In 2004, I put my life on hold. Unprepared, fresh out of green, about to plunge into teaching, I had several months to roam and discover. (Every time I think of roaming, I think of the time I was in Mongolia, in 2002, with H., sitting outside a ger, reading Nozick’s Invariances, watching the sun deepen from blue to black, and the 3,000 stars visible to the human eye coming out to play, a horizon that went full circle, for an endless, endless night.) I met S., A. found me, I bought a car, I started lessons at the AF, I watched plays, I went to Iran, I half-read, half-drowned. I can barely remember them all, but I can recognise myself.
Between then and now, so much, so very much has happened. You can read it, partly, in asymmetry, now crippled because I have neither the heart nor patience to reassemble the pictures, photographs, the memories. Now, A. is gone, and it is too soon for me to speak, explain, or to make real, incontrovertible declarations that I can only whisper to myself now.
Terrifyingly, I am almost happy.
I sift through all the books that I put on hold in 2004; I look at the stacks that have accumulated in the time since, all the magic that has passed me by, I look at the busy, empty months between then and now, and I ask myself, how did I survive, how did I fall in love and not know it? In the last month, an empty, hollowed chest, and a spinning, spinning head, and too much, and too little. In the last week, finally.
I have systematically destroyed and quelled every spark, every beginning, but. Wrecked, empty, less than half the man I used to be, my tongue paralyzed, my mind limp and bedraggled.
This very morning, I pick up where I left off; I start my motorcycle lessons again, instead of being at church, where I’ve been for the last 2 years. In the blasphemous, electric lyrics of Zero: “Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness and God is empty, just like me.” Forward, I must, and then.
Somewhere in between, I’ll find you.