This blog has been dead for a little while. This is mainly due to very little happening in my life in relation to writing. I have had a few things happen more recently, though, and will be talking about them here later in the week. For now, here's another bit-sized story.
Suitcase
All at once I found myself single, equal parts freed and now
shackled to a new whipping post of emotion. Though I could not have been surer
of my feelings and ultimate decision, I still found myself consumed with a
feeling of missing something. I explored this feeling and found I did not miss
her, for I knew I had never felt encapsulated by her presence with force enough
to warrant such post-entwinement grief. I missed something else entirely,
something I was still so deeply in love with yet was heart-wrenchingly unable
to define. It was the lights in her high-rise apartment at 3 in the morning,
the way the glasswork turned pointless sky into glitter on oil. It was the
tired morning that felt so fresh and open. It was the quietest room in the
loudest house and the echo of tears on concrete.
In the months that washed over my now mundane self I found
that despite the heavy longing that pinned me to the seabed of time I could not
bring myself to search for these moments. I instead resigned myself, in my mind
so starved of the oxygen of feeling, to a fate of mediocrity. A few good beers
and a few bad ones, a late train but getting to work 5 minutes early, a cycle
funerals and weddings. My world was an unremarkable oscillation from high to
low and I withdrew my heart from my sleeve so as to dampen the force of the
water.
A singular question tugged at my consciousness, and I found
it was the one thing time did not free me from. What happens when we reach for
each other? I had known what happened when I last reached, and the result was
unsatisfying. So why did I feel so implored to reach again for what would only
be a scientific purpose? Following due process I first searched for a meaning
to the experiment my anchored brain begged to be untethered for. I did not desire
a more spectacular result, feeling that spectacularity would reach for me if it
would ever feature in the years to come. Researching one's own mind is a
terrifying task filled with bias and pain, so despite my better judgement I
chose to forego that second step.
The hypothesis kept me locked for months in the quagmire of
shifting sand on the ocean floor where my head's heart still lay, and by the
time I had established one I found I was able to pass the experiment by. My
mind asked me what happened when we reach for each other, and of course it
already knew the answer. The fundamental issue was 'why do we reach?'. I had
never loved that for which I had cast myself out, adrift on the tide. I reached
not because I loved what reached back, but because I loved the act of reaching
out. I did not want to meet someone and hear a chorus of angels signalling I
had found the one, I wanted to fall madly in love with one of the transient
angels.
In this endless sky, where we reach out by the billions and
still feel like the world is empty, we find ourselves forced upon vessels of
our own creation that are somehow alien to us. We fly these kites and sail
these ships, hoping to catch someone else's line, or spot another brig on the
horizon. We reach so that we might find someone who reaches the same way we do.
It is with this person that we will settle down and understand that
fundamentally we see the world through the same pair of eyes. It matters not
that we found each other, but that we reached out in our personal way and found
someone who loved that same brand of reaching. It is not the destination, it is
not the journey, it is the suitcase stapled to our hands full of everything we
are.
