This
is a blog entry.
I
don’t normally treat my blog as a blog.
I treat it as a place to post rough drafts of literary essays that I’m
working on. Today, however, I shall
treat it like a blog. I will address the
reader. I will write like a person, not
like a person who writes.
I
will say that I know that some of you who will read this have been reading my
writing since I was seventeen years old (a couple of you, even longer). I will say that I remember when I used to
post my writing on Facebook as a Facebook note and you would comment on it or
email me about it. I will say that even
getting just a couple responses from a couple people who I would never have
expected to read my writing – much less engage me in a conversation about it –
may have helped to change my life (for the better, for the best).
I
will say that many of you, each in your own time and way, have told me that you
like to live vicariously through my writing – through the bold moves I make in
my life and through the literal moving I do as I wander the world from one
country to the next. And I would like to
tell you that while you may live vicariously through my writing, you also live
with me in each place I go – on my mind and in my heart. I keep you packed in that – my heart – the heaviest
carry-on item I ever travel with.
I
would like to say that I remember each of our conversations on the nature of
happiness and love and time. I would
like to say that they helped me and that I if you read closely, you can see the
result of those conversations in my writing – in my life. I would like you to know that I am living the
question.[1] I
would like you to know that sometimes, when I meet someone new and I am talking
to them, telling them about myself or just telling them my thoughts on life,
sometimes you are the subtext. When I
tell a story that illustrates the fact that I have grown up to find courage and
faith within myself, the subtext of the story is that our interactions – yours and
mine – were part of what helped me find it.
And
while I say this to you, I say this to myself as well. I say it in attempt to remind myself that
things are not quite as I wrote them as being in my last entry. I may have left towns and friends and
countries; I may have lost time and touch.
But I didn’t forget. I never
unpacked my suitcase heart. And I am not
as alone as I may characterize myself as being.
I’ve been with you -- in coffee shops and campgrounds, small town pizzerias
and paths high up in the Alps. And when
I am not with you, you are with me – in an anecdote I tell to the boy I’m
falling for as we sit at an Italian restaurant on the French Riviera or in my
notebook as I ride the night train on my way back from Paris.
And
I say this now to comfort myself, to reassure myself that though partings hurt
- and though sometimes the best memories can become the heaviest burdens to
bear – that when the next round of partings comes to pass, as it inevitably will
and as it inevitably always does, I will be okay. I will not lose myself to nostalgia any more
than I must as a self-reflective writer.
I will pack up my suitcase heart, expanding it evermore to make room for
these new necessities that may very well become old friends and flames but will
never mean any less than they do right now.
And I will count myself lucky because, as a writer, I have the ability
to taste life twice – in the moment and in retrospect.[2] I will see you again on the page. I will see the look in your eyes that I never
learned how to read. I will see tan skin
and black stubble, a smile that made me comfortably uncomfortable and a raised
eyebrow that told me you knew what I was thinking and that you liked it. We will talk again on the page. You will tell me once again that travel
becomes an anecdote that we slip into our lives and on the page – only on the
page – I will tell you that you’re right.
And I will tell you, only on the page, precisely what I was thinking every
time you asked me what I was thinking and I said “Nothing.”
And
now, as a close to this blog entry, let me thank you all for reading and for
giving me something to write about.
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