We walked into the mist. We stepped into the darkness. Crawling into a haze created by some atmospheric happening that I don't have the diction to describe. I will call it "the entrance of the womb of the sea". Darkness illuminated by a mist and a dull rusted glow. Patrick became blurry in front of me and the sensations he was describing about the disorientation he was experiencing as we approached the ocean's edge was exact but all the more tangling in my mind because I was feeling the same thing before he verbalized it. We had run down the street as the moments chased us into the new year. A fast embrace held still and an unforced kiss in all its simplicity marked a year trailing behind the next. Firework matches were tossed purposefully towards the water extinguishing themselves but not before our imaginations let them explode before our eyes and above our heads. We turned our backs on the orange glow and haze. Our rebirth was about to begin. We made our way back to the house we had been hibernating in for the past week and a stream of hot water traced the curvature of my cold cheeks silently whispering and reminding me of all that had happened in the past year. "I made it" was all that my lungs could release with a sigh.
Two weeks ago I would describe myself as squirming uncomfortably but convincing myself of stability. In a short period of time all terms that define futurizing dwindled to a thick reduction of basing decisions off of disappointment and disillusion. I was hours away from spending two weeks in a forced environment of self containment. Hours away from doing nothing but thinking and dwelling and making my my mind make decisions. I would have waited for a love to visit me behind closed doors and sealed windows. I was about to close the year off with a wallow that should only be known between the bindings of books, in between the lines, so as to have the option to call it unrealistic and too tragic to be so. Hours before that two weeks was about to begin a small echo from some unknown place within my bellows reached just the right place in my mind and flicked it with all its might. Hours later I was meeting with some Brit name Ben in Prague who had posted a ride share to Paris. It was all too simple which made it easy to once again pack my bag and relentlessly slam the door behind me. I enjoyed my last Czech beers in a little corner pub in Prague with a handful of local drunks. It was the perfect "final" Czech conversation.... one with people that actually wanted to speak Czech and couldn't speak anything else. I waited for Ben to close up his apartment and as the rain began to fall I hopped into his Land Rover as he kissed his Czech affair goodbye. We spent the duration of the ride exploding with conversation about nothing in particular. Driven by the beat of good music and the drive to escape the grasp of whatever was trying to hold onto us. I payed for my second nights sleep since the nine months of nights I have slept since leaving home but swallowed it down without a chaser. We enjoyed a nice meal on the German/French border and woke up early to greet France wide-eyed. Unfortunately, it was blanketed by a cloudy haze but the ride was still enjoyable.
All I knew was that I was heading to a small town on the other side of France and that Patrick would pick me up at the train station. Ben dropped me off in Reins after a nice meandering around the center and I spent the rest of the day navigating my way across the country by hopping perfectly timed trains along with all the other people trying to get somewhere for the holidays. Far into the darkness of the day I stepped off my last train and made my way towards an old friend and his friendly face and another smile that was held up by some body dressed in what looked like an ethnic nightgown (which happened to be Eric's body). Then the details of the next ten days began to reveal themselves. Patrick and I were to be staying in a house with six Brazilians along with an ongoing flow of stragglers that would come in and out over the course of our stay.
The history of what was is all so entangled but in short: Ebert and Antonio are connected to Patrick through New Orleans and The Music Box which is a band that made it to the Plummer School House. They were in France because Marcela was in France. Marcela and Ebert have loved each other for oh so many years and Leticia is a friend of Marcela's from Brazil who moved with her to France to study and work. Eric is Ebert's brother who had been traveling in a Rasta-hippy camper van up from Portugal and around and about Europe who picked up Patrick in Granada, Spain, where he is living and on to Royan, France, where we were staying. Thales is Ebert and Eric's cousin who has been studying in Germany and the fluid community of our little winter beach house includes another gang of Brazilians who were met in France, an Austrian girl, Sophie, who was wooed by the fruit of Eric's loins at some music festival a few months back, and a French-American named Tiffany who worked with Leticia in a little shop in Paris.
We have lived on a basis of no time. We wake up at some point during the day and make breakfast. We spend the day cleaning up from the night before or for the meal ahead. We make music and build fires. We laugh, we drink, we do nothing in particular but the day seems to pass easily. Conversations lead into the night and are egged on by trumpets, and drums, guitars, flutes, and any other sort of sound evoking objects. We watch South Park by the dregs of the day and we laugh when past episodes carry on into the next through imitations and situations. We hug often, massage backs, and make food. We eat food and complement the cooks. We clean all day just as much as we make messes all day. We roll cigarettes and let them get sucked up by the fire at each exhalation into the chimney. We drink bottles and bottles and bottles of the cheapest French wine and willing watch our lips redden and cheeks rosey. We snuggle and cuddle and make love up against walls in the thick of winter air. We lost our sense self and relish in the core of a group. We love unexpectedly and never think of the outside. We chase down sunsets and set tables food first. We enjoy the belly of a house embracing. We go to bed long after our eyelids can't hold up their own weight.
As always there are so many moments to be shared but not enough mental space in this moment to write them out. I will one day choose to learn to write better and more complete or except my inability to tell a story in its entirety from start to end and let the fullness of its insides be leaked out over the years to come through small windows of opportunity for short stories or moments to be told.
Last night I thought to myself that I spent the bulk of my year running away. After running with all that I had to make it to the water before some insignificant time just to be trapped in an abyss of foggy but beautiful mental cloudiness at the strike of a new year I felt somehow weightless and refreshed which seems to be a good way to shed time and gain it. This year I am going to attempt to run as fast as ever but towards something.
My journey continues and I am still lost in it but I have gained a new sense of strength to capture it under a new light.
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