Unfurling Sounds too Noble

Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?

Maybe it's all of the goodbyes I've had to say recently. To people, and to the bits and pieces that have made up my life for the past two years or so. Or the rush of anticipation, the explosion of celebration, and the uncertainty left in its wake.

Or maybe it's all of the thank you letters I've been writing to people I could never really thank enough, so all I can offer are a few flimsy words which I hope they can look beyond to see what I really mean.

Then again, maybe it's because I'm at a juncture in my life where I have the opportunity to take the biggest risks of my life. Or not. Though risks are inherent to living, so to say that we choose to live without risk is something of a contradiction.

Or maybe it's something as simple as the fact that I found a gnarly bug crawling on my face in my sleep last night, which initially worked itself into my dream, and then I woke up. When I turned on the light and saw my bedfellow, an exclamation of immense impropriety rang through the house and I briefly considered cutting off my face. Still not off the table. (Pause for 5th shower of the morning)

Let's change the subject now, shall we? (Kind of like a dentist asking questions to someone whose mouth she's got jacked open. Don't you think?) I'm reading a book, although I'm afraid to pick it up again, because it pulls me towards an unknown that I'm scared of. It's called Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck. In the very first pages, he writes about the people who come to see him and his truck before he sets off across the country.

I saw in their eyes something I had to see over and over in every part of the nation-a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something...Nearly every American hungers to move.

I wonder if that's an American thing. I certainly feel it- it's the reason that this book scares me. I wonder, though, if it's a human thing. Or maybe not. It might just be a certain-type-of-human thing. If you've got it, I don't think it ever goes away. Steinbeck writes about a young boy who asks to join him on his journey;

He had the dream I've had all my life, and there is no cure.

This "thing" makes us very fragile. Because setting off into the unknown is terrifying. People are meant to be with people, to love and communicate and keep each other warm at night. It's the only way we can live, it literally keeps our brains alive. But it brings us to the point where deep sadness and irrepressible joy meet. It's not an easy place to be, an exquisite place.

It's terrifying, but in a good way. It's a place of possibility, of floating, of joyous desperation and reaching out for something, anything, but not just anything, to hang on to, to attach to, to love and be loved by. A feeling that might be characterized by the desperate need to love someone or something new, with the reciprocation of love being the only prerequisite.