Return

2/10

i

I have just returned from my first trip abroad, and so it has seemed like an opportune time to visit upon a topic I have not directly spoken of before, that is what it means to return. It is true, man is a being that negotiates memory with anticipation, a between state that reckons was with ought. It is only him, and this is something I knew so vividly as if for the first time recently, who can be somewhere and elsewhere simultaneously: in a prison with unseen vistas held inwardly. For me, it was such that I lived in a heaven with a foretaste of my incoming exile, so that at my highest moment I simultaneously held my lowest: summoning a nearness to that exigency of the only community with the other that matters.

Dancing away from a pain too personal to speak of, I will recall to you, and in doing so, to myself, that the truth of symmetry between small and large is to say that when we speak of world we also speak of self. There are places we leave, and there is a self that we leave. The still as of yet minor truth I am apprehending, in the way man apprehends the truth of cold—a callous, oppressive touch from the aether—that to age is to experience the quickening of loss, not only of dreams, loves, passions, but places, friends, situations. Who knew that there would be such peculiar sensations in the air and in a lightness to laughter with people no longer here that would be impossible to render in the same fashion with a new assembly, a new place that likens to the old place? A patio is a patio, is it not? The essential function is not in the texture or palette of color that manufactured the environ of said patio, it is the function that the patio serves that is essential, and being of-the-air, ought to sustain like legato from place to place—but no, it is gone. You will never smile like that again, but do not mistake me for saying you will not smile at all: you will smile, a smile that now contains a hiddenness you find painfully present everywhere always.

The self that has emerged as itself, as if always awaited, this year, represents a great killing: my individuation, the process by which I eliminated the other potential avenues of venture, was a great doling of culling, a judgement that exterminated so many unlived lives. What I am is also what I am not: the is and not are entangled. It is in the obliteration of distinction that we lose everything, not save it. I do not lament this truth, but I carry it with a heaviness. I carry myself with a heaviness, a heaviness that labors now, beleaguered, almost limping—with a trembling smirk. Yes, much death I have lived to live this life now. And what kind of life is that? On what account would I justify my existence to the adolescent heroism that slowly bled out cruelly from every pore for a decade? Where could I tell him the spark went? To what did I entrust this uncertain warmth? I wonder: would he sob if I told him, yes, you did everything, everything you said you would, and it did nothing, in fact it made it worse. Because what can you give to the one who finds everything partial? What is left to have—and what if there is nothing left to give? Once I departed for the sake of a shore: now I depart for the sake of departure, as a matter of habit. Having recognized this basic fact, I must depart from departure: I must return to myself, and in betraying my surface remain true to my depths—once again, at last.