The bag feels light, almost weightless as I bustle through the station en route to missing my train. I'll miss my train because I can no longer control the whirlwind, because the tiger I'm riding cannot change its stripes. Missing this train took a minute of ill-preparedness which took a day of muddled thinking which has taken weeks of bi-directional candle-burning. And I won't miss this train because, for now, the tiger loves me and wants me to be happy. It carries me to the ticket barrier and we bound through. It smiles its Cheshire Cat smile at the staff who whisk me past the queue. It settles me in my seat with such silken grace as to make all this seem so easy, so inevitable that a greater romantic than I (and that is no mean feat) would cry 'destiny!' But the tiger just smiles. And if I've manifested away the rough edges of my chosen course and sworn there are no rocks below the lovely smoothness of this water then I have also pressed my wet finger to the plug socket and felt the crackle of electric desire through my body. I could writhe in my seat, back bending and fists clenching with unexpressed energy. I don't. I sit there quietly as the train dives deep beneath the water, the walls draw close and allow no turning back. Even if there were a way I wouldn't turn from my Icarean arc, I'm committed to the chaos. I don't seek it and it doesn't seek me, it's just there and I don't flinch. I lean in when causes are red and consequences are black and white. I trust everything to the impassibility of a wall in a Cuban bar. I'm living in the moment, we're told to do more of that aren't we? Yeah I'll ask the imagined reader for endorsement because I know what my friends might say. From the lofty heights of a stable relationship they'll look down and won't see a crumbled staircase and signposts for 'dangerous cliffs'. The gatehouses along the way only ask you to choose between 'infinite happiness' and 'obvious despair'. The ascent into the heavens is just a series of sensible decisions. But can they be blamed? We're inherently unreliable biographers, inclined to post-rationalisation of decisions with the benefit of hindsight. We are, ultimately, who we tell ourselves we are as the nature of the world outsides our own minds is debatable at best. So who am I to me? What do I think of the person whose pupils contract against the bright light of the French morning sun? I head towards a secret rendezvous at 300kmh driven only by that electric desire and consequence be damned. Is that romantic or reckless? It can easily be both I suppose. And in those ingredients the chemical reaction is intensified. Heat, light, oxygen. It feels in this moment like the stuff of life, so sharp and true like a new razor cutting through skin. Or a storm at my back hurling me through four countries by midday. But in the pursuit of what? Oh that's not so easy to describe. That razor cuts cleanly but in its wake is blood and tears and exposure. So then, desire brings me here? Yes, but it's never so simple. Desire to be desired? Perhaps but that's not the person I tell myself I am. A yearning for the aforementioned chaos after eight years of good behaviour? Having been cut loose myself do I now cavort without mooring and refuse any debt to gentlemanly conduct and decent society? The more I analyse it and pick through the bones and leaves of my intentions the further I seem to get from their understanding. So maybe it is all those things that made me book this train to that place. Like colours of the spectrum they combine into a light as pure and white as the snow that blankets the Belgian fields now outside the window. And the light isn't at the end of a tunnel, that tunnel is behind me physically and metaphorically, but it's the light when you open your eyes and realise that you may be on your back but you are alive. It's a light that signifies the absence of death. Because when eight years of following a certain path leaves you hanging in the clear air like Wile E. Coyote, the cliff edge unseen, you don't die. Gravity asserts its grip and you fall and fall expecting death in a peaceful instant. But you don't die, fall all you want, you won't die. You will need another plan. And in a binary kind of fashion it must be life. I can't remember where that realisation struck me, Bangkok or Sydney or Luang Prabang, but it comes back to me now. The life I'd planned no longer had me in it. So I needed another one. And I found it, or rather created it, in Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur and Labuan Bajo. In Windsor and Warwick and on the 08:19 to Rotterdam. What am I doing? I'm living.
Comments
Post a Comment