Friday 24 April 2015

--------the everyday/// transitions

"maybe you just know too many people...."
"huh, maybe...."

///the last few months had been more than a little surreal... the city gradually began to diminish as I explored ever new territories and carved out new paths, both spiritual, and geographical////

        since leaving my job at groundwork and going back to work part-time at my last remaining refuge, my days have been marked with spontaneity and serendipity, long stretches of wild and natural quiet broken up by the city noise, crowds and traffic// solitude preempts unity (& some connections don't ever go away)...    

I've tried bringing myself back to myself through journeying. And through journeying I've crossed paths with so many people I know and have known from so many different lives in the most unlikely places; old friends, new ones, former colleagues, people I've shared half conversations with, people I've met on side streets and at obscure gatherings, people who have meant so much to me and people who I have meant so much too. It's been more that a little surreal. And while in former years, this same serendipity, and these same chance encounters had been the cause of much anxiety, making me feel like a ghost haunting the city, now it's almost comforting. And though some of these serendipitous encounters have been rather beautiful others have been quite nightmarish, causing me to turn corners, cross roads, pull my hood over my head and start in the opposite direction (do we ever really grow up, do we ever truly change?) the majority have been welcome.

It's strange, London is supposed to be a very lonely city. And maybe a lot of the time it is. I wonder, is it this fragmentation, that makes it lonely, the fact that we know everyone and no one too? The fact that people come in and out of our lives so oft, leaving nothing behind but memories that fast fade... Fragmentation: the fact that we come by so many of the same people in so many different contexts, yet on some level, still remain detached, unable and unwilling to formulate the stuff we need to say, the stuff that won't go away-so much is still left unsaid, and it's these none conversations, these half conversations, these ghost conversations, the fleeting looks that pierce holes, these moments of warmth that really drive that concept home. I don't know. A lot of the time I don't know how to take things in life, so I just ignore them, forget them, will them to go away, until they do, but so often they come up again: place and person. And there are so so many people I've seen and heard from this last month, so many people to whom I should have maybe said something to, but to be real, I didn't know what that something was.

I didn't know what to say, and how to say it, and you know I have problems communicating, and you know this is why I write because sometimes I can't talk. Sometimes I have nothing to say. Because in this big big world, of many many words, there are none that fit. So I read that book, and it keeps coming up again, everything. So take my silence as everything and nothing at all, and return it to me- silence.

Few people understand the way I live, impulsively, freely, haphazardly, unwilling to commit or compromise, but happy to just float on... to be... I live in the everyday.  The only place livable. The only place I can find freedom. I find it easier than most to walk away from everything, to adapt. A few months ago I was hanging out with mayors, today I'm cleaning bird shit off shop windows, that's life. And that's fine by me. And sure maybe I'll have to grow up one day. But for now, I'm happy to be free, to be me. I don't know, I often think I could live out my whole life like this, drifting from job to job, place to place, meeting interesting people, seeing beautiful things. brief sojourns, unplanned stop overs, lying on the grass and staring at the sky.... sometimes I think I could live out my whole life in the beautiful every day....

...and hey, who knows, one day maybe I'll be able to say all the shit I wanna say to all those people... who knows....