On losing things

I am shedding objects. Moving in, moving out, alone, with friends, with family. Everywhere things get left behind.  My passport in Madrid, sunglasses on the cruise, shorts, earrings, and flip flops in Ibiza, makeup in Brussels. Several lighters, a pack of cigarettes in Barcelona, a pipe, nice marijuana, some hash, a nail clipper. Many pairs of underwear stolen from off my bed in Amsterdam, along with my primary bag of toiletries. Two leather purses, an expensive digital camera, a notebook with a week’s worth of drunken and drug-addled notes regarding the meaning of life written in Brussels and Amsterdam. Late for my train to London and in a sleep-deprived fog I left a bag behind.

I am saddest now about the notes. The camera is insured, I only lost a day’s worth of pictures, money comes and goes like the tide.

This is a moment to reflect, to get my shit together and see more thoroughly: through my pen, rather than so obsessively through the lens. I will remain open to magic and adventure and I will write more dedicatedly, I will strive with more passion to sort out my dream and make it real. I will get more of it up, out, and on the net in case another notebook or this laptop are lost next.

I don’t need these objects, I don’t need these records any more than I need any thing. All I need is experience and language. To sharpen my pen, to forge forth with more gusto, to be stronger.

I will enjoy being lighter, being less fixated upon holding on. I will get square with the stream of the universe, with the fact that all fades and eventually no one will know I was ever here. Images are not superior to reality, they only offer us the illusion of immortality by preserving precisely the moments that slip past us in real time. We cling to photographs to fill our flawed memories, to give us narrative jumping off points when the mind fails.

We are in those images, our vision and our presence. It is not unreasonable to mourn the loss of that evidence.

Still, reality trumps its lens-snatched facsimile. I am getting closer to that in prose, close as can be; I am shuffling up to it, snuggling my skin against it like an antsy, coiling cat.

I must keep looking as if I have the camera; perhaps I’ll buy a new one when I head east. I musn’t be afraid of losing cameras over and over again because it’s just money, just hassle. Hassle moves and motivates like any part of the journey, I can’t be afraid or impatient with it. This is the worst that can happen, remember? I know my silly self.

“Ridiculous absentminded girl, how can she do this again? How does she exist this silly way?” I ask from the outside, feeling my purse like a phantom limb. But I know, I do know my silly self, I expect nothing less at this point. In spite of my disappointment, silver linings sink in like the gray relief of Dutch sky after so much scorching Spain. Luckily luckily I did not lose my passport again, luckily luckily I still have my ticket to London. I will get there, things are not so bad, nothing will stop my forward momentum.

Last week in Amsterdam, a mushroom trip dissolved into panic at the end of the night. The pleasant thing about drugs is that generally if you take too much, you wake up in the morning and everything is right with the world again. This is different; the consequences here are real. Canceled credit cards, lost equipment, another bump up in my mother’s anxiety. I wish I could turn it all back. I wish I was less like me and a bit more like someone else, someone responsible, someone fastidious and vigilant.

The roller coaster will take me up again, I’m sure. For now I dial these numbers again, where lost objects are meant to be found. I hope that someone kind will read my notebook, find my address, and drop it in the mail.

I find a nail clipper on the bench, waiting outside the station. I have no money and no heart, but a friend is on the way to rescue me. The sneaky universe has not forsaken me yet.

a bond so instantaneous

Billy Jonas has a song called "The Bus” (lyrics) (listen) in which he shares a few anecdotes of fellow passengers he met while riding the bus across America. A father goes to bail his young daughter out of trouble, a young man heads off to boot camp to avoid gang violence, and a Native American woman teaches Billy how to kill rabbits with a stick (before cooking them with instant onion soup mix.)

The point of the song is the bond, the trust that arises amongst travelers in a single vessel, the breakdown of suspicion in favor of camaraderie and straight-up love. It’s a subversion of our natural fear of strangers, and an assurance that it isn’t so odd to let your guard down, to get close and be vulnerable because we’re all in this thing together

I wept over this in the sun on a beautiful day at sea, so happy to be on the boat with strangers, getting to know them, hoarding the small intimacies they shared with me.

We have so much to learn from each other. Each of our lives represents a perfect example of what it means to be a human being. I can only live from this one seat, from these feet and this brain and this set of predetermined and acquired circumstances. Whenever I talk to someone new, it feels like a bonus round of life, a tiny taste of what it’s like to be that person, to think their way and experience what they have. It gives me the most expansive thrill, that spontaneous moment of closeness when we break through our conceptualizations of each other as “other” or “foreign” and find common ground.

Of course this is Marina, too. Her words shake in me everyday. I reread and think about her and it feels something like studying scripture; enigmatic enough for multiple layers of analysis but prescriptive and instructive. Important. It feels good, painful like a workout or an overzealous massage, but good.

Good today at least. Mourning can be like the weather, capricious and unpredictable.