Because it's beautiful to remember, looking back from another new place moving forward. And because even though I haven't felt autumn weather for three years, I'm about to go back to the place where autumn and home both begin for me for a visit; and later, beautifully, the place below.
autumn/feelings [Madrid, 2011]
Something that catches me off guard, when living abroad, is just how easily life goes on. My life goes on - a whole huge pool of experiences begins to form, interactions most of them shallow, but occasionally promising, vistas, steadily familiar narrow streets and the landmarks that you make of the places and statues you pass day by day, the things you teach yourself - or maybe the things the world teaches you and you ingest while walking through the park alone in the afternoon. The release of finishing a day of work, a singular feeling inside of contentment that soon passes but was yours. The flip side of that very contentment -- the swimming, the surfacing in this constant state of being in another temporality, while all the people you used to know in all of those places you used to live march on with their lives -- you do the same. it's not dull, but it's much calmer than I imagined -- this steady opening up of your life, of what you are going to make of your life this year, of what you will fill the extra hours with, of how you will try to build upon yourself here. Interactions in a language that's not your native one, the fragmented verse of strangers trying to approach each other, the constant hum of desire to reach some depth through all these surfaces. the struggle to stay focused on what pulls you up in life, the search for patterns of meaning in all the experiences that have brought you here, and the feeling that I am quite simply just living.
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