We Until Vaporate

Like a record skipping we are forced to find the song within the nonsense.

And at the end of it all?

Maybe it is really nothing.

Either way, we made a promise too see this through.

All the way.

Until we boil and burst.

Until we evaporate.

Until we make it home again.

I've capsized and been marooned in a busy metropolis. I smell like the sea so no one notices me as I make my way, star struck, through these narrow streets.

On my way, amnesia sets in. Who am I? What is my name? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Nostalgia without memory these things reminisce about something, I can't quite. . .

Thinking more about the art of doing nothing.

The perfect moment is found slumbering away inside you, unawares, until it is awoken in the knowledge it is no long needed. It looks out and, groggy as it is, it recognizes it is no longer inside but in front of you and fades into the vaporation of actualized being-ness.

I am no writer, I am simply a girl with a pen.

Into some dark corners the boundless mind roams. Uninhibited, unshackled and free to feel – so much - on occasion it ends up in the hands of desperation, emotional deviance and flattery without love.

It can't be helped.

Desculpa.

But we still have time, to erase the needles from the past, in the lubricating oils of the present. Ahh, the present. Can't mistake it for anything else, here it rides, tied up with words, I can't quite,

Locked up in the every second, to pull it out would surly be to kill it.

Maybe one day we can safely talk about it in the past - pull it out, taxidermied and under glass, a museum piece - but for now; the perfection and everythingness, the serendipity, the closeness, the magnificence, oh the sheer phosphorescent beauty of every ticking second!

The present doesn't lie, it stands, for everything I've fought to be destined to become.

The present doesn't lie.

Reveling the reality and fallibility of person hood means finding a nodule of sadness even amidst this infinite glee.

Seeing the dedication of a fathers love and weep, for the all encompassing patriarchal atonement that will never come.

And maybe that's just it. Freedom in the silence? Yes. Love? To be sure. But an answer for this? No. That is just time my friend, time and a re-dedication to the knowledge of immortality. The past is the past. What's done is done.

Moonlight lights my finest hour.

This way.

Whoosh...

That way.

Whoosh....

This is nothing less than going all the way.

Now I know, what the laughter of the Gods sounds like.

It sounds like the beach in the moonlight. It sounds like a midnight motorboat and it looks like the heavens fell on me.

It's what remains that counts, you and your fly paper heart, ready to bite again.

I love someone I can't even pronounce their name. It's so hard to believe it feels fake.

Obrigada.

Today is completed in the setting sun, both arduous and lazing, its sits well in the stomach, I am feeling bit by bit less and more.

Chasing summer around the word, moving west to fight the night. Travel on. Travel on.

I am barefoot in the desert. Like walking on hot coals, the best strategy is to breath, and transcend.

This is how we overcome, we don't become over-came.

I am trying to see this as it really is; a long road, a late day, a heartfelt salute, the waning light, this plastic and this camp concrete. It should not sustain. It should wobble and bend and shift under the weight of my reality, be pulled in by my gravity, it should be lost in it's own truthlessness. . .

Maybe in time. For now it is me that wobbles.

Nostalgia for a current time, this is the greatest feeling.

Milky black the night settles in again, settles onto the skin, of everything. It is rich, this night, rich and tepid and it masks the dawn that will truly come, eventually - inevitably. This is apart of a repeating phrase.

Like a record skipping we are forced to find the song within the nonsense.

After the Wake

Today I made my way from Setubal to Lagoa de Santo Andre, 60km on the bike for the first time.  Two hours in I rounded a corner, eyes wide, brakes off, careening down a hill I had just surmounted when suddenly;  the palms and the sun and the road and trees and the wind and the smells and the birds and sea rose out of the fermented ashes of my memory and into my throat.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

I yelled it as long and loudly as I felt it. Farmers may have woken from their labor meditations, birds may have flocked from their trees, but I don’t care. I don’t care. This day is my day. Today is mine, I made it, and I own it. All the love, perishable and imperishable in the universe builds and grows and flows within it. Today I created my own reality. Today, I am my own God.

This is the house that Jack built. 

And this is the day of suffering endured. 

This is travelling. 

This is infinite freedom.

Here there is time to exist. Time to think in the light and effervescence. Time to grow and move, with fear in your heart and peace in your shoes. Finding family everywhere you turn. Never alone, surrounded by the constantness of change. With every step that which was lost is gained, the wisdom that lives in everything. Its hearing the silence again, an unbroken melody since the dawn of time, too toxic for skin, you have to quit to begin. 

Everything is something to be known out here. Felt in the breeze, under a gentle hand, a twist of an open door. I am only as good as that which surrounds me and though I cannot fix its holes or mend its tears I can chose to see it completely, open and unmarred;  a reflection of the same light burning within me, an immense brilliance that glows now that we’ve finally made it - out here. 

Though I move in slow spurts, I now move only as I wish towards my destination, be it tomorrow or all time. My only conditions are the ones which keep me safe, the rules of nature and perseverance.  I have only to look to the future and the progress of growth to understand I have all I can possibly care to create. 

My Life. 

My Matrix.

And the rooting anchor that grows? It’s knowing that all will be forgiven. So off I swing, madly, truly, violently, from the heavy proof of absolution. 

Is this careless? Or simply unimaginable?

It seems messy but it is also clean, pure and untouched. This is a re-virgining of spirit as life comes back to me, as it once did, as a child. 

For all that was lost.

In the wake and furry of adolescence.

For all that was never gained . . .

I plunge, head long and head first, dead weight. I am a vision- shepparding my own flock, living in the hills of my infinite subconscious.  I am rebel - arousing suspicions in some, dreams in others. 

I am a creature.  

I walk this earth with you. Though sometimes alone, sometimes through folly and unforeseen circumstances, as queen and ghost, but still the way we all do, absorbed and lock-step, caught between idleness and forward momentum. Even at a standstill we spin, 100,000,000,000/mph.  Our earthly cavern is our anchor; and it anchors all. 

So remind me if I forget to smile. Remind me if I lose my way. Remind me of this - looking up- of all of this. And don’t forget to ask me, if you don’t walk too. 

And I will do the same, journeying to remind us all, we have a choice. 

My friends, my comrades, my peers, my loves, my family: 

 Life Lives! 

You can be one with the mercy of your dreams, high in the clutches of your own majesty! You can sign your own cheques and all it costs is everything that doesn’t matter. 

Walk with me, I’m on the other side and I am waiting to see, 

 

just what your mind can be.

Paris to Lisbon

Arrived today in Lisbon after sleeping most of the two hour flight from Paris. Something about cabin pressure puts me out, almost meditative, half in and half out of sleep. There were so many thoughts that I watched from underneath in my meditative wakefulness. Thoughts about going home, thoughts about the unknown, thoughts about this plane crashing into a fiery death trap. Thoughts about the couple beside me and their tenderness; a hand on the knee, a kiss on the check, a reflexive glance. Do I want a Kit-Kat, no I don’t want a Kit-Kat, a coffee would be nice, but then I would have to get up, apologize, and ask for cream. What language do you speak on an English flight from Paris to Portugal?

I arrive and find the bus, 745 not 44 as I assumed. Someone else asked, I just used the information. Winding our way, I get my mid-afternoon introduction to this, the first city. I moved in and around the crowed space on the bus. Bag on, bag off, beside me, in-front. Then it hits somebody’s legs and I realize I don’t know how to apologize. I don’t know how to say anything. Ola. . . well that won’t help. I’m back to square one.

Off at Rossio, centre stage, the curtains open and I cross the square. Sache, sache pirouette, watching for cars and pickpockets, thieves and goblins in my imperfectly choreographed ballet. It’s amazing, somebody gives you a date, a time and a place in the world and there you are. And there they. . . Where are they? My couchsurfing host was no where to be seen. No panic. I’m just alone, in Lisbon, with no where to stay, at five o’clock in the afternoon. There are channels that lead out of the this square that lead majestically to the sea. The sea, the sea! I was tempted to the end.

My host and I finally did connect and he delivered me a short distance away to his small flat, resident corner drug dealers in place for my welcoming.

We passed the night in endless amounts of discussion. Bottle of wine over dinner, pint of Guinness at the Irish pub to play trivia. I lost, but gained in knowledge of UK game-shows. Did you know the aqueous humour was in the eye?

The night continued with erratic twisting and weaving through roads that looked like allies and allies that looked like gutters. Carnival is just a day away and the costumes were dusted off and the dull Sunday streets were shaded-in with people, just in time to start celebrating early. We spoke of drunks as being under the weather, which is, I’ve decided, the only way to talk about them anymore. I also learnt what a ‘lights-on’ bar looks like at 3 am for a glass of wine, on the house, including a very cordial response to my attempts at Portuguese to the packed house of card playing Somalian refugees. Bom Nuit.

Day 2

My streak continues. I am not a reincarnate of a cartographer of Paris; I simply have a good sense of direction. This is not something I would have ever believed about myself given all the other ‘logistical’ tasks I am so bad at, but there we are, or there I was I should say, directionless in the void of wandering through mosaic streets and still not only finding my way towards monuments and moments through divination, but finding my way back.

I am the only person I know of to have gotten lost in Stanley Park though. . .

Lisbon is an amazing place, the most amazing of which is the way it smells. Like fresh laundry in sea-salted air. Breathing is like taking bites of candy, you can sip it in all its Mediterranean glory. The city rises in on seven peaks, of which I only explored one, but it was enough to see it cascade and dance around you out to the sea, palm and orange trees in every glance. It remained cool, but the tropical vibrations are unmistakable. Frescos, churches, cathedrals and castles, mosaic tile arts and pushy street vendors. Classical guitar buskers and human statues. This seaside port city has caught all over hundreds of years of gill-net fishing and spilled and squished back it into this remarkable homily of history, religion, progress, destruction, construction and change.

I am horrible at gauging safety and like always as I adjust to newness I am intimidated and fearful of everything. But the smell of fresh roasting cod, the hue of white umbrellas and fresh mineral water was too much to pass up as I sat down to enjoy a patio lunch by myself, though surrounded by family.

This is the first time I have felt compelled to take pictures in a long time. This city has a story and it hasn’t been, told, sold and re-hashed like its more famous cousins. There are things still worth explaining. This city remains.