Travel Notes On Europe, Written On the Plane Home

     Europe by train. Germany, Holland. Taxis, endless taxis, and the snow, and then the warm winter wind off the Waddenzee. Up all night in Amsterdam. Sun rise on the harbor out the hotel window. Never mind, you can sleep on the plane. You sail over the clouds – clouds casting shadows on clouds that are endless snowfields floating on a rolling ocean. Fast little jets cut our flight path, vapor trails like chalk vectors so you can see not only where they’ve been but extrapolate where they are going, and the idea of extrapolation is as understandable as a passing moment when you glean the future in a girl’s eyes, in a reflection, like particles of light, like spun gold flaking to the floor, lost in the blare and alcohol of the party – just as the vapor vectors dissipate into diamond droplets of water and without so much as a humbled sigh join the collective life of ether.
    I am restless but determined, I have my warm coat on. I sing into the night from atop my bicycle. We rewrite our dreams in preparation for publication. I whisper see you next time over the din, in a hush, in a snarl – the poetry of bubblegum wrappers. Rally for the cause. Start a gang. The noise fades out as if in a movie and only the whisper is left, until it evaporates leaving nothing but an image of a face, which isn’t even light, but just the idea of light.
     How did it get to be December? Stopover in Switzerland, the Black Forest, a silver river snakes like a thin chain on the girl’s neckline. Travel mementos in your pocket, a few crumpled-up euros, a sweet dull ache behind your sunglasses not to mention under your passport that is tucked in your left breast pocket. I begin collecting dust memories like a picaresque story tracing the journey of a grain of sand in your hem. My heart gathers moss; it is wood and no longer breaks, but crumbles. This may appear as decay and yet it’s also verdant and alive. How unforgiving is a vector? Do you prefer to think of us on roads? On paths? We wander in the fields and brambles and the things we do are places on a map; old roadside structures that can turn to ruins but never be erased, just as experiences can’t be undone, the way a bullet can’t be unfired once the trigger is pulled.
    Over the Atlantic, the idea of being nowhere, of being between lives, of transcending timezones and timetables becomes translucent and distantly resolved – this Declaration of Airports, this luminous dreamlife of mathematical formulas, of the arc of a curve between points A and B, is only significant in as much as points A and B represent our meeting places – under a moon, under a streetlight, in a crowd, in a corner, in an unwritten apartment – and that, sometimes, we are lucky enough to move together between those anonymously named coordinates.
    We walk with many traveling companions, many partners hand in hand on the soil and stone pathways, and some days we walk on water and some days through quicksand and my wayfaring partners, whether for a day or a decade, make the perception of my experiences palpable, crystalline, unremitting, visceral, and, ultimately, all that is meaningful. I’m heading home, I’m racing the sun – when was the last time you saw the sunset for six hours? My friends, we disperse at the airport bound for taxis and dinners and television shows under rust colored bands in the peaceful and stagnant Los Angeles sky. It’s good to be home, but the lights are a bit dimmer, eh? And my relationship with my world is interminably ecstatic.

-8 December 2008, Somewhere over Europe, over Switzerland, over the Ocean, over Iceland, over Greenland, over America