Portland. Terrebonne. Jackson. Gros Ventre. Jackson. Terrebonne. Eugene. Portland. Seattle. Dawson Creek. Whitehorse. Tok. Anchorage. Hope. Seward. Anchorage. Palmer. Anchorage. Whitehorse. Dawson Creek. Prince George. Great Falls. Jackson. Gros Ventre. Jackson. Terrebonne. Portland. Boston. New York. Boston. Chicago. Portland. Terrebonne. Portland. Anchorage. Portland. Terrebonne. Elko. Salt Lake City. Jackson. Gros Ventre. Jackson. Helena. Spokane. Terrebonne. Portland. Seattle. Anchorage.
58 words. 58+ destinations. the last 15 short months of my life. myriad stops in, among and between. doors opened. doors closed. gas pumped. clouds gouged reflective in that white space around the colored eye. smiles released. frustrations blossomed. apologies given in lieu of understanding. not knowing who or what you might possibly be written across the brow. homeless. searching. allowing place to sear remembrance on the visible backs of said eyes. cars, planes, and trains, my own two fucking feet – forms of transportation, travel.
I have quite normal revelations, realizing as they happen that ‘quite normal’ seems both intuitive and circumspect. The world is an intrinsic place; one that we must neither apologize to or for. My job amidst my movements and actions has been to find that place – the blue moment of just before dusk – where the magic of created fictions dovetails with the loneliness and ache imposed by public reality. How do I impress upon the world that geese heard at dawn coursing upriver beneath a pregnant, coming pink sky is what I hear when anything utters the word perfect? Where does one find the proper place to exemplify the stone silence of a mountain that has just allowed you to climb her?
Words are given and taken — and I wonder how often they are gifted and how often they are just given away. Photographs compile unforgettable, ratcheted seconds of time. Books soothe a mind that aches for the impossible and gives said mind relief in all of impervious beliefs.
I am here to stitch realities together. A seamstress – one quietly pumping the foot pedal that the machine in front of me may sew from the myriad threads that unravel bright and searching from behind my eyes. Seeing all as a precursor to making notations. What constitutes mere thought and what is waiting language? How do we decipher what goes where?
Quite literally, I am sitting on the floor of the room I came to age in feeling – the good and great pressures of one who must channel that which has been given to them, mainly thought. Snow falls. The silent world is both in and outside. My laughter is lonely. Adrift. My smile fading in and out like AM bandwidth somewhere in North Dakota – Minot, a town where you’ve seen the sun rise across the dusty brick of main street, bits of hay collected in the gutters like last nights dreams and car exhaust piling up so that you slide from the town both noxious and removed enough to question what you just witnessed. I’ve met no one to whom I can introduce myself with abandon. What doesn’t seem to exist, what was once prayed to, is not troubling so much as unlinked — the inability to know too much drives my molten, somewhat disheveled core. Temporal and transient living means that the self is relegated to finding meaning in created understandings that chance to follow you everywhere. Dynamism through connection. Connection as that thread that hasn’t yet spooled from behind my blue eyes.