
There are no gaps.
Sometimes it’s oceans.
Heart closed off, head focused anywhere else, feet walking away.
Complete silence, but not rest.

No matter.
“You can’t choose what stays and what fades away.“

You’re Still Falling

“You know what Charlie told me?” he says, staring at the marks in the snow.
“What?”
“If you fire a gun, the bullet falls as fast as if you’d dropped it.”
This sounds like something I learned in physics.
“You can never outrun gravity,” Paul says. “No matter how fast you go, you’re still falling like a rock. It makes you wonder if horizontal motion is an illusion. If we move just to convince ourselves we’re not falling.”
“Where are you going with this?”
…
“It’s like your question,” he says, walking backward in front of me as we head toward the room. “If you could be anywhere, where would you be?” He opens his palms, and the truth seems to land in his hands. “Answer: it doesn’t matter, because wherever you go, you’re still falling.”

The Rule of Four
-Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason-

Repatriation Therapy: Day 103

Some Truths – some hard, others gentle reminders and observations.

1. Here is where you have landed. Here is where you shall stay. [for now.]
2. They made their choice. You were not it. They did not want you. [and you made choices of your own, too.]
3. Things are coming that you cannot evade. You will be in America when they happen.
4. Your dog dying is one of the above things.
5. Arms-lengthing maintains doubt.
6. It is crucial to learn to separate the children from the sins of their fathers.
7. Just because you can’t find it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
8. It’s not that you don’t have friends. It’s just that most of them live far away.
9. If nothing is changing, do something different.
10. Beware of men in capes. Despite what you’ve been told, men in masks are much more trustworthy.
11. Hindsight is not 20/20.
12. You need to learn to fight.

She Reads the News

I am not very good at following the news. I wish I was. I greatly admire those who can follow it, form opinions, and assess situations related to all that goes on in the world. I do try, however, I admit that often times I just want to know what Kate Middleton wore today.

However, this week there have been two things that have given me great pause.

1. Amanda Knox was acquitted of murdering her roommate four years ago in Perugia, Italy. I am not convinced of her innocence (or really of her guilt and my heart aches for the family of Meredith Kercher who are left without answers or closure) but what bothered me at the time and thus what gives me reason for such retrospective contemplation was my geographic proximity to Perugia and the potential similarities between my situation and hers. I was a nineteen year old American ex-patriot living in Switzerland. We all were. I remember talking about it and wondering what it would be like to be at the mercy of the Italian justice system. I’d only been there a few months, but I’d instantly realized that anything that contained the words “Italian” and “system” were something to be feared. There was also that sinking feeling that our magic blue passports couldn’t save us. If she was innocent and merely caught in terribly unfortunate circumstances, America did nothing to help her. Looking back, I see how even in those first few weeks and months my thoughts on being American and an expat were already beginning to morph and I’m still trying to work out the specifics.

2. Steve Jobs died. I’ve never felt so sad about the death of a public figure before. As a student of the human condition and as a student of the visual, his contributions have completely changed how we view the world and process information. My undergraduate thesis (a far superior work to my graduate dissertation) discussed the relationship between words and pictures and how the world is becoming far more navigable throughout cultures as a result of universal pictorial icons.  He revived the tableau through touch and I doubt that there is anyone in the modern world who has not been molded by the way he showed us to see things. I know that there have been many things written praising his innovation, but I suppose, like the rest of the world, I am sad about the loss of a brilliant mind.

Perhaps these thoughts and feelings are just a result of too much pent up emotional energy and nothing on which to spend it. Or just part of repatriation therapy. Maybe one of the phases of repatriation oscillating back and forth between intense apathy and intensely caring about everything. Either way, those are the thoughts of this week.