A fistful of air

I'm at the edge of a place. In the indefinite greyness I call out my name, letting it echo, reverberating along the boundaries of this world. I'm at the brink of understanding, of knowing my place in this fraying memory, this protracted segue into the future. Transience does not suit me. I seek strong, solid earth beneath my feet. The realization of home anchors me to a place. But no home presents itself here. A dorm is a shell, a rest stop along the way. It is not a home. A college is an organic institution, a sentient, evolving body of life, but is it a home?

Questions rattle against my mind, shaking loose bits and pieces I thought I had lost.

My progress feels slow, but rapidly accelerating. Soon I'll have reached that terminal velocity, soon the interface of my life and this place will disengage; I'll soar or fall flat.

This is just my roundabout way of saying that I'm feeling the pressure. This is just my way of saying that I miss home. I miss my friends. I wonder if they miss me.

This is my way of relating a memory.... leading the reader through so much extraneous information, hoping to ground them in my thought process, the why of this recollection, the context in which I have framed this image just so--as propaganda for my you and I to digest in tandem. Because as I tell a memory in my head, I'm reassuring myself again and again that I am alive, that I've done this and that and can remember doing so.

Sometimes I remember so vividly the memory feels touchable, like a dream come to life, all sinew and bone and gossamer strands of hair. Reading Nabokov has compelled me to think of themes in my memories, to trace the slow, gradual branching of my life. What are the overarching tropes of my existence? What series of circumstances brought me to this point? I started out so simple. Just a boy with a bulb cut on his way to school. And now I'm something all together different, something I can't really describe with much eloquence right now.

So I race back in time to gather clues, to speculate and wonder. What if I had never taken that class? What if mom had stayed in Pennsylvania and never gone back to Knoxville. What if dad hadn't been so cold? So busy with his work and his own mind. I try to condense down into a sentence, a phrase, just who I am. And I come back empty handed.

Somehow, I'll work through this. I'll piece together all these colorful pennants of life I have shored up in my mind and make a picture for myself. I'll find the threads that hold it all together. I'll snip them off, and watch the picture unravel about me, so beautiful in its dissolution.

The first thread then is this: Water both still and moving

The second: strong female figures

The third: Summers layered like rock strata

The fourth: Clothes hanging in my closet

The fifth: the continuity of place and time

The sixth: long drives and airport terminals