Words, words, words. Three, four films, and half a dozen other narrative events in the last week; moleskines, coffeeshopping, bookshopping with a vengeance, and 2 weeks to a final flourish. There is one black notebook for catharsis, one for revelation and faith, and a couple for tracing out the lines of our lives as we wander off into the sunset, and an expectant red one to fill with the ink of the new year.
2, 3 years at my current school and quite worn out; I have tried my hand at every opportunity presented, challenged myself to teach, mentor, learn, embrace, and I have emerged somewhat wiser, if almost in pieces. Friends and family I have neglected; and I was blind to the one soulmate I have now found. So it is with a great relief that I am able to write, now. For none of this is easy; it is hubris and confidence that allows me to plunge right in and tackle, organize, sort, engineer outcomes and seek closure. I leap, and am caught.
Through all my years, which I have oft recounted in lectures, class, in rooms too warm and in places too open, I have by choice and through circumstances found myself traipsing through places unfamiliar and foreign; I have found in my lonely sojourns with a few wonderful friends, now lost to time and fate, a part of myself that has shaped me. I have no confession to make, not in the manner of Rousseau, only thanks to give, for those that came into my life and stayed far longer than they dared, for those that came knocking and quietly left, and for those who I passed in the street and only knew fleetingly. To them all I owe my faith, my loves, my self.
I have only this much to offer, to the few that I now quietly sit beside. My mind, gently throbbing, aching, gathering itself for its new journey, my one and only heart, now revealed, pure, singular, vulnerable, true, and my steady hand, strengthened and weathered, bringing us to a place where we are no longer strangers but at rest in a place both familiar and new, far and near.
For there has been no greater day than this, that I might face the future sight unseen.
As I pack up to move home after being away again for almost 2 years; I have picked through the detritus of almost 8 years of a nomadic, itinerant life. London, where I lived and died, in the army, where I wandered as lonely as a cloud, and in school, where I gave everything up for the life I have today. It is time to organize the Library, time to burn letters, postcards, photographs, time to sort through years of narratives – camera equipment, pens, papers of all textures, sizes, scribblings and notes, drawings and ideas, stubs, crumpled programmes, receipts for sandwiches and coffee, stacks of used tickets, boarding passes, rail cards, library cards, hard drives from treacherous computers, empty Bombay Sapphire bottles, half-filled, stained, flaky notebooks, an ebony guitar persistently out of tune, mysteriously worn-out rollerblades, a doubly etched sword, ziplocs filled with crumbling passports and army notebooks, useless souvenirs, each with a story waiting to be told, and finally, finally, someone to tell them to, beginning with the incredible adventure of how I found you.
Hello, you.