Monday, October 09, 2006
the air moving in and out of your lungs
Postcards
My bedroom. High ceiling and white walls. It's about the size of Elwood's apartment in The Blues Brothers. Miniscule. The walls stained with markings left by previous tenants. The silhouette-like forms of spray-paint concealed by white. The last clinging remains of countless pieces of sticky-tac that once held up so many memories that I'll never know.
Only three pictures were left. Postcards, actually. Three reminders that I suppose the previous tenants could go without to bring back memories of far-off wonders. One of the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris, France. One of Plaza Monumental de las Ventas in Madrid, Spain. And one of Barco Rabelo in Porto, Portugal. Three places I've never been. Three places I now know exist, at least in someone else's memories. They preferred to take home their memories as places in their minds, where ever home may be.
Some say home is where the heart is. If that's true, then this is certainly not my home. Come to think of it, I don't truthfully know where home is exactly. I left my heart somewhere hidden, I guess. Hidden even to myself. I guess I should bracktrack and find it.
Maybe home is a person. A person you've left your heart with.
It all sounds stupid.
Call me crazy.
I came to this place not really knowing what I'd find. I didn't really have a reason for coming here. Now that I'm here, I've found something that I've long since found somewhere far, far away.
I came here hoping I'd find something new. Instead, I found something I'd already seen... just with a different language. Just without the extra skirt of third-world poverty.
Now that I'm here, this place won't change and neither will I because there is nothing here to change me. My perspective hasn't really been changed; only justified. One place is as good as the next. Just collections of people in shelters with minorities who aren't. Despair, hope, grief, joy, relief, curiosity. It's all everywhere. It's all the same. I know it sounds depressing right now. But come to the same conclusion as I have through your own personal experience and it'll do more than just sound depressing. So don't feel too bad. Drink your medicine.
Sometimes I lie awake in the night; staring at the ceiling. Walls so blank and high, they give off the feeling of being in an asylum. Nothing outside but thick concrete. Lots and lots of thick concrete. A grey matter. The beams of street light breaking around the dancing curtain and swirling, cascaded, and projected onto the walls. And to think, after all these years, I still can't sleep facing a window.
It's the aliens, you know. Beaming from an over-imaginative energy surplus in some grey matter.
I'm going to sleep now.
We are so far away now, her and I. I don't have any physical fragments of my own memories so I need someone else's to remind me. That's why I keep those postcards on my wall. Someone else's reminders used to bring about things they don't represent. It doesn't matter. One place is as good as the next.
I keep them there so that maybe I can fall asleep into a memory. A memory of her. Someone else's souvenirs are what I have left to bring her back to me. To let me see her again.
Some say absence makes the heart grow fonder, where ever it is.
Melodramatic and ridiculous, I know.
Here comes the night. Trapped in a land I just arrived in yet had unknowingly seen before. Trapped in the asylum.
Call me crazy.
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its grey, gray, grey, gray, grey...
take advantage of their train system and go to glasgow, its an beautiful place
a world still recovering from ww2
-Jonathan