In Which Jara Provides a Nearly-Wordless Post

I want to start updating regularly.

I'm in the middle of grad school applications.

Non-essay writing isn't happening right now.

Here. Have a picture of a peacock feather.

I hope you have a nice day.

(I think I was inspired by this picture, originally:)

 

I like that quote.

Home is Where the Heart Is

When we were little, my sister used to save everything. With the extravagant and gullible affection of childhood, she would harvest toys, pictures, even little pieces of paper if they were sufficiently "cute" and colorful (meaning purpley), to go in a little treasure chest overflowing with what nobody else would have considered valuable.

I did not understand sentimental attachments. I had them, of course, but they didn't make sense to me. An object's sentimental aspect comes from its associated memories and feelings—things which are inherently inside your head and cannot be taken away from you. If lost, they are things forgotten, which a mere physical item can not bring back. So—if circumstance provides that you misplace the item, or find it no longer worth the space it takes up—what have you lost? Nothing important, so long as the important part is still inside of you. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

And yet, in June, as I piled and boxed my stuff on my roommate's living room floor, an old stuffed horse and a blanket tumbled out of the trash bag that had housed them for three years, and a wave swept up and melted a side of my heart. These...feelings. Come from images I can no longer remember (oh God, my brain, empty fumes, I mean rooms, I mean how do you call the flipping mind thingies that hold memory stuff) but they somehow—how?—still are embedded in me. Strongly.

It's like... I used to remember all the important things. Now, my mind's out of fuel and out of space. It's no longer an empty bookshelf or even a full one, but a museum of the scars and events of my life, its very structure a memorial to the history that created it.

It's like... I'm no longer entirely inside of me. I've left little pieces of me all around, without a map to find them all, and the environment around me is the key that unlocks those associations and brings them back.

*     *     *

I remember taking a walk in the waste field behind my first apartment complex, climbing up on top of a pile of rocks, fenced in by a net of wire to form a containing wall. A weed had burst out of the caged rocks, and, given that it grew with no soil to speak of, I admired its verve.

“When you transplant a plant,” Steve said from beside me, also regarding it, “it’s the tiny little roots you need to be careful of. You want to keep them intact as much as possible.”

That surprised me. My train of thought switched tracks. “Not the taproot?”

He shook his head. “The taproot is important as an anchor, but that's not where the plant gets most of its water and nutrients from. The smaller, more fibrous ones have the greater surface area.”

As a recent transplant myself, and one who'd paid a lot of attention to her anchor points, a lot of inexplicable things abruptly made sense.

*     *     *

What makes a home a home? It's many things, but one of the most elusive pieces comes from the thousand associations you build up in a place over hours and years of simply being there. You can't describe it, any more than you can consciously tell your life story in minute detail from beginning to end. Nor can you even remember exactly what it looks or sounds or smells like. But when you're there with it again in the flesh, each detail is a key—a key to a set of stories, habits, memories with an overlapping spectrum of emotions—that opens the door to a past life, a past self.

This is what I've lost, by starting over, in a new place, with no former associations. But—it's never truly lost. For better or for worse, my history is the same; I just need to find new ways to strengthen my connections to whichever parts I want to keep connected to.

(I wonder if this is the secret to happiness in old age. Tie all your flashbacks to your happy memories. Make lots of happy memories to tie back to.)

*     *     *

Sometimes, when I used to bike home from work, I used to count it up as "making memories." The scenery didn't change enough from day to day for there to be any one ride for me to remember, but over time, I imagined that I'd beat out a path in my mind strong enough that I'd look back on it vividly and feel some sort of connection to it.

I biked that road the day before the day before I left Austin. And it did, it held something—something more than just the feeling of the moment. There was an echo there from times before... The time when I'd seen deer crossing the road late at night. The times of relief, using my legs after a long day at work. The daily view of the lake and its heron, and a few, glorious maple trees in the height of autumn. The construction pillars along the side of the road and the pop music spilling all down the hill after the Top Golf there had finally been completed.

I held the echoes carefully next to the dry and real moment I was experiencing and tried to feel all of them at once. (It's important, I guess, to feel the weight of what you've experienced and the value of what you're leaving behind when you tell a place good-bye.) And then I made it larger. I tried to bring in the feeling of the wildflowers, the endless sunny air; the goofiness and techiness and food and fun. The sweat in the summer and in the dojo; the midnight light pollution from the highway. The times I'd walked outside and skipped over to the park; the times I'd gone to Wind Ensemble practice. The first people I became friends with and the last people I became friends with. The different places we played board games and the different seasons we went kayaking. The smell of the juniper, the call of grackles. The parkour gym. The church.

And the other pieces... Getting tired from being too busy, getting busy because things were missing and needed to be made up for. Times I tried to help people who never got better. Times I hurt people I liked. The times when I was irresponsible. The times I cried because I was irresponsible. The times I tried to become better and the times I failed over and over again anyway. Times I felt out of control. Times people leaned on me anyway.

The times when I was admired. The times where I wondered if anyone who liked or admired me really knew anything substantive about me. The times I talked too much. The times where someone saw beyond what I was saying.

The times I let someone hurt me. The times I needed help from someone I barely knew or couldn't pay back. The times where I connected with somebody. The times where I had to give up...

*     *     *

I held all those overlapping moments carefully, folding the corners back from their edges and examining them piece by piece and then all together. I waited, more patiently than I often do, for all those experiences to percolate. And, tangled and woven together, I found myself holding a nest of grungy and golden threads.

They were all so clear. Beads of glowing, shining moments, so small, so precious. Completely overwhelmed by gray and grunge.

No doubts: I want to go back home.

This should have been “home.”

A bright future. But another failure.

*     *     *

It's a strange feeling—coming back to a place that you know you knew, a place you already know you love, with barely a memory of why. Everyone I recognize I'm happy to see, as though my memory hands me the “overall positive experience” banner without any indicator of how strong a history was used to make the assessment. And yet, at the same time, there's a feeling of strangeness that jars with the strong-and-immediate attachment. There's a new shopping center in my town. A classmate makes jokes about a vice I never knew him for. People have moved. Some have married. Stuff has changed. It's eerie, because I still already love them anyway. But that's ok. There are reasons for all these feelings.

*     *     *

I stand at the edge of the backyard, thumbs in pockets, regarding the trees skeptically. The leaves are golden. A downy woodpecker pecks up a pine tree. For all the times I told people I missed the trees here, the immediate rush of affection is entirely memorized. I stare at them for a few minutes, challenging them to inspire me.

The woodpecker flits to another tree. A squirrel takes a few hops through crunchy leaves. It's nice, but it's hardly magical. I frown up at the woods appraisingly, then go to the shed and grab a hoe.

The garden bed has gone completely to seed, so I can get a good workout from hacking the weeds up by the roots. After half an hour or forty-five minutes of this, I lean on it and stare up at the trees again.

There are more birds; the woodpecker is gone, but there are two tufted titmice making squawking calls much bigger than they are. A small flock of sparrows or wrens flies overhead, and a cardinal chirps out of a nearby bush. The squirrels in the leaves keep changing their minds about whether they should run up a nearby tree or not—they take a three foot dash, pause, then go about their ground-sniffing business as though nothing whatever's the matter. For some reason, I find this amusing.

I set the hoe aside and meander onto the trail that goes farther back into the woods. I find scars on some bark, collect sweet-gum leaves, startle a doe when I try to mimic a tree-climbing squirrel. She doesn't go very far, though, and lifts her white tail daintily in my direction as she goes back to browsing.

I think I'm an undernourished person, trying to compensate for long-term starvation in a single sitting. It's like a thunderous rainstorm after a drought; even good things don't enter immediately. Absorption needs soft rain on soft soil, and time to percolate.

Woods, I address them, though not audibly, I think I'd better acknowledge that I don't know you like I used to. So, I'll stop pretending like I do, and we'll get to know each other again in the usual way.

It'll probably go faster; we've got a good foundation. Regardless, I'm looking forward to it. Last time was fun.

I'm re-knitting myself into this place. It's the intangible aspect of coming home.

After a long break...

I didn't forget you. I think about you all the time: words bubble out of me and splurt onto a page...but for several years now they've been better kept in other places.

For one thing, stories involve people. Real people. People who probably shouldn't have their interactions with me sub-anonymously sprayed out in a forum where technically, everybody could see. For another thing, sometimes I think the writing is for you, but it's not. It starts out pretty, then jumbles and snarls, and a few hours later I thank my computer for the therapy session and stuff the pages into a folder on my computer and then go to bed.

Sooner or later, I want the words to go farther. And hopefully, be packaged more neatly than the garbled stuff that comes out of my mouth when I normally feel the urge to share my thoughts and feelings.

No promises on chronological order. No promises on consistent theme. Someday, the blog can be predictable. For now, it's mostly for me.