In the last week I’ve completed the return journey back home, to the east, where I now live once again. For 10 years I have not lived in the same place for more than 2 years at a time, almost always moving on the moment I started to lay down roots. As I packed in boarding, throwing out a decade of churning and journeying, I am preparing for one last, final, move.
No longer the hectic, insane madness of a life lived in constant fear of being entirely, completely still. No longer lurching from moment to moment, picking up signs and cues and signals so that I might piece together a memory to flesh out the present. No longer shall I drop words, half-remember lines, and wake up as exhausted as I did when I turned out the light, each night.
And as I tie up all the loose ends, open up and knock on doors rendered unfamiliar by my foolishness and apathy, examine this peculiar and foreign self, transformed by 2, 3 years of teaching into a pedantic, irrepressibly dialectical monster, it almost feels like morning, once again, except the colors are unfamiliar. In a wonderful way, splayed out at the edges, just like how pictures taken with my new EF-S 10-22 lens are, just like how we really see the world, an expanse of curved lines and pinched perspectives, forced and bent into shape by our stumbling, clumsy minds.
There is no end to the churning, churning, churning, of the years.