Earlier today I was wondering about some lack of aspirations – traveling Europe, the Southeast Asian belt, or maybe Johannesburg with its turvy road along the coast.
But you know, after enough flying around for interviews so strikes one night in a fused meal-bar venue. Hard to say what I even ordered. Maybe a breakfast-for-dinner. Or some Pad Thai. Wherever we were sitting, so it was a bar line. Like a ramen restaurant, except open and no wooden panels for separators, just a dark granite slab extending endlessly along the red interior. High chairs, small talk with others on each side.
A woman all radiant in our low lit warmer atmosphere took my order. She was beautiful, or at least charming. While refilling my water we talked for a bit. It’s hard to say which parts are real and which parts I’m filling in, seeing as all memories break down anyway.
She was originally from Kansas, or Nebraska, whatever middle state it was. How’d she end up here? I think it was a family thing. You could hear some sort of accent. Whether it was slower, or a little rickety around some inflictions, it had a clear distinction from the typical.
I commented about how many faces she must’ve seen. And for whatever reason I talked about how it must be strange to see all these faces never to see again. I guess my mask slipped a bit. Or maybe this is all a lie.
I can’t remember what she said, or maybe she spun it a bit cheery.
But it’s an unavoidable reference when I think about why I don’t care about anything beyond my home.
Why it’s really confusing to me, those who travel about. Because instead of building up any sort of temple against the Reaper so instead one doubles down on His gambit. That is, transience.
When I first enrolled at college and settled in for the fateful autumn so a dorm-mate and I looked over pictures from their trip to France. And I asked what did they get out of it with their panorama view. Which maybe, to some, seems a little crass: the experience alone ought to justify it all. But he kept talking in a politician sort of manner where I wasn’t sure if there was a point other than dodging any points at all.
It just stays there. In your memory. It stays in your timeline; melancholic bombs planted for accidental reminiscence.
Life is short. So certainly you could learn a thing or two from visiting these places. Maybe a change of view. But it won’t prepare you for the transience.
That, after all of the walking and museum humming maybe it’d be nice to find some permanence. Ironically a museum is your best bet at any sort of permanence since art, in a way, is a grab at some sort of permanence. Reaching toward immortal thoughts: heavens beyond such frail bodies.
But it comes. Transience’ll gurgle up the riverside biking along. The last thing one needs is the burden of fly-by experiences, disjointed, a memorial island you visit against the 5 a.m. traffic noise for the rest of days.
In this way I at least avoid the melancholic meandering a good bunch of middle Westerners may face, visiting pristine cities with transit systems of another world. Reconciling the mental-frontier with the potentials to flatten.
I just want some permanence in an impermanent world.
“Thou hast made us for thyself O Lord”
“Our heart is restless until it finds rest in thee”