"i am free and lost in this freedom. do you know what i mean by that?" – ingeborg bachmann, from a letter to paul cela
solar eclipse, as in: the sun falls asleep and the whole world forgets it. as in: midsummer turns into a collection of shivering days, turns into every echo of the jaws of a suitcase clicking closed. this routine of ours is nothing more than an assortment of nimble enchantments, vivid breezes and wooden floors that breathe with you, dust winds wisped into nearly-there, nearly-gleaming circlets. but the story, as it always is, stands to be something more, larger than life. if there is anything to be known, it is that there is a theory for everything, and all of them start like this: trembling fingers, the rush of a passing car, the moon shattering mid-sky, it’s crashed shrapnel sharp and timeless in your hands. how easy it is to come up empty for the things that haunt hijacked, that play without rules. there is too much space to exist in, there in the future, too many places left out for obscurity, for chance. but the question stays, stands: are you still contending? is it still your turn? there is a comfort in lingering just outside of improvisation, to take everything day by day, hour by hour, each minute spent following at the coattails of a mystery a little larger than the entire universe. like the very beginnings of time are something real, here, in a way you can take them up in your hands and turn them over and find every answer waiting, eyes open. like here, you can be anything, you can believe in anything, because you have made it to right here – and you are not alone. what you want to say is: i see you. did you hear me? i see you, and the weight of everything you are holding. what you want to ask is: are you surviving? do you know? does it feel like surviving? what you want to ask is: how does the past haunt you? is it all palindromes, different but the same, a story told frontwards and backwards and still it is the same, always and forever the same? and yet, isn’t that how everything is, until it isn’t, any longer? there is an interlude between being alive and becoming a story that no one knows how to hold, exactly. we are shaped like yesterday but we are not the same. that’s the trick, isn’t it? we never are. we live our lives mid-air, all of these pieces of things like something added to a collection, an accumulation, of all of these moments that make us. time is endless: why does that feel like a secret? the odds are endless, the statistics of continuing / repeating into its own infinity: what are the chances i will go today? tomorrow? how do we know how long will it take? how do we wake in the morning and not expect it around every corner? how do we hold it, day after day, how there is this and yet / we continue. is that not strength? or is it a kind of vanity, how we say to the world, you cannot knock me down for long. we say, try, all bared teeth and open palms. how we stand, over and again, and say: here is the world and how i can stop it with my own two hands if i wanted to. we say, try me, atlas, and grin. tell me again, how you resist the urge to leave fingerprints everywhere. to press pieces of pressure into every surface around, to leave proof that you were alive, that you were here and you saved the world. otherwise, how do you know? how do you know that these vagrant glories of past trials, how stubbornly failure persisted at your heels, your overcomings – were even real? you know of no kings, no gods with tones like yours, dirty hands and star-filled shadows, surrendering swords, the ever-tuned lyre of the romantics. tell me again, what stays? what holds? what lasts, past the dying light, when history has turned away? maybe time is a language we only know how to use with a tender-wrecked geography. one you give where only the air circulates. maybe it is / how we give ghosts. something so close to the chest it’s a risk of losing too much of yourself and having nothing left / or everything. too much or nothing at all, like seeds the wind blew to your home but couldn’t survive the season. like an archaic nostalgia that still feels palpable, somehow, history and innovation in the same breath, engulfing every pause, every plane, like light. like light / that never goes out. gather up your life in both hands, chains and change alike, from where they sit muddled together in your pockets. hold the world, or something like it, with the name of the universe in your ears. everything here is trembling and violent, of little meaning and pivotal. stand here as something that has existed before, existed longer, where your eyes were then not just eyes and your mouth was then not just a mouth and maybe, just for once, just to see what it felt like, you wanted to be something else, something different, something more. maybe you still do. maybe you still could. maybe you still can / still are. the sky is leaking into the horizon, now, and the impossible hope of dawn is passing quickly, light following itself home; and like this, it is easier to hold, between your palms, like a promise. hours later, when the sun meets the horizon for another dusk, every last word between you and the air is nothing but contentment, laughter. there, it’s effortless, somehow, in a way it wasn't before, and you say in unison like it is the only constant in the entire universe: the future is ours, and we will take it up in our hands, and we will call it our own.
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