about travel

I felt I owned the area around my front door. I wanted to control who parks where, who loiters there, what grows where. 

I used to look out and see conjoined buildings. When I moved in, some ivy had grown all over an outside wall, and I liked that. But a wood-stemmed scrub tree started to grow near the same crack where the ivy grew. I tried to poison the tree but poisoned the ivy, too. It died. The wind started to take away the dead leaves, but I still knew I made a mistake.

In time—a year or more—the ivy grew back. It started to wrap around to the conjoined building—a restaurant. Someone there—a manager, not the owner—must have thought it unbecoming, so he showed the dishwasher where to cut the ivy, to cut it where it grew. So the dishwasher returned with a big knife and cut the ivy. I watched the leaves wilt again, and a week or two later, it was all dead.

I used to drive about 10 miles to work and 10 miles back. I had to learn the inclines and the declines, the potholes, the best lanes to be in and when. I earned that knowledge, so I owned that experience and in an abstract way even a percentage of that land. But I am a slave to what I own and get frustrated when I cannot control everything about it.

You must be somewhere else when you commute. Driving the same path every day, seeing the same things, and going through the same gates of this circular dimension, pretending to be the same person every day. No, you must put yourself somewhere else.

But you travel and go to a place for the first time, you are up against the world and it’s new again.

Note: Who was only a stranger at home?

about one early October commute through the Reagan Metro stop

My helium heart jumped out the window of the railcar as it slid across the bridge over light airport traffic—the cars of flattened cares circling in to pick up or drop off. 

(doodles) on a Post-it Note with a good, inky blue pen

 

about the lamplighter

Almost every weekend from my chair in the old house, I’d see a white moth visit the weeds across the alley. And on my last weekend there, I opened a Yates book randomly to read the first paragraph that jumped out, and it was this:

When the men were throwing away their ration cans and lighting up cigarettes, not long after Prentice had managed to swallow his tears, it began to snow. Big, soft flakes came down at first from the darkening sky; they then thinned out into tiny points of white that whirled in the wind until the snow was flying rather than falling, making it hard to see anything except at close range, making it necessary to squint and blink to see anything at all.

 

Note: I’d like to think rereading all this Yates is a goodbye.