dlh
ps--and Sera is still tickin' along! wooot! woot!
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So it's good-bye Buffalo. I got to visit the airport on my last night at work, for some poor girl who fell out of an airplane and dislocated her hip. So I have one more sure-fire winner in the "Have You Ever?" game: Have you ever driven on the runway of an international airport? With a police escort? I don't think so. Drink up!
The Stronghold is packed and gone. Sean is moving into my room, and I am back on the road. I have a traveling chest now, with all the stickers I could find slapped on the outside, and pictures and notes taped to the inside lid. A mini-stronghold, with natrually more books and pens and torn-up-cereal-box notebooks than clothes...unless you count the wool socks.
I'm sitting at home, listening to Colin Hay. It's still home, even though I haven't lived here in four years. I think it's the curtains. When you put curtains up, when you start attending to decoration, you're committing to a place and a time. Home in Detroit is the last place I lived with curtains, and here I am sleeping in a real bed and eating meals that have multiple dishes. What a lark!
Still I am transient. I am at home and home will always be home--but I don't really exist here. My family and friends have work and school and chores and the kind of small talk visitors on holiday are not involved in. I have all the time in the world to sleep, and three books lie open next to my bed, and I am sitting paused in front of an empty screen. Words are reluctant, sentences tentative, and I am doing a lot of waiting for nothing in particular.
In a week, maybe two, I will be off for another curtainless room in Houghton. My identity will change again. I do not know how stressful it will be--or how deeply I will alter my habits of presentation. What new Dan Holcomb will emerge between me and my new co-workers? I wonder how recognizeable I will be to co-workers who have known me before. I wonder how recognizeable I am now to older friends from home. Will I know myself in this new place? Already my thoughts have grown turbulent around bringing the tougher, harsher man I have become in the nights on Buffalo streets home to mother and church.
I've been sleeping for the past eight months with a collection of old notebooks and journals on the bookshelves over my head. I haven't read through them in, oh, over a year. Part of me thinks I should--it's a semi-regular custom. Part of me doesn't want to. I've even been shying away from perusing the prior parts of my current journal when I'm opening it to write--something I haven't done in a little while. I'm strangely hesitant about anything committal, and putting words down on paper is a committment if you're a packrat like me. Those words will be there, in a journal I plan on keeping until I die.
What's keeping my hands hovering near but never opening those old books? Is it that there's no turning back? It won't be my friends and family not recognizing the me I've become. It won't be new acquaintances confused about the shape of my face and the color of my language. It'll be a younger me staring back appraisingly.
I'm not at all sure I'll recognize myself. It might grate in the unpleasant taste of the bargain I've struck with my current circumstances, stick it in the back of my mouth where I can't get at it and can't get it out of the way of a fragile peace I've made with a pretty uncompromising adult world. Maybe that's the fracture in the foundation that's unsettling this curtainless house with its empty rooms in my head...
Are these thoughts mine? Am I really at conflict with myself? Is something implicit in me warring with something explicit and important in my life? Am I walking a line between pragmatism and capitulation? Am I wishing I could find that line marked tight and clear?
This writing thing is scary. This identity thing is scarier. I am wondering how stable and endurirng and faithful the "I" is. Am I learning and growing, or or just adapting to the moment? I don't like feeling adrift and disconnected, removed a short distance even from the life of my old community at home. I don't like that eerie mercurial sense of personal transience that I get in between communities, in between lives.
But I really don't like the thought of burying it, unresolved, in the generation of a new noisy rhythmic busy life. I don't like the thought that I may remain unchanged, unresolved, subsumed into some quieting patterns and distracting tasks, something insubstantial into an identity in need of something solid and true.
