At the moment I’m in the empty kitchen of my friend Heather and her husband Theo. The walls are covered in pictures Theo made, strange drawings of little creatures, ornate and complicated worlds. Five years ago, in Montana, the two of us set up a makeshift screen printing studio in the basement of my house. He was making art-books then, animated narratives, and I was making poems. We shake our heads a little when we realize it’s been as long as it has. Somehow these things happen. If this trip to Thailand hadn’t fallen in my lap the way it did, suddenly and from nowhere, I don’t know how long it would’ve carried on like this, not seeing them. But here I am. Its five years later and we are drinking beer and talking. They are married and about to have a baby. Somehow these things happen too.
Having left Seattle on a slow train south to Portland, yesterday I spent the afternoon staring out the window, pretending the evergreens of central Washington were something else. For three and half hours, the river to my left was a stretch of distant water winding south through India; the forest, a jungle made of elephants and big cats. I, too, I was something else, a different person in a vastly different place, free of being known and, therefore, able to be anyone. Every now and then, in long bright slants the sun cut through the heavy trees and lasted, turned the river into something almost glass.
Perhaps predictably, given the place in which I find myself, I have been thinking lately, as well as talking quite a bit with Riley and Kelli, about how and why it’s like this, what the reason is for the little clock in us that won’t be quiet. Buried somewhere in the stomach, it’s ticking around in there; and we can heart it; and it’s telling us to run. A prevailing train of thought says the desire to travel is as much a need to experience new things as it is a desire to reinvent the old. Another train of thought argues that we leave our homes because they’re broken and they don’t fit right anymore. That, or we are.
I was with Riley at a party in the Cities earlier this summer. A little tired and a little drunk, we were sitting on a flight of stairs that led to a loft above the room in which the people below us moved about and talked above the music.
“I can’t live here anymore,” he said.
“I never could,” I said.
In Minneapolis, and in the Middle-West in general, the people who matter most to me, whose lives I want in my life, are not enough to keep me stationary, rooted as I am in a place I love and understand. Maybe someday I'll come back here. Who knows. When Kelli talks about Eau Claire, it’s usually late at night and we'll be sitting on a bench. She says how much she loves it, that she's happy in Wisconsin, and yet she wants to get away. There is guilt in her voice and sometimes she gets sad and excited all at once. I'm not sure that any of us really know exactly what the feeling is except to say that it is there. And yet, we understand it. At this point I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but I tell myself over and over that I believe in it. I like the way it keeps me moving, helps me love. I trust the feeling very very much.
In one of the pictures on the wall in the kitchen, a toy train on a toy train-track is leaving the open mouth of a creature best described as a woodland astronaut with tiny wings and antlers. On the train, a tiny version of the creature leaves the interior of the larger creature when it speaks. Now the train drops down across the creature’s chest and enters a city through a tunnel. The city is alive with hundreds of little doors and windows. Also, the city is a clock. It waves its hands in the air and a bird escapes the city because it’s time. As the creature approaches the city, then enters it, and then comes out the other side, it changes. Coming and going, it is no longer simply a smaller version of itself. It is something else entirely, more bird like, more at home in air then in the ocean.
In Thailand, I imagine Bangkok too is a living mechanism, the tiny version of myself I am right now approaching one of many doors. I am trying to remember the places that I've been, the people who defined them. I bend down low and look through all the keyholes. In one room, Riley is smoking by an open window. There are birds in the sky, clouds, and in the space between the clouds, the half-dead reds and dirty yellows of a low sun lasting in the night's pollution. The birds are soundless. Kelli on the grass.
Now, in the picture, the new creature enters a heart shaped opening in the chest of another larger one. The larger creature has a forest on its head, evergreens. An animal, a small brown wolf, is leaping out from the top of the forest, and it is speaking in a language at once familiar and strange. The creature with the forest in its head is connected to the astronaut because the train, and the tracks the train is on, and the little creatures going through a thousand transformations make it possible. They understand each other. The city connects them and contains them, makes them slightly altered versions of each other. When the wolf in the forest on the head of the creature speaks, the fact of having traveled from one place to another makes it’s speaking audible, somewhere in the stomach, buried there and wanting to let out.
In Thailand, I imagine Bangkok too is a living mechanism, the tiny version of myself I am right now approaching one of many doors. I am trying to remember the places that I've been, the people who defined them. I bend down low and look through all the keyholes. In one room, Riley is smoking by an open window. There are birds in the sky, clouds, and in the space between the clouds, the half-dead reds and dirty yellows of a low sun lasting in the night's pollution. The birds are soundless. Kelli on the grass.
Now, in the picture, the new creature enters a heart shaped opening in the chest of another larger one. The larger creature has a forest on its head, evergreens. An animal, a small brown wolf, is leaping out from the top of the forest, and it is speaking in a language at once familiar and strange. The creature with the forest in its head is connected to the astronaut because the train, and the tracks the train is on, and the little creatures going through a thousand transformations make it possible. They understand each other. The city connects them and contains them, makes them slightly altered versions of each other. When the wolf in the forest on the head of the creature speaks, the fact of having traveled from one place to another makes it’s speaking audible, somewhere in the stomach, buried there and wanting to let out.
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