Ghosting.

We can go and walk in the morning.
We don't need streetlights, just a new start.
Not paralyzed by appearances, with big ideas
And just way too smart to walk around
On the surface, when there's an ocean
Just beneath its blue-green smile.
-R. Votolato


There was a time when I was perpetually gone or going. If I were back from a tour, I was booking flights for the next. A significant portion of my internal rhythm was regulated by passing through airports, almost to the point of dependence. Newark. Los Angeles. Honolulu. Seattle-Tacoma. Minneapolis. Atlanta. Buenos Aires. Gothenburg. Copenhagen. Zurich. London. Frankfurt. Hamburg. Tel Aviv. Stockholm. Bologna. None of which accounts for the now countless jaunts across this country that I made by ground. There were times I'd come home from a month abroad, only to get up the next day and get in a van, or onto yet another plane to skip town for another month, or six weeks, or two months.

Learning to sleep in vans, venues, and terminal gates, I allowed the notion of home as a place that implies stable responsibilities or a command of my attention to slip away, buried by boarding calls and passing cars. It wasn't that I disliked my life enough to neglect or abandon it. Probably more realistically, there were demons with which I was locked in a death-match waiting game. The Whisper, as Cassie called it, and its handful of architects. Their only advantage was their crippling gaze, and the cowardice of knowing onlookers. My only advantage was the fact that the Earth happens to be round, and one can only cast a gaze so far. Short of counting on less cowardly onlookers (or lovers), the Atlantic was usually of sufficient width to dull the blow.

In hindsight, it's just as likely that some part of me was putting off writing certain final chapters, by way of absence. No amount of humility, patience or devotion was going to keep that book from closing; life tends to get in the way of whether or not such things matter (and sorry to ruin the story for you kids, but your peers will exact precisely zero to safeguard or reward such sentiments in the interests of a more reasonable set of possibilities for us all). One embraces and honors such things for the sake of cringing a little less at the sight of one's own reflection, and should count on little more.

Ultimately, the ink simply ran out. There was no real climax, no resolution, no conclusion. I'd slowed down enough to appreciate what awaited me when I'd run my course with life as transit. And in the face of routinely watching my most challenging and spiritually demanding moments evaporate into thin air, I simply ran out of things to say (or at least the energy to say them)... and then quietly closed the door on what little I'd left of home, behind me.

The irony, of course, is that eclipsing the last vestiges of "home" had no geographic implications. I'd cultivated a material framework firmly grounded in the District, and for that matter, (despite years spent spilling across the Western Hemisphere and beyond) knew very little else. My relationship with home became not unlike a relationship with a lover suffering from severe memory loss; spinning through my daily commutes, I could still navigate the city's contours like tracing over details of a familiar body... But whatever had once fired within that shell was nowhere to be found. Remaining present meant committing to learning about this new person inhabiting that body.

Committing to some other geography was more time than I was really willing to give of my remaining 60 or so years, and the last time she cast her lot with performing rather cheap mourning rituals over my departure (to an audience all too invested in the mythology sustained by these widely publicized bits of theater), I forfeit my affection for the city that, until recently, she'd only ever reluctantly called home. One cannot be what one was. And I'd already been that guy, ceding some portion of a history I'd yet to see handled honestly or responsibly (to staggering effect).

A tension has emerged since, which now dominates my inner monologue; one in which I'm failing to decide whether the nearly two years that have followed should be characterized by this shell of material pursuits with which I've busied myself (presumably in preparation for the day something will catch and the gears will stop spinning aimlessly), or whether this is - in fact - who I am. My hostility toward metaphysics being what it is, I'm not wed to the idea that there's anything significantly profound to be mined from my day to day trajectory. Maybe there isn't any compelling justification or inspiration for getting up and passing each day. Maybe it's just something that happens, irrespective of larger narratives. And just as well, maybe not.

It occurred to me at some point that I have perhaps been seduced by yet another waiting game - one in which I continue to get up each day, continue to fulfill responsibilities and commitments, continue to safeguard my material and emotional stability... But only in waiting, betraying any fidelity to movement with L'Altra of motion. Not entirely unlike the hours whittled away in Newark. And Los Angeles. And Honolulu. And Seattle-Tacoma. And Minneapolis. And Atlanta. And Buenos Aires. And Gothenburg. And Copenhagen. And Zurich. And London. And Frankfurt. And Hamburg. And Tel Aviv. And Stockholm. And Bologna.

So, I've left. Again. Trading in lucrative self-employment and a two-storey apartment for a modest basement room in a hilltop condo, and a keen lack of routines with which to bury the passing of the present. Invariably, I'll return, but I needed to wrest myself from the inertia of rising and resting, a stranger to what emerges between the two.

The waiting game can kiss my ass.