Leave

It is fall here now. The leaves are beginning to look starved, their spines crippled. A north wind blows through, sweeping them away as they scrape and click against the pavement, like the sound of an old clock. A clock that moves slowly, slightly behind time. The leftovers of the summer air are finally misting out, only to reveal a seagull-grey sky, as if the mountains, silhouetted like sleeping dragons, are yawning.
September spills over the west hills to slide a changing of seasons down the streets of Vancouver. Every intersection is blooming with busy queues by the side of transit stations and clusters of cars at stoplights. Time has begun to move quickly, and everyone is in a panic to catch up. And all of it reminds me that I don’t quite belong here. I don’t fit in. I suppose I exist within time, trapped in it, but am hardly aware of how it passes. It leads me to remember how much I miss being out in Eva’s garden. I like the slow pace of agriculture, where seeds must die and are then buried beneath an inch of soil, where they lay for months before they begin to slowly give birth to life. And no wishful thinking could resurrect them any faster than they ought to be resurrected. Eva’s garden got inside of me like Neverland. And because of it, I know that somebody like me could never stay in a place like this.

I used to often drive down to the beach at the end of the day, when the tide was out and the moon was high, and stare out at the horizon, wondering whether I could cut anchor and cast out. But I had just as soon gotten restless with vague intentions of pursuing something that would be hardly better left unknown. These intentions, they had lain dormant, and I was entirely to blame.
And so I left. With a slim notion of where I was headed. Expectant heart. To find a story worth living. Something beautiful. Something painful. Something dazzling and frightening. Something tangible and utterly true. I left with a half-hearted promise of returning soon.

I went looking, and found my way to Colorado. A landlocked community at the heart of the American Southwest. It is a place full of the landscapes that Ernest Hemingway wrote into novels. And it had folded out, a setting at a time, cast with fantastic characters whose stories were being spoken into sonnets of run-on sentences for which the weight and awareness of conventional rhythms and rhymes grew fainter by the line. They lived in wide open spaces, moving themselves around mountains, around high plains and canyons, along the edge of rivers, to stand in the empty desert and marvel at the peaceful, calming “why” of life. This “why” being something that is itself just made up of metaphors, something that can be experienced but cannot be understood.

Even now, these stories float in sometimes out of the blue, like jazz. They resonate with a moody, meandering pitch. And I can’t seem to get them out of my mind. I find myself humming the parts that I remember, trying to sing the world into slow motion.
These stories mean the world to me, and I hope to relay them over the next little while.