Existential Ridiculousness

I am listening to, or rather I should say “hearing” many different things right now. I’m sitting on the back porch of the villa we are staying in and the waves are crashing and smashing angrily against the wall below. I can hear the beach being pulled out toward the beginning of the night and the end of the sky. There are many stars twinkling up there above. Many many Spanish speaking children with shrill voices are yelling and calling out to one another, chasing each other and I can hear the scampering of their tiny feet on tiles as their voices call out and scream in delight as they play. It is 7:45 pm but it feels much later. I have taken a day of extreme rest, only laboring to go up to the balcony to read, or to situate myself in a hammock. I have achieved nothing today except absolute relaxation and finally, time to myself. I am surrounded by the echoes of voices and the constant repetitious sound of nature and the smells that are enveloping me are many as well, the salty sea air, rich and heavy in the nighttime humidity, Spanish food, thick with season and care, hamburguesas, papas fritas, the faint smell of perfume floating on the air, and the cheap wine I am sipping. All of this feels warm and comforting and reassuring somehow as I sit alone, typing in the darkness, illuminated by the glow of my laptop. I feel slightly lonesome, but I suppose this melancholy feeling does tend to plague me when I’m feeling observant and wishing to share experiences with someone or other.

It’s been a swell trip. A real life vacation. An odd time space continuum. My sense of reality has been changed greatly this year, the common and well-known foundry that I have previously stood sturdy on my entire life crumbling. This new way of sensing things around me, of being, can be at oft times very confusing as I tend to not recover my past or think of my future so much. And, it gives the sensation of floating, with no purpose or reason, to have nothing beneath my feet, and to only feed on the present longings of the heart and brain, and to only utilize and embrace the power of observation and of course, those observations themselves. Life is fleeting, and I have been grasping this more truthfully over this past year, and the exact understanding that permanence is impossible does indeed make complications within the lackluster human condition and the longing for security and comfort. To be around my family can at times throw a wrench into the gears, for they are the living proof of my existence and from whence I came. And they do provide comfort, however, the truth in my past is still intertwined with whatever persona I have created for myself. And this acceptance, of truth and love and human family understanding has for the first time really become a part of me. This is both amazing to feel and overwhelming at the same time. My family is my life, has always been my life, and I have somehow not been wholly aware of this. What a childish thing. I am an adult. I have been realizing it awhile now, but here, in these quiet moments, as I wandered around the villa alone, taking in all of the personalized scents of my varying family members, their left behind belongings building me a story, I realized how grateful I am for them, and how perhaps, I have failed them as a human being and maybe as a family member. I let this grievance only last a few moments and then I embraced them fully, my family, and I felt only a comfort of knowing and maybe a longing to be able to be the way they are with each other, close. I suppose I’m “close” in my own way, but as I get older, I become more awkward, and more comfortable only in observation. I feel closer to everyone when I am further away. It is a flaw. A weakness. Something I don’t understand fully. Being here alone, I feel aware. The consequences of my chosen lifestyle gnaw at me only at times. The realization that I have not stayed in the same place for more than 7 months in the last 5 years at the very least is both exciting and troubling. I have not been able to accurately maintain a constant relationship with anyone, save for the long distance friendships of love and affection via the United States post office and sealed only with a stamp. I have been in love severely with many geographic locations and have not been monogamous with any place on the map. I make promises under my breath, to these places, and I betray them not long after, as I look for something else, the rush of the western mountains, the sweeping horizon of a beach, the endless burning desert, the rise and fall of a constantly breathing dirty filthy city. I am unsure of how to stop. I’ve used relationships as excuses to set and become comfortable. Let the caress of an intimacy replace my constant longing for exploration and the need to fill the lonesome burning cavities of curiosity. And in those relationships, I have a deep knowledge in my heart (no matter how hard my heart does try to hold on) that all of this will be fleeting. I think of this as I just witnessed my sister’s marriage. I looked around at all of my family on the beach. Everyone for the most part was paired up in love. I could see my sister’s life unwinding, as she repeated her vows to her now husband. I saw the tremble in their hands and the intensity in their embrace and their kiss as they bound their lives together. I could see her in the next few years, with children, completing the cycle. I looked around at the other family, some with kids themselves, I looked upon our parents, who created this legacy. I looked at all of their lives, and I felt separate somehow (self induced). I wondered if perhaps, it may at some point be possible for me to wed, to love so permanently, to perhaps create my own living breathing legacy and not just the stale weathered pages of journals, r the glowing, flickering electronic tablets upon my laptop. For ten years I have been moving often. I am filled with a constant buzzing, anxious energy, and I lack the normalcy I so desire that folks have to accomplish, and conquer and make the world their own. I am fleeting, and useful for only periods of time, and I have said often, that I have an expiration date. I have made these things up, and I have done so as to fulfill my own wants and needs and that constant longing, which, I seem to feel no control over. I have tried unsuccessfully to settle, to stop, to lay my head upon the same pillow in the same place next to the same face for a very long (to myself) period of time. And that greedy longing sabotaged me. My belly all-full of fire too oft. My head full of rocks and false wishes and all of the daydreams I like to make my reality. I did in fact fall in love really, and I did see a future flickering, and I believed it for a moment, and it did not work out and somehow, I felt a sense of relief upon being set out to my own lonesome freedom. These days, they are all so long and so unsure, and in that unsurity, I feel such a comfort, because I know in my heart I do not have to commit to anything when everything is ever changing. I am thinking these things as the scenario out here changes this evening, the sounds muffling over time, the children quieting down as they grow tired, the smells of cooking being carried out to sea as it becomes ever later, the ocean the only constant, and that even, not as rough and tumble as hours before. The moon changing location, the stars twinkling in different places, as we, turn, on our axis, and folks set down to put their head to the pillow to dream. Things change, they always do. Change and growth are always. My sister is no longer a child; my brother is no longer (and hasn’t been for some time) my child. My mother is more my mother than she has ever been. My step father is more my father than just the man who stepped in and took care of us, my brother in law’s family has been my family more than I could have recalled. All of the things I have thought before are not as they are right now and in awhile, they will be nothing more or something better and I do not know what they will be or when they will be. Relaxing has a funny way of making the brain and the heart listen to one another. The full moon and the pulling and pushing of the ocean might be related. I haven’t allowed myself the leisure to sit and write like this in some time, so I apologize. I can only sit here and feel the tug, the longing, and find comfort in my solitude, because perhaps, I have not yet learned how to love properly, and because like an naive person, I can only sit and watch and be amazed by all this is around me. For now, g’nite. . -KG