Motel musings

I spend a lot of time in strange places with strange people I don't know very well doing strange things. My writing this at this time of night sitting on a motel bed a few hundred miles away from my home exemplifies this tendency. Though there is a particular reason for why I am here in this instance, I've realized that more often, I find myself seeking all that is bizarre and abnormal and out of my comfort zone.

I find myself valuing the company of vague acquaintances more than that of people who are closer to me. They don't know my life; I don't know theirs and have no desire to learn more about it.

We connect on no complex grounds of the past, on no hazy expectations for the future. We connect in the present. In the now.

It is simple. It is becomingly carefree.

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There's something too comfortable about closeness, security. Something unfulfilling in its fulfilling nature.

There's always something that overpowers that desire for a routine, the concept of having a niche in the world: a desire to be lost.

Lost in what? Lost where?

They always ask me, those who don't understand it. But there's no point in explaining, because there are only two types of people in the world: Those who don't mind being lost every once in a while and those who deeply fear it.

And of course there are those who are not aware of whether they have ever been lost or not. But those are hardly people at all.

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Perhaps it's because sometimes, the world seems too vast and we are possessed by a desire to not just understand it or see it, but to be it.

Sometimes, we want it so badly that we are willing to break our flesh up into infinite grains of dust to coat every molecule of land and air that make up the planet. Maybe this is why people want to be cremated after death. It's one last attempt to embody the world.

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Being lost is a sensory engagement.

We don't notice the dirt of the worn paths we tread under our feet every day. We don't notice the doorframe of our own house, the color of our curtains or how the carpet in the bedroom feels under our feet. Those things become a part of our mind that is caged off.

Our senses shut down to things we are too familiar with.

But if you walk into a neighbor's house, you will notice the feel of the carpet and the color of the curtains.

Walk onto the streets of a foreign city, and you'll notice that you have five senses again. Everything becomes sharp. The wind feels colder on your fingertips, colors are brighter, smells are stronger. Sounds are louder. They're louder because subconsciously, you're listening harder. Because you have no idea where you are or what to expect. Your senses are on fire.

Everybody is more aware when they're lost.

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Russian literature comparatists came up with a qualification for writing to be literature, that is in order to produce true literature, one had to defamiliarize. In essence, take everyday, common events that one experiences and paint them in a different light, a unique perspective.

But in order to paint the banality of daily life in a different light, one must first view it in a different lens. And to do so, one must adjust his or her mind to accomodate it. It takes a conscious effort at first to view things in a different light, but if done correctly and constantly, it becomes intuitive, habitual.

I no longer see roads as roads or people as people when I walk by them in passing. They are characters in a book, subjects of a painting.

Rain is not rain, but a mood. Music is not sound, but emotion.

It is in this way that I am able to write, to paint, to think in poetry and walk in metered time. It is in this way that I am no longer like any of those around me. It is in this way that I can no longer connect with others in the same way, not even many of those with whom I've shared long years of friendship.

Defamiliarization. It has shaped me. Some would say it has destroyed me.

And some would say if it hasn't now, it will later.

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What is it to be lost?

It is to be pitched into a void. To have no idea where you are or how to get where you want to go. Sometimes it means not even knowing where you're going at all.

To be lost is to throw yourself in this void for the sake of knowledge, for the sake of experience, for the sake of defamiliarizing. To be lost is to actively and consciously search for the lens that will provide you with that different perspective, even if you do not know what you are going to do with it.

To be lost is to climb out of your warm bed, your dark room, your den of friends, and embrace the senses that you have long since lost contact with. It is to embrace your deepest, greatest fear: The fear of not knowing. The fear of being insignificant.

The fear of being alone.

It is only through embracing this sort of terrifying unknown that you may also embrace that part of your mind, buried amidst the tangled neurons of trivial everyday interactions and mundane tasks, that will allow you to see and feel in a way that transcends how everyone else sees and feels.

It is only through embracing this unknown that will also take you a few steps closer to embodying the world.

the fall

maybe this is it, you know,

the end.
if one could even call something "the end"

when it never really began in the first place.

Disconnect.

There is nothing so heavy about the concept of love.

Whoever made it so was foolish, because all lovers have some form of love. Ours was like the snow in the winter where we lived.

Light, leger.

It carried no weight, no responsibility, no burden.

We found each other brushed under the thin ice that coated the sidewalks,

melted the ice crystals off our skin with a burning love for Europe, our emotions heated for a continent in a way that they never would be for each other.

And perhaps

that was what we found in each other, l'esprit de l'europe.

Venetian canals, grapevines, gothic cathedrals. Perhaps it was through those things that we found some sort of love for another human being too.

We crafted beauty with the casual —

"de temps en temps," as the parisiennes would say.

It was through this disconnect, this unbounded territory, that we planted our roots,

not knowing what would become of anything we had, or if, in twelve short months, we'd even have anything at all to talk about over our glasses of Perrier and relentless insomnia.

Not knowing if you'd remember my face when I left,

or if the pictures of les montagnes et les compagnes on my wall would still remind me of the person who gave them to me.

We knew only that the fickle breeze of Bretagne would come by spring,

that it was only more beautiful

because it would end soon.

(3)

She swore to her soul and everything else she believed in that she would never end up being one of them.

One of them — those foolish, cotton-headed women who lived to wait. They were everywhere.

Those who would put on dresses and sashes and hats and wait. Those who would eat dinner and sit on their couches in the evening and wait. Those who would go to bed and wake up and look in the mirror everyday at the dust collecting in the creases of their once-beautiful and now gradually aging faces and wait.

For love to sweep them off their feet, for success or great fortune to come billowing their way.

For the 9:30 train.

For some sort of revolution.

For the beginning of their lives.

They disgusted her more than anything, those miserable creatures, helpless to themselves, helpless to fate. But then again, she didn't exactly believe in fate because it was that concept in and of itself that disgusted her. The idea of not having complete control over one's own life, that every premeditated occurrence in one's short life lay in the hands of some invisible, omniscient deity.

No, certainly not. Those were the thoughts of idealists, dreamers. The ones who stayed in bed and dreamed of traversing tumultuous seas, trudging through their lives, never knowing what exactly was reality and what wasn't. And when they were finally able to draw the line, it was too late. They had nothing left but ashes in the fireplace, family in the mausoleums, cold tea dregs, and a few grains left in the hourglass.

She shuddered. Never.

But when she couldn't sleep sometimes, when her eyes tired of staring at screens and books and papers, when she lay in bed listening to her clock tick its way slowly to 4 a.m.,

when troubled thoughts stirred her mind — thoughts of temperamental emotions and half-present lovers — and strange moods made her question her sanity,

she wondered if she really wasn't one of those foolish, waiting women after all.

A story for you (2)

It wasn't that she had to do it. She had no genuine need to do what she did, neither was she in lack of anything.

But there they were, stacked in pretty rows, thrown in little baskets for her to sift through, available for her nimble, trained fingers to run over, to toy with. And sometimes, it just wasn't enough to sit in front of her computer to type, though she was good at that, too.

Come to think of it, she was unnaturally good at most things involving her hands. They called her a kinesthetic learner, and she saw the world around her not with her eyes, but through her fingertips, whether they were drenched in colorful paints and smeared against white paper or rubbed up against the rough, sandpapery bricks of the buildings that lined the icy streets she walked every day. She felt color and read people by touch. And even on the coldest days, when brutal winds would chafe the skin to bleeding, she never wore gloves.

Ever since she was young, she had an interest in building things with her hands, folding origami, writing, drawing.

Giving.

Taking.

It wasn't that she had some deep, uncovered mental issue, though some seemed to be convinced that she did. She wasn't greedy, morbid, impoverished, or harboring some buried event in her past that manifested itself through a rare psychological disorder. On the contrary, she was a rather bright person, extraordinarily amiable, her cheeriness only occasionally tinted by the cynicism of her realistic side that she touched base with every once in while when the lights were dim and exhaustion plagued her mental faculties. She was ambitious, just like most average people her age. But unlike most average people her age, she cared not for fame, or for fortune, or for luxury, recognition, or anything else that usually was assumed to accompany greatness.

Her only desire was to satisfy her hunger, a hunger that was insatiable by means of any material object that could possibly be offered to her on earth, and she had every talent and ability to acquire such objects if that was indeed what she wanted. But it wasn't.

The only things she ever wanted were those things that were intangible, those abstract concepts and twisted ideas that she ached to soak through her skin by touch, and she spent every excess second of her life finding ways to do so. But sometimes even the greatest thinkers of the past were frustrating. And sometimes when she could find no answers in the notes of melodic composers or the over-leafed pages of her books, or in the scarce intelligence that lay scattered around her in the form of mechanic human beings, she turned to the only thing left that could give her a brief, fleeting, yet undeniable moment of utter satisfaction.

The only thing that could break every social and moral boundary that tied her immovably to the frame that she wanted so desperately to shatter. It was passive. It was subtle. It was a crime.

And the feeling of being full and not hungry, though ephemeral it was, was still a good feeling nonetheless. It fed her like food did a Holocaust survivor. It kept her running until the next time...

To kill for your love

Some start with a bang. Some start with smiles. Some start with sparks.

And some, some you can't even tell how it starts at all, only that it did

and now you're

tangled. Hands and feet bound in a net wrapped, twisted around your body, around your bones, around your brains.

And you can't get out of it. But you don't want to anyways, because this is what it's like

(or as they all say) what it's like to fall in

traps.

Or so you would be inclined to believe. Because the last time your back was up

against a wall like that, so was everything else of yours. Your emotions, your convictions,

your religion. And when you finally pulled yourself off of it, you swore to the only god left that

you believed in

that you would never put anything of yours in the hands of any

beautiful person

because all beautiful people were the same. Lovely and different from afar until you got within the reach of

their crusted fingernails, their sharp talons that raked in what you had to give and locked it

away in their cold rattling chests to feed on until they could prey on their next victim. And you

were left, stripped down to the skin and running as fast as you could

into exactly what you wanted to avoid,

exactly what you swore you'd never go near again. But this time he was lovely and different from all the others. He had strong hands, a gentle touch, and you couldn't see any talons.

So there you were again, in a net, knowing you would hate yourself again in a couple months,

knowing you were tangled in the trap of another beautiful person, knowing that right now you were helpless to it, and knowing that

this time, you had a knife.

A knife to carve out the bleeding heart of a beast.

To 2011.

I spent New Years with some friends in a gray void down by a pier in front of the Atlantic Ocean.

We had expected to see fireworks by the harbor, the traditional explosions in the distance, fire in the sky. Countdowns, toasts, clear skies.

But instead, we found a night with fog as dense as steel wool clinging to our skin, with visibility hardly five feet in front of us. We couldn't see lights, we didn't hear explosions. All we could see was gray nothingness, a sort of frightening nothingness at our fingertips.

And quite honestly, my thoughts about the new year were the same, that is, I had none.

So here's to the new year,

To my expectations for this year being as obscure as our view from the pier, not having a damn clue what lies out there in front of me,

To not even knowing if I'll have what it takes to meet whatever is there.

But here's also to knowing that no matter what happens, this is life.

We live, we love, we lose. In retrospect, 2010 showed me all of this, and more. Much more than I expected to see.

And whether I'm ready for it right now or not, this is another year.

2011, hit me with your best shot, and by best, I mean, not too hard, please.

I usually make resolutions, but I have none this year. When my expectations are more foggy than they've ever been, there is no possible way I could make any semblance of a resolution.

And to everyone who may stumble across this, here's a toast to you, too:

May your love be greater than your loss, and if not, may love be in your loss. May you find passion in your grief, happiness in your solitude. And may you seek beauty in everything you do.

-MW