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| I made a new site. You can find me if you'd like. I've probably already found you.
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| Keat is not an ordinary boy, nor have I ever pretended
he was. Damn near impossible to understand (what human is ever, really,
fully understood?), he has always been ever harder to define, to pass
along, to explain. I can't help but try though, as you'll be hearing
more and more of him as time goes by.
Maybe a story will help.
One
New Year's Eve, he took me to a platform under the bridge. The platform
separated the river from the pillars. The pillars separated the
platform from the bridge. Above us was Route 1, the easternmost road in
the United States of any real interest. If I'm not mistaken, it runs
from Maine to Florida, or vice versa, depending on your particular
point of view and personal bias. We grew up in Maine, and always saw it
as starting there. And headed elsewhere. Just like us. Without much of
a notion of where we were going, there were always big plans to get us
headed out on some adventure. Some of these plans, in time, came to
fruition, most of them didn't. Keat was okay with that, more often than
not, but I generally was frustrated at the way things always fell apart
at the last minute. Anyway, the highway, though full of meaning in our
lifetimes, was only a roof that New Year's Eve. Rather than cheering
and dancing and kissing pretty girls, we spent the end of that year
away from nearly everyone else in the world, drinking red wine from a
cracked bottle and telling bits of our lives to each other. I didn't
always grasp just what he was telling me. Most of his stories left me a
little confused. There were always unresolved plot lines and random
characters that didn't do much for the story at all. But I always,
always, always walked away feeling different. Feeling like I got something out of sitting there while he talked. This was one of those stories:
"A
canary named Miriam hopped along the stone wall of a garden planted by
a family of pioneers. They were one of the first families to settle in
this part of the country. It's not really known that there are still,
in some sense, pioneers in America, but there are. There are these big
patches of land in places like Wyoming that the government will just
give you if you decide to build a house and live there. More than two
hundred years after claiming this little section of the world as our
own, we still haven't filled it up, because, as we all know, people
like to cluster into piles and cities. Loneliness is the most common
trouble in the world, and people will do anything to ease it.
Miriam
didn't know any of this, though, and only sang her chirpy little songs.
That was what she did because that was why she was created. To sing and
to fly. Miriam didn't know it, but birds were the envy of all other
creatures because of their freedom from gravity. Gravity is the way the
whole world pulls everything together. Old mystics called this same
force by a different name. They called it "love." Most people would say
that they don't want to be free of love. And that's probably a good
thing.
Magellan didn't have wings. He wasn't created to fly or
to sing. He was covered in hair and claws and spent most of his days
pacing and circling in the woods near the garden and in the clearings
that sat in the sun, unsheltered by the oak leaves. He called this
adventure. Everything was more or less the same, wherever he went, even
if he took a different route in his daily wanderings. Maybe everything
is the same everywhere. He wasn't sure. It wasn't much of a curiosity
that kept him walking, but more of a contentedness. He optimistically
plodded the tiny area, eating when he was hungry and sleeping when he
was tired. That was what he did because that was why he was created.
There
are plenty of creatures like Magellan out there, his species. He didn't
know what his species was called, it never occurred to him that they'd
be called anything. They just were. Everything else deserved a
name, but he never dreamed that everything else in the world might have
a name for the little beings that look just like him. One of these
beings, looking and smelling and behaving much like Magellan, was out
and about one morning and crossed his line of sight. He would have
followed after her, but the echoing of dim melodies attracted him and
he continued to move toward it.
Miriam chirped and sang, now,
from atop a sunflower. She had no idea a furry little wanderer was
optimistically plodding her way. She had no idea the sunflower she was
sitting on was named Archimedes by other sunflowers. Sunflowers didn't
chirp or sing or fly or even wander. They grew and grew and turned
their face to wherever the sun was. Without much to do or any place to
go, sunflowers were very wise and learned many things in their lives.
Most other creatures, though, didn't have the right ears to hear them,
so they lived out most of their lives rather unappreciated, except for
their beauty. This was sad, because in all creatures, beauty is the
most temporary of all virtues. In most cases it is silly to place value
on an object because of it's beauty, as the beauty will vanish ages
before any other virtue or vice. Those who valued sunflowers, though,
even just for their beauty, were not often let down, because sunflowers
were uncommonly noble, and never once in the recorded history of the
world have they ever injured or scorned another thing. Archimedes did
these things because that was why he was created. He grew and he
thought and he was beautiful."
Keat would end a story
without much warning. I could only tell, after years of his friendship,
that he was done telling a story when he started fidgeting with his
hands. He'd pick at his fingertips with his other hand and sometimes
would glance to the left before looking back down. He never was great
at looking anyone in the eye. He told me once that when he made eye
contact, he saw everything about that person. There were no real
secrets left and whatever the person he looked at was thinking was
completely revealed, decoded. Early in his life, Keat realized he
didn't want to know everything about everyone, because he liked
surprises and mysteries. And he was always afraid the gift worked both
ways. And the last thing in the world he wanted was to have other
people know what he was thinking. He wanted to be understood, of
course, above all else. He didn't want to be lonely or free of love or
anything of the sort, but it had to be more, it had to be harder than
just looking and seeing and knowing. To this day, I think he just wants
someone to ask. Someone with a sincere look on their face to wonder how
he is really doing. I'm not positive about any of this, though, because
I haven't the courage to ask. | | |
| if you're my ray of sunshine
why am i so often blue
you'd think the color'd change from time to time
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| Three weeks down, two to go. Aaron and I are in Latvia right now.
We've been in Amsterdam, London, Birmingham, Paris, Brussels, Hambug, Cologne, Bielefeld, Berlin, Kaunas, Vilnius, Sialiai, and now in Riga.
We've flown, hitchhiked, walked, taken buses, trains, ferrys, and even rode on a school bus.
We've slept in vans, on floors of strangers, on the couches of new friends, in a monastary, and a few nights outside.
We are both writing a lot. Oh. You know what that means.
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| so i'm headed to europe today with the boys. then aaron and i are going to lithuania and latvia for three weeks. gonna be monks 'n' stuff. chill.
i'll be back in the states may 23rd ish.
then i'll be relapsing into the adventures that have so filled my past few months.
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