Perpetual Departure

I actually wrote this a few weeks ago, pondering motifs in my recent life, enjoying the blues. It seems sacrilegious to post this now, now that the happy horizon is here and a new life of togetherness dawns before me, but maybe a few readers will read and enjoy being blue with the Teddy of a few weeks ago.



My Valedictory Life


I'm finally home to the Blue House again and now that I am I can't stand this place -- I see the peeling paint, the dingy, cigarette butted and ashed porch and its 40's era blue ribbon trim, the maplike network of stains on the vinaceous carpet, and a loathing fills me, bringing with it an illogical desire to leave. Leave?? I just got home for crissakes!! And again I mentally mouth the question so often in my thoughts; what the hell is wrong with me?

It seems my life has come down to one thing recently: leaving. Leaving. The theme of my life, and what a depressingly average one it is. Going home to see my family. traveling for business, or simply and begrudgingly leaving the bar at closing, I'm always going somewhere and this pathetically forlon feeling is persistent in its quiet infectious nature, invading all the would-be carefree moments of my days. I stand in the shower at a hotel, relaxed, meditative, when the loneliness of leaving a known place, a welcoming place, seeps into me - I know I'm already late for a meeting and checkout is imminent. Or I go for a bike ride to feel sun and wind paint humanity onto my body, my soul, and there, atop a bike seat pedaling through cracked familiar streets, I remember leaving a woman who never learned to ride a bike - how could I fail to teach her something so simple?

And the people in my life only seem to make it worse; I love them all uniquely, as only each and all can be loved. But I'm always leaving, just when I want to stay somewhere, to remain when all else blows away, I want to be constant, that rock, that immovable object which time itself does not, can not affect. Eating early dinner at a patio table overlooking lake Texas, I think about leaving the girl back home, leaving for Austin and leaving myself behind. Am I the abyss at the bottom of America's cliff or the lone silhouetted figure perched, wavering on the edge?

I know people here and there and in many places, but they're never where I am, at least mentally, and uplifting friendly voices soon lose their potency in the nothingness of physical solitude. Without tangibility even the best intentions seem somehow divided, smaller in the face of immediate physical reality; sure the voice on the phone says it loves me, but I'm staring at an empty hotel room, an emptier bottle and pillows that won't cuddle me back. Maybe that's why I've been drinking to forget recently; I know I shouldn't drink so much, I really do. I know I shouldn't drink whiskey like water so that half of the night is lost time, a dark smear of laughing, stumbling memory, but why recall when there's no one to recall?

In my solitude and eternal departure I become I become I am a memory-ghost at the end of America, the last days of disco, a flitting shadow in airport corners, a goofy slovenly youth flying in first class, smiling sadly to no one and needing no one to enjoy jokes and music and DVD's with. Is the ability to impress myself really that impressive?

I wake up one morning after a half-forgotten night with scars on my hand and shoulder and another vague recollection of lost opportunity in the face of a pretty face. As the bath is drawn, my thoughts run with the water right down the drain, all but one borne in my newest lonesome realization; all we familiar strangers, all we lonesome beings have are brief, fleeting moments in which to just be, moments in which to talk to each other, moments of respite and trial, moments of despair and welcome, and yet we stare through eachother's gazes with supposed indifference, frozen in solitude, linked in apathy.

A familiar new day (Friday the 13th) in the sunbleached homely happiness of San Diego's oceanfront, and the beach with my scars and my CD player. Talked to mom and dad this morning, the same disturbingly trite and happy conversation as last time; "and that's the news from lake woebegon," my mom always says in her wavering, beautiful, left-behind voice. I think of her, of my father's heroic shrinking shadow, and sigh to myself. I paddle out into the forgiving sea, alone in the vast blue of sea and sky to float on my back; to experience the fluid weightlessness and rhythmic motion that only mom can provide, yet even here, even in the oceanic womb, I'm motherless, alone, leaving. Off, off the board, out, out into the water, down, down, dark, dark, I'm leaving.


-tn

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