Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 131 - Buenos Aires I think I finally put my finger on it in Buenos Aires. An explanation for a malaise grown over recent weeks that niggled and pricked my waking hours. I thought I could shake it, I just needed a bit more sleep. But it was emotional lethargy that saw days pass in this coolest of capitals without the slightest endeavour to sample its 'je ne sais quoi'. There were broad boulevards, architecture redolent of Paris and beautiful public spaces but somehow the city lacked something. It was I that lacked something though I realised. It suddenly struck me that we all form a connection to the place in which we live. We invest something in our home and it in turn invests something in us. The wandering alien severs his connection and loses a certain sense of belonging. I had no door to shut the world behind, no space to claim as my own. I was caught in a river whose course was unknown but whose current was insistent. Despite the new-found clarity and understanding I s...

Day 127 - Mendoza I'm desperately searching for an emotion, be it sadness or gladness, regret or disdain. There is no clarity only a vague nagging feeling that something is not right, the world is never as it should be but even less so right now. It tickles the back of my neck, it sours the beer in my glass, it stymies all action and makes every notion impotent. Do I attribute it to events still in motion? To dark days of high consequence? Is it the slow breaking of my heart or a great brittle chunk cleaving from the glacier of my being? My hand picks furiously, uncontrollably at my nails, discomfort in all but words. And words, words, how they fail me. Not with pen in hand but in situation out of hand. Do I lack emotion or do others have too much? No matter the rights and wrongs of that preposition logic always loses to emotion, the needle of ration crushed by the sledgehammer of feeling...