This damn blank page. It blinks it’s cursor at me like a demanding child. Who needs who?
I am in Granada, Spain. It is a mid-sized city nestled somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Home to the Alahambra, countless Cathedrals and endless Arabic-chique bazaars selling skin greening jewelry and Indo-Hippie clothes made in Taiwan. German. That seems to be the language you hear most often. Though occasionally Spanish as it wafts over you in the streets, bombasts from the street side tapas bars and convelesses and prays in endless Catholic ceremonies - over coifed and costumed in all there sensual cosmetic glory.
Maybe it’s the rain.
Two weeks straight of it.
Maybe it’s the sickness.
Four straight days of vomiting and diarrhea.
Maybe it’s not knowing where I am going next. Questioning why I am still here, spending money to be dirty and homeless. Spending money to let my mind rest, as soggy as a vegetable, surrounded by too much peace and quiet, too much respite. I made room for God and lost it again. Skeptic and aware that when you’re alone, it’s too easy to make things up. Too easy to read into all this; a falling leaf, a passing wind, a message in the breeze written just for this girl, just like every other 23 year-old girl, following a herd of goats, searching in the mountains for something that makes this make sense. Something that defines, confines and replaces the ceaseless uncertainty.
The sound of a piano ties this all together. For twenty years I have heard these notes and wanted to play them, to know them, feel them with the skill and precision that would make them dance off the walls, make them sing into hearts the sense of cacophonous foggy ease that it brings into mine. These things, all these things, bind me together, pages of a book that run years long now. They smell and perforate and smudge end over end as I continue to flip through, looking for the omnipotent narrator to tell me where this is all heading. To provide me with insight to the dramatic irony I am certain is occurring. What is it this character is failing to see? Judy Blume never made it so complicated, to get to the point of it all.
Life is a trillion piece puzzle that you have no picture to build with. I smashed two or three together over the past two months, I think it’s ocean. Either way it feels good to mush my fingers through the pieces, feel their cardboard sides spinning and catching on themselves as they build-up and slip from my hands, under my feet. I wake up with them stuck to my face, appearing in a dream that tells me I have to go back; back to school, back to work, back to busy. But it is the ones under my eyelids, that impore my dedication, the ones that cut my view into empty jig-sawed holes. Travelling is walking in and out of the blankness. What is it that goes in here? My journey brings me from one rabbit hole to the next, all seemingly interconnected, but how?
These dark crevasses are shifting too, not so much holes anymore I see bubbles of psychological manifestation. Inundate, coagulate and coddle the wantant mind with light, sound, sight, smell. It is all it needs to believe anything. The Truman Show comes true; we do believe that stimulus is reality. In this particular bubble a fire burns in a deep forest lodge of a river-side Spanish commune that spills dirty worn Arabic carpets from its hearth; hand drums, guitar, flute, didgeridoo, it’s encircling companions.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, sometimes tensions rise as desperate growing souls continue to struggle with the everyday. I see them mostly as children here in this Never-Never Land. Time has stopped, but here there is no Hook, no enemies, no crocodile. No fear but regret and themselves to move the plot along. I step into the sleeping tee-pee, nothing more than a half dozen dirty blankets and worn out mattresses resting under a canvas-cone. Orange peels, broken glass and plastic bags our warming central fire. This feels like failure, resting half a step above skid-row. It may not be heroin or speed, may not be money, but it is here all the same; how much nothingness one can consume is consumption too. A non-material aspiration. They would all be happy to fade away, some part of the cycle of the waning moon. Martyr for the cause of ecological servitude. This is far from criticism. I chose to be here, part of my own disappearing act. I took each step and wanted to see everything. I wanted to see where one can go when you stop believing in everything. I found a place where you stop caring enough to believe in anything. A place to fade away, part wood nymph, part smoky fire, while the rest of you carries on unshaven, unkempt and falling apart at the seams. An old burlap sack, a discarded Birkenstock, all of held under by the heavy lid of Babalon.
I look at my gummed-up ocean colored puzzle pieces, close my eyes and look again. Breathe. These questions weigh me down. I am looking deep within everything for the truth, the answers that push energy into this thing, this thing into me. I look at my pieces:
I have found love; ancient, celestial and terrestrial.
I have found a difference pace, which has made all the chaos seem funny, unnecessary and invigorating again.
I have found home and learnt there is no place like home.
I have learned to love without fear.
Pain is personal.
Being strong is not about being alone.
The struggle is not who gets to the end first, but who enjoys doing it.
I have remembered that I care deeply for everyone, even strangers. It is caring like this which sets me free from fearing them.
Happiness is not something that can be found or attained. Absolutely nothing, not even time will deliver it. Happiness is a tool. You have to learn it. First step - open your mind.
