Hejira
Again, after a long time, I am tempted by the thought of throwing myself into an utterly foreign environment. A perfect sphere or a closed tunnel. Imagine a place where the same set of concepts like human shapes, restaurant signs, tree-lined sidewalks is shared, only invented differently; there are people who haven’t touched the shape of your memory. Something about foreignness is like water. The absolute, even texture, stirred only by the flagging arms or the effort to move, to breathe. And to speak a sound that cannot be comprehended. It’s not as strong as desire but more like a white blinding flash when you think of it. That means you can’t predict it, and you don’t even know what will be fulfilled. The light fades, slowly. You are starting to see things assembled in a particular way
Like a kaleidoscope and you have become nothing but an eye. That’s the desired state. The pear tree on a patch of yellow lawn. The blue chalk on a white wall. The old lady in polka dots on a park bench. The water fills your ears, covering them with calm and apocalypse. The drowning void that lets you stay before it starts to become unbearable. On your way to a coffee shop you try to make eye contact with people on the street, you want to undertake some kind of risk just to be able to confirm that you have something to offer, that you also are a small piece of foreignness, like a round handheld mirror. You enter places, getting natural at smiling anxiously and uttering foreign phrases–– these are the risks you are willingly to undertake, to find out that people are still kinder than you thought, that they still like you. Some moments are unbearable and you feel like an obelisk propped up in a field of cotton. But there is always something to garner–– the visions you collect, people that devotedly live their life. People to whom these belong: A basket of bread and fresh peaches in a market lane. Two hands walking intertwined. A set of eyes lost in a silhouette. And you are brave enough to assume that you can also be a sample, a specimen of life. That you are qualified. The struggle of breathing seems fine because you were already struggling to breathe anyway. But after all of this, what I want is just to see a sunset I’ve never seen, that taints the unfamiliar horizon with the color of a dream undreamed. Because missing you feels like I’m holding a raw egg in my palm all the time, only the egg has disappeared, and my fingers are scared and pale in the position of holding. I would like to straighten them up now, one by one, and then, slowly, wave goodbye.
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