5 years ago, today

sunrise

I woke in a motel room in St. Augustine before sunrise and ran to the beach. It had been years since I had seen the ocean, 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. The beach in the vision was located at the intersection of Memory and Imagination, somewhere off the Outer Banks of North Carolina:

author, circa 1980

morning

My father and I 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.

Castillo de San Marcos

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.

181st Street and Fort Washington

night

To my knowledge I wrote nothing on November 9, 2006. In retrospect I find it a beautiful coincidence that the date now exists in both metaphorical and indexical limbo – the chain of signifiers was broken on that day; it exists between these journals:

__

and these pens:

__

There is nothing more important than the space connecting one moment of our material existence to the next.

It is empty, 

yet full;

present, 

yet absent.

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.