The first thing that strikes you is your own nausea.
The second thing that strikes you is the barbed wire, looking sordidly out of place amongst the small and homogenous people. They all bear a certain weary quiet.
I see the bars enclosing the store fronts, the sun-bleached advertisements, a dry sort of poverty.
I see the desperate smears of identity on all the walls of all the streets, tags, throw-ups, names littering the town. The search for names bubbling over the societal structure, the drive the climb the hunger all confined to public painted lettering. Establishing the self within the fog of the river current. It’s desperate.
You wonder what it is that makes them scream.
I see through the eyes of 2006, accessing certain vulnerabilities I thought I had lost.
I see the foreigners holding their phones out in the streets, and the dark eyes and flat faces of the people that know better. I see the glass shatter and hear an echo of the angry cry from the night my mother lost her earrings.
You feel the roots of 2006 ensnare your ankles, twisting their way up your young body, crushing the fluttering movement that enables you. You live in the recurring nightmare, and are pulled into the soil’s soul over and over again.
This time the people do make their way onto your tongue and pour themselves into your blood, unwittingly engorging your veins. You feel lightheaded and so wanted. The wet mess of the outside world teeming underneath your skin is alarming and repugnant. There’s no ripping through you now. You see the boundary line that separates your body from the rest of the world is non-existent. You’ve only been imagining your skin, and feeling touches transgress you your whole life.
With each bump of the vehicle, you reconnect with your profound unwillingness to let anyone go. To let anything go.
This time I see the water swallow the horizon, beginning to merge with the small, tiny tan colored stones at the base of the cliffs. I see the fog obscure the demarcation line between the sea and the sky, subsequently making two parts one whole. Somewhere in the sky I see my own blood.
I see my memories. I see my exhaustion. I see I see I see a home I did not grow in.
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