A real scenario that took place not so long ago

…So we’re sitting in the Irish pub, in the rain, talking and drinking, and eventually we get into past relationships and exes and whatnot, and I give him the Cliff’s Notes version of the whole saga, explaining the initial whirlwind, the college romance, the breakup and reunion and the breakup again and how heartbroken I was over it afterwards.

“Wow,” he says. “That’s kinda cool.”

“What’s cool?”

“Well…it kinda makes me feel better, in a way.”

“What does?”

“That you’re actually capable ‘a gettin your heart broken in the first place.”

I pause, blinking a couple times in surprise, genuinely taken aback.

Then, smiling hesitantly, I tilt my head and consider him from across the small table. “…Do I not strike you as the type?”

“Nah,” he says, returning the smile. “Ya don’t.”

Breath

What goes in and out of you when you breathe. Is it life or hope or what. Or the worst parts of you leaving – that would be best. The idea that only the best things are taken in as you inhale.

Maybe it comes back to you later, after you’ve had a chance to taste the air on your tongue. Recognizing the dull ache of integration as what you’ve breathed in becomes a part of you. Remembering the metallic tang of atmosphere and changing weather in the dim waning of early winter twilight. Feeling it creep along your spine, these delicate fingertips – here and here and here. It settles deep, curling comfortably to rest, somewhere in the pit of your stomach: a beautiful vertigo. An endless unknowing. Into the peripheral fade, the bleed around the edges. A voice, a hand on your throat, the licking light sending tracers through the dark. Exhale.

Are these the best things then? The catch in your throat, the slow sighing through barely-clenched teeth. Making material out of the oxygen around you, a fabric to give shape to words, every possibility hung in suspended animation before you, before it’s had a chance to be spoken, to be said. But in the saying you lose all that.

Better then to just hold your breath. Then you are your worst and best – the most lovely terrible thing that could be.

Have this

sighing, singing here

here – you can have this
i give this to you
this silly song of mine

You can’t go home again

It’s been ten years this September. Burning buildings and a bunch of brouhaha, some unspoken calamity ever looming on the horizon…every street a wordless shout of sound and color – buzzing, alien, it was so lovely so scary beautiful.

What happened to it all? Where did we go wrong, you and I?…

In the earliest days it just seemed like falling, endless falling through the fog to crash-land sprawling on some nameless avenue (they all looked the same to me, back then). Tumbling through dim canyons endlessly receiving me into a dark opacity, I never knew where I was. I thrived on the vertigo of not knowing. The uneasy ease of separation.

Then came the panic, the thrill, the unending refrain: what’s happening now, what’s happening now, what’s happening now. In your greyness I became infinitely malleable – molten metal, in permanent flux. Down in the underground, lulled by the thrum of your sexily beating heart I found a way to vanish at will, sinking into the silhouettes and fading into the background. The hum of the tracks like water, the electric blue flickering…

And now look what you’ve done. You followed me around the world like a jealous lover. You haunted every foreign skyline, stalked my every step, through every timezone, reminding me of the closeness: how I’d never get far, now that you had me…I could never go far enough.

You used to flay me alive, splayed against your surface like a pinned butterfly. I’d clamor for more even as you called me filthy names and slapped me in the face. Now you merely mistreat me – casually, uncreatively, in the manner to which I have become accustomed. I anticipate your slights, your minor injustices, the small crumbs of victory you dole out as you see fit.

…I would have given you everything, given up everything if you’d just given me a place to hide but instead I’m curled on the lawn in Central Park, breathing in the smell of soil and wondering how and at what point it became impossible to lose myself in a city of eight million people.

…

Am I learning? Could I finally be learning?

The letting go

What I will say now is probably the truest thing I will ever say in my life: the leaving was easy, effortless and natural – it’s the coming back that that damn near killed me. But for now, let’s focus on the road.

On Thursday, March 22, 2007, I left behind my Auckland apartment of six months, my flatmate, my job, all my worldly possessions and most of my sanity and embarked on a month-long tour around the North Island of New Zealand with nothing but a 35-liter backpack and NZ$2,000 to my name. I truly do not believe, when I enthusiastically and somewhat naïvely wrote a hasty, off-the-cuff “See you all when I’m back in civilization!” blog entry the night before my departure, that I understood how profoundly and completely my life was about to be turned on its head. (I have become something of an expert in this field since then.) Gone pear-shaped is I believe the appropriate colloquial term for it, although without the somewhat negative implications.

My itinerary did indeed (at first) follow the trajectory I had originally planned: I spent a day on the Coromandel Peninsula, then a day surfing in Raglan, then went off cave diving in Waitomo, down to Rotorua for whitewater rafting and a hangi. Following that, a stint in Taupo involving skydiving from 15,000 feet and my losing a contact lens up in the stratosphere the day before I was set to hike the Tongariro Crossing (a potentially deadly alpine trail with variable and often dangerous weather patterns – awesome!).

I took a day to recover in the ski village of Ohakune before hopping back on the bus to Wellington, a gorgeous harborside refuge for my fried and utterly liquified brain at that point.

After that, I wandered a bit off the tracks. Which isn’t entirely difficult to do when you have been waking at 7AM every morning, hitting the road (and the booze) hard straight through until dawn, participating in any number of physically demanding and possibly life-threatening activities during the day and partying every night with a different crowd of people whom you inevitably become attached to before having to leave behind the next day, because this is the Backpacker Scene, where everyone is moving on a different schedule and everyone is coming and going at the same time and Rule #1 of the Backpacker Scene is that you must never, ever, become attached to anyone. Which is somewhat of a problem when you’re out sleeping with pretty much anyone you come across.

My daily schedule went something like this:

Wake up at basically the first sign of daylight, hungover and unsure of what city you’re in at the moment. Roll out of bed and into your flip flops which you must wear religiously when taking a shower to avoid nasty infections from the communal bathing areas (gross). Attempt to make yourself look somewhat human despite the fact that you have been living out of a backpack for the last two weeks and haven’t had anything non-alcoholic to drink for about 24 hours. Score!

You then shuffle out to the big orange Stray bus which is like the only form of routine in your life at the present moment; your world revolves around hopping on and off of this glorious and garish chariot, allowing it to whisk you away to ever more distant and remote parts of this Middle-earth we call New Zealand, and each day you find yourself with an entirely new crowd of folks who, although you have never met them before and will probably never see them again in your life, are like your family for this one twenty-four hour period and you cling to them like pieces of driftwood in the aftermath of a giant explosion involving massive quantities of Export Gold and SPF 50 sunscreen. You share your life story with them as you careen together down caves and through forests, lying awake at 3AM on your backs staring up at the unfamiliar constellations in the southern hemisphere sky when everyone else is drunk asleep and passed out. You know that at any moment they could skip the next bus or you could, and your paths would never cross again. You communicate in an Underground Railroad-like system of chinese whispers because of course no one who is backpacking has a cell phone or any other way of keeping in contact with anyone. So you ask the people from the bus ahead of you if they’ve seen so-and-so, hoping for a sign that you will somehow magically find each other in the same town once more before one of you hops a jetliner and leaves the country. This is the way you must learn to exist when you join the Backpacker Scene. It is exhausting and emotionally wrenching and at the same time completely liberating and exhilarating; you have no job, no plans, practically no money, and completely no clue at all where you will be in the next week, or even the next day. You are an island unto yourself, your only source of comfort and strength. You train yourself to think no farther into the future as the next morning, and sometimes (out of necessity) not even that far.

I made the mistake of falling for someone, mainly because I had slept with them and because girls tend to find themselves in those sticky emotional situations after such a thing more often than guys do, but also just because I think I was tired, and lonely, and looking for some sort of stability while I was on the road. I truly shocked myself at the sheer amount of fortitude I displayed on those neverending nights of boozing and partying and dancing and anonymous sex; I don’t believe I thought myself capable of wearing my heart on my sleeve quite to the degree that I did. I didn’t think it was possible for me to be so completely aloof, so completely in the moment and unfettered from the various insecurities and things that normally prevent me from being an extrovert. I suppose it was a necessity at the time, a survival mechanism. In a way I think it was also a catharsis of sorts, a deliberate reaction against my monogamous past and all the pain and bullshit that it ended up bringing down on me, but primarily it was simply the accepted way of doing things when you are in the Backpacker Scene. Most of the folks in this crowd are in the 18-30 bracket and on at least semi-permanent holiday from reality. Armed with condoms and the pill, there are seemingly no consequences, aside from the chuckling and whispering when you get on the bus the next morning and just about everyone seems to have figured out what’s going on between you two.

I guess it just seemed like the thing to do, when you are surrounded by such unbearable and breathless beauty and constantly pushing your body to its breaking point every day, throwing yourself out of airplanes, body-surfing through Grade 3 rapids, hiking mountains, each night drowning the physical pain and exhaustion and feelings of placelessness and dislocation in endless $3 pints of beer. Even in the aftermath of all this I had no regrets at all, none, because I knew that in that very moment things were changing before my eyes and I had absolutely no control over it at all, that this was what happens when your life makes that fundamental shift into something else and you are never the same again. Even when I found myself back in Auckland after following something I knew wasn’t real, awake after no sleep and shuffling down Queen Street to find food which (being part of your former life and your former routine) is so shatteringly weird after having been away and having been through what you’ve just been through…even then, I knew it was the way I was supposed to be living, and so I just put my head down and accepted that heartbreaking feeling of wanting something you can’t have, and accepting the bruises on the side of my body from the rocks on the Kaituna River, and accepting the hangover and accepting the confusion and the feeling of being addicted to the road, addicted to movement and to traveling and to being constantly on the go. Never wanting it to stop but feeling like at any moment your body is going to shatter into a thousand pieces and your brain will drain down onto the floor in a puddle.

In the midst of these days, you look at yourself in the mirror and you literally do not recognize yourself. It is at that moment when you can feel the seconds ticking by and feel yourself changing at the DNA level and becoming something totally different, knowing you can never turn back and that things will never be the same.

Tunnel lights

Always going into, falling into, tumbling into the city, into your arms, and yours, and yours too. I’m driving very fast. Your thumbprints are wandering along me, subdermal impressions a thing I can look on later and remember – half smiling, half distant, breath slipping though the gap in the cracked windows.

The patois of sleep and slow waking. The peaceful breath of morning. Staring upward through this soft, warm diffuse light, filtering dimly through the shades, a hazy, otherworldly illumination. Decelerating through third and second to wind up here, in perpetual clutch-lift, waiting for the gears to mesh.

Come on over me. Come over me with your heaviness. Form these patterns, crack those inside jokes, bring me into your framework. Then laugh it all off; show me how it’s done, to weigh nothing – like I’ll float away, like I’m a helium balloon, like I’m lighter than air.

She recalls being a boat

At dusk the air is just right, just thick enough to carry sound from the freeway across the long grass and corn-ear tips. At dusk she goes and lays down in the field to listen: to the dull roar, the drone of crickets, humming like a downed power line.

Flat on her back, fingers splayed to touch the blades around her, dry and brown from this summer’s bad drought. She lays down in the field and pretends she’s a boat.

A boat can go, can leave things behind – big things, not like cars which only trade one interstate sign for another. Boats can leave big things behind. Big things like the land. She licks her lips, chapped and stained red from some sugary drink. Sweat has beaded on her forehead.

When it’s like this, still hot so late in the day, it feels like she’s stuck in a television tuned to a dead channel. This endless, maddening static. White noise.

There was a book she read once, last year in the first grade, which said that sharks have to keep swimming constantly or else they die. She can’t remember why, precisely, but she imagines that they would probably just sink to the bottom. Surely boats, being also creatures of the ocean, must be the same.

She decides to make herself seaworthy. She’ll never sleep, never blink again, to stay afloat. The gentle, maternal embrace of land will slip from around her.

Still tires, still pavement, still traffic on the freeway thrumming and buzzing in the southern air. Heels of her hands pressed to her closed eyes to make the whole world a kaleidoscope. Imagining that distant shoreline as it fades to a singularity. Sinking into the gravityless water, the cool and weightless water. But momma said you can’t swim.

Lying there, she breathes in pollen, breathes in dust, a somnolent cocktail.

Sometimes we go dancing

What we love about dance and songs and the lights? I’ll tell you. It’s not the hit – it’s the spaces in between. The moment of suspension. Coiling into a tensile, shivering mass, all potential until you feel the bass through the floor, through your feet and that’s your cue.

Should be like this: the melody is muscle, the rhythm your skeleton. The function builds around the form, the soft tissue yielding to this structure. Move as everything slows and slides into a snapshot. Your limbs shaping this geometry, all right angles and flexed triceps pulled taut like a bowstring.

(The tighter you are the more efficient your actions become. Explode out from the center and pull it back just as fast.)

Your outline chiseled against photoreceptors, various forms sliding here and there, the concave curves of spine and stomach. And then the sound, thick and textured and perfectly timed as the floodlights flare and you’re stuck fast in the afterglow. Low and low and lower still but your hands reaching, grabbing, screaming wordlessly higher.

It interrupts you and dilates your pupils, shelters you in the warm embrace of extremity – you: your gunshot eyes, as they contemplate the infinite nothingness that is every color all at once. It’s so loud here.

…In the dark the spotlights make fractal patterns across the back of your skull. Sound waves bending back the delicate cilia of the ear, like stalks of wheat in a strong breeze.

Drive

We’re accustomed to the strange way that technology has of grafting itself onto the human body. From pacemakers to Blackberries – machinery has become part of our biology, a kinesthetic extension of mind and muscle.

Take to the pavement then. Make your minutes into miles per hour. There are too many easy metaphors here, so shed your human skin and just forget it all existed: this language, the world and all its words, these useless words, these helpless stupid words.

There is so much disconnect in this inefficient system. So unlike the graceful curve beneath your hand of molded wood or plastic, a purpose personified, a graceful mechanical dance.

You interface with this thrumming, inhuman creature around you and beneath you and the world outside changes, blurring with your momentum. Lift the clutch and let the metal teeth clench; kick forward, your stomach dropping away into distant vertigo, into the frantic, brief thrill of weightlessness. Shoving the stick through 4th and 5th and feeling it catch on that lovely little groove.

It’s terror to think of what lies below, of the chaotic ever-whirring, ever-working apparatus. Terror to think of the control you have; the drifeshaft just another ligament, another tendon stretching, flexion and extension. People are indeed afraid to merge. Afraid of the action potential at every red light – the eager response to your hand on the wheel, intimate to the point of obscenity, reacting to your every touch as you calmly break the speed limit.

We trust machines in ways we would never trust each other. We trust in their terrible reliability; they pull us from the dreary, limited realm of humanity. Flinging, as they do, our flawed and organic bodies laterally through the air.