sunrise
i awoke in a motel room in St. Augustine before sunrise and ran to the beach. i had not seen the ocean in years, and at that moment nothing seemed more important. three weeks earlier i had experienced a vision of myself as a toddler, sitting on a bench looking out over the water.
morning
my father and i, both history buffs, visited the Spanish forts that overlooked the bay. walking around the ruins, i wondered how much blood had been shed, how many lives had been lost. i thought about the men who died in sight of the bay, the men who never touched the water.
midday
we stopped at Cape Canaveral and took a tour of the grounds. i was surprised by the amount of wildlife surrounding the launch pad, and fascinated by the sheer scale of the operation. i thought about the men and women who touched the sky, and the perspective that must come with experiencing one's own body as weightless, one's own planet as distant and small.
evening
i arrived in a strange town with everything i owned, or at least everything i wanted to own, in a single bag. it was not unlike my move to New York seven years earlier, except that the sturdy green canvas had been replaced with a flimsy blue linen. that night i purchased a college-ruled composition pad and a new pen. i had been using ballpoint for ten years at that point, and i decided it was time for a change.
night
to my knowledge i wrote nothing on November 9, 2006, and in retrospect i find it a beautiful coincidence that that day now exists as both a metaphorical and indexical limbo. the chain of signifiers was broken on that day; it exists between these journals:
__
and these pens:
__
the pens and journals and sentences left behind are merely the sedimentation of memory, artifacts of a past that (n)ever existed, monuments to the life that was. meaning does not come from words;
but from the silences between them.
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