22 September 2008
12:26 AM
This space has been a place to hold the words for a very, very long time.
Sometimes I wonder what there’s left to say; despite any insights into this life, it still has that abstract quality that betrays the strangeness of life itself.
I get the sense that even if every scrap of life was saved here, thrown into a huge mould of words and then carefully recorded to extract all possible happiness and meaning, it would not add up to Life. There will always be, and have always been, that space between Life and the words of Life. So when I reread my lines, there is something that seems missing.
Yet, write, I must. It is in time's gripping moment, compelled by the slippery seconds that, if unrecorded, is not unlived, only unremembered. Memory is, after all, not a location; it is a relation between Past and Present. Even if I cannot do that relation any grand justice, I can make peace with it, at least.
Every story I’ve told about myself has only ever been in the past tense, a thought that goes backwards from where I stand now. I have ceased being the actor in the story, now a spectator who views my own life at a distance. In peace, curiosity, fascination.
So I grasp at it, at Life, which I wrap strongly with words, and place soundly, boldly onto my page. This is the contribution - to make no mistake, no skeletons of my Now, my hopes of soon-to-be. To go doggedly on, and leave Thens where they belong. Here, on these pages, in these times.
This is my final entry. I move forward, without the eagerness of the kid I was, with a bit of muted resignation. Life cannot be allocated into cubby-holes; life is messy. The quiet shouts louder than it should, and king Canute holds up his hand in vain.
This Sunday comes, not charging forward like I thought it would, but soundlessly stealing up. I make the effort to throw up to the air all assumptions, recycled opinions so tirelessly wielded for my personal protection.
I leave letters to home, duffel up the odd mix of ambition and reality, and pack it up on a plane. A plane to a place of cold.
Because after all, if you get far enough away, you’ll be closer to
finding home*.
