I asked you one night: “And what if we were dots of light?”
What if we left a line of light for each journey we made? From bathroom door to bedroom window, to kitchen fridge for water, back to bed to give our thoughts a rest, our mind some time to switch off.
2,580 miles in the speed of light, from home to home, the eternal traveller, a stranger in every homeland, the unforgiven drifter. And isn’t it funny? All these short silver lines for all the pointless walking, all the muttering to ourselves as we repeat baby steps, as we keep falling. Many short lines, careless strokes of silver for all the minor mistakes that never fade away. A dozen long lines in search of a solution, in search of ourselves, in search of something to hold on to.
I draw a long line once to find someone who could give me myself back, but I returned (to myself) empty-handed.
“How would our map of life look like if we were dots of light?”
350 days of smudged silver ink, the pressure of time pushing (against) us, pushing us forward when all we want to do is fall behind. Helpless, irresolute children in prams we didn’t choose to be in. We swing high into the sky now, but we don’t remember. Scattered cut-outs from our childhood. We stare in nostalgia sometimes, but we don’t remember. Who gave us the first push and why, why we are battling our way through the air.
We are adults now, you say. Gloriously free, rebellious adults.
I asked mum once if there really is a place somewhere called Neverland, whether I could make it my homeland if I liked. I asked mum once how free you can really be, in a world whose true boundaries are ticking clocks, ticking bombs, the boredom of everyday box ticking.
She never answered but you, you said I should wait till we are real adults.
Dance with me, you said, and time will have to surrender.
When you didn’t come home that night, I thought about slow dancing with you for eight hours in a row. And then I thought about turning away, running away from you, running fast, in all different directions. I had a passing thought once, about how beautiful our maps should be, always running away yet always returning to our core, to our shared centre.
Fireworks on a page, our story as an explosion of light.
I told my dad one night that I wished to hold no one’s hand, that I would be strong enough one day to grow wings instead and fly. He smiled and I said that we could hold hands till then, that we could share the same life map if only we always crossed these streets together, that our lines of light would always unite into a bold, almighty line.
Of course, our hands have been separated since then. But I think he would still agree that this is just real life, I think we would both still smile.
There must be parts of his journey that coincide with mine, parts of your journey that are also mine, parts of our life maps that somehow merge into that bold, defiant brush of silver. And then there are those parts that we form when we hesitantly drag ourselves in opposite directions. Slow lines, heavy, both of us injuring the earth as we painfully break away from each other.
I say welcome to real life, where things don’t always sparkle.
I told you one night: “I think we are flashing lights. We might not shine that much, but I think we are sending signals of life to each other when it gets darker.”
PS: The music, the images, our shared moments. Remember the shared light.
Rational Artist 