cups of coffee and pad-thai
So i am here. And it seems to be the simplest thing to say. Am. Here. And i suppose i could say that i am happy, but if you have read Mig's blog it might be possible for you to understand how complicated simplicity can be.
I can grasp the physical location. That is simple enough. A measurable distance from home and family. The trees seem more alive here, as if the air is richer and the people less ambivalent. There are islands off the coast and it makes it seem like a myth, as if Odysseus could come home soon with seaweed gifts and distant memories. The rivers are not dying and there are mountains, of sorts, even though it seems someone decided to give up halfway through.
You come not for the place but for the person, and it is in this respect that the distance becomes something still exotic and hazily wonderful, like seeing something through sea mist. She likes different things and she is the only one that can make me wonder why that is. I don't do this in silence, this cartography of the personally inexplicable. She tells me that she is an old women trapped in a young woman’s body and i have to agree with the principle but not her connotations. She is old the way a caterpillar is old weaving its cocoon, slow and asleep to the world that has become irrelevant and blurred in motion, but we cannot decide who is moving too quickly, Zeno died while still trying and left her lost without the necessary answer.
We spin things endlessly in the same room and even though we move our hands through thin air, it feels that the room might not be big enough to fit it all. We cannot open the windows for the cold and sometimes i can hear whatever it is bump against the glass like a mournful, wayward moth.
This is what it feels like to say that i am here. Am here. But while the words are enough to keep my body still and in place, they do not say all there is to say. Am here, but here is bigger than it seems, more than the four letters imply.
She wants her clothes to almost clash, to almost fit, to almost be fashionable, but like so many debutantes she will not go all the way. It is the same with her home and the same with her life. An almost "there" but like the word "here" it is not enough to hold all that she implies and no matter the almost, if it went all-the-way then it would be damn near intolerable.
I have watched her move as if every moment is a decision that was almost made to stop. I have watched her not falling asleep after hours of being "tired". I have watched her at rest and never seen something move so fast. You can watch a contradiction for hours and never call it by its real name. This one has a name but it misses its unpronounceable counterpart and i always feel uncomfortable saying it.
This constant confusion is one of the problems with knowing Mig in "real life". It's exhausting and i'm not entirely sure that the human being has the necessary sensory equipment to discern it or keep track of it. She will always come out with her trademark "blah" and visibly think about slapping you but it only adds to the enigmaticism. How could one so crude and, almost, peasant-simple be the one who can sift through her own rough, practice the dark alchemy of personality shifting. I silence myself in want of more names.
As we drove around today i noticed that i want everything labeled. And why not when i still turn to her and ask "what's the word for that", "I don't know, you silly boy". She thinks there are to many words but she will always remind me that she loves them all. She visits these silly labels in the dictionary under lamp light, she repeats words i read out to her and holds them on the tip of her tongue, swings them up the back, the back of the tongue being sensitive to sourness and all the better if the word is sour or perverse, she likes it when it's not only the ink that is black.
She is evasive to the extreme. As forthcoming in print as she is withheld in life, she talks a great deal without saying much at all and notes with a sly delight the agitation this causes. She is the proverbial haystack but we are at a disadvantage not knowing what it is that we are looking for. When you get pricked you know you should have known better.
This is a very long way of saying that I am happy to be here, that it feels right and all too long in the coming to be here, that the time it took stretches behind me and seems the longer for being here now, knowing that I should not have been so long away.
And why write this, why is it necessary?. She says that it says a lot more about me than it says about her and she would be right, is almost always right, but what do i care. The respect you pay to someone in private bears no shame when it hits the cold air of the public arena. Why wait for something to pass before you are willing to give it its proper due.