On light, darkness and the pursuit of happiness

The resonance gets stronger as you approach the buildings.  They are surrounded by soft, rolling hills that stretch into the horizon, close but unreachable. Like a friendship crippled by distance, always close but never close enough. From them, extending down to your feet, prairies full with the promise of spring and standing alone in one of them, a tree, lonely and tall and proud, even if naked by winter.

Stepping into the mission feels like boarding a ship quickly abandoned in depp see in a rush at the news of imminent sinking. Life here stopped long ago. Yet, there are traces of activity everywhere you look.  A dip on the dirt floor of a threshold endlessly trespassed, the circular groove around a keyhole where a now missing key turned before a thousand times, the smoke of fires lit in the chill of the night dressing some of the walls, the faint pathways in the cemetery marking the way for the burial and mourning of those who fell here, forever lost to a foreign land. Forgotten lives  many times remembered, empty spaces full of past.

And, same as the ocean makes the existence of a boat possible at the price of swallowing it, slowly but restlessly, time is slowly eroding the mission, erasing it while converting it into something extraordinary , magnificent in its tatteredness, vigorous in its exhaustion, full in its emptiness. 

The place is deserted and the silence surrounding everything only broken every now and then by the distant sound of birds chirping in this winter morning and the worn out wood planks creaking under your feet as you enter the different rooms.
The crisp light of the morning outside quickly dies engulfed by the perpetual darkness that lives inside these windowless walls, its attempt at brightening them beautiful and moving in its futility.

A scene awaits that makes you stop and evokes a sense of recognition so intense that it shrinks your heart and fills your eyes with tears.  
It is a bench by a wall in a windowless room, looking helplessly at the light that pours in from the door right next to it, unable to reach it, so close and yet imposibly far, its shape devoured by the shadows that reign in the room.
The moment is broken when a skinny, older man, his hair thin and grey, and a young, blond, freckled, bored looking girl that might be his granddaughter show up at the door of this room.  You reply back to their short, polite greeting without paying much attention, but something in your attitude must awake the man’s curiosity because, as the bored looking girl has seen that the room is empty except for the bench, and having turned around, is back outside ready to move on, the man, right when he is about to leave the room as well, turns around instead and, for a second, stands right in front of you. Without looking, you feel his eyes on you and hope that, in the darkness,  he won’t see the tears as he finds your eyes and follows them to discover what it is that you are looking at.
He finds the wall and, from there, his eyes move down to the bench first, and then back at you with a mixture of confusion and doubt in his face, disregarding the bench without giving it a second thought. There is genuine curiosity in his voice when he asks you what it is that you are photographing in there.
Days of light and shadows, you reply with a knot in your throat. And you exit the room, leaving the man standing behind.

The glass fogs up where drops fall, creaking in its frame as blasts of wind hit the window. It is early afternoon but the rainfall is so heavy that there is barely any light. And even when you know that the sun is still somewhere up there in the sky, the clouds are so thick that it is hard to believe that you will ever see it again.

There is an oak. Its trunk wrinkly and thick and centenary. Its empty, twisted branches move at the mercy of the wind. Naked. Pitifully reaching with their bare fingers for that sun that you cannot see. And next to the oak, running across the window, right in front of you, a road. Straight. Long. Black. With a white line in the middle. Receding into the distance. Disappearing into the horizon. Infinite.

You know this road. It took you here. Long ago. It is hard to believe that back then, you used to trek it for days on end. Restlessly. Lured by the unknown of its end. Until one night you realized you could not keep on walking the next morning. And you stopped. 
Days went by and you didn’t feel like moving. And then the day you were ready to get back on the road came and you discovered alarmed that you could not longer walk. You body simply did not respond. You felt like waking up from anesthesia, at that point where you have lucid thoughts but are incapable to move.
And today, as you watch in your stupor the rain falling, you look at that point where the road disappears into the horizon and wonder whether you will ever resume your trip. Discover where the road ends.

A lone figure enters the picture, walking hurriedly under the rain, bending forward to protect himself from the gelid gusts. It’s a man. Wearing a long wool coat and a large brim hat. In black. With one hand, he carries a small suitcase and a  bunch of papers clasped under his arm. With the other, he holds a dark umbrella that barely endures the storm.
As he passes by your window, a gust of wind turns his umbrella inside out and threatens to take his hat away. And as he struggles to hold on to it, he lets go of the papers under his arm. Sheets blow in the wind.

And it is cold out there and windy and dark and lonely and night is falling fast and there will be no moon tonight with all these clouds and god knows what could be out there lurking in the thickening gloom and it has been so long since you last went out and what can you do anyway to help this guy and it is his goddamn fault anyhow because what the heck is he doing out in such weather and don’t we all sometimes screw up and figure it out and it will be too late by the time you get down and you are sure he will be okay anyway and oh! it is so comfortable in here by the window. Where it is warm. Dry. If lifeless.

You feel the wind on your face. Because the end of this train of thoughts takes place while you fly down the stairs. Because you should have known all along that you would not just sit there and watch the man fight the tempest alone. Because you are now in the storm, chasing papers under the rain. And you don’t think of the cold. You don’t think of the wind. you don’t think of the night falling. They don’t matter. Only reaching that last sheet of paper blowing away right in front of you matters. And you run, run, run. There is rain in your feet, rain on your face, rain on your hands. Your whole body is rain.  And something must be seriously wrong, because doesn’t it seem to feel good?.

And when you finally collect all papers and stop to catch your breath, your eyes look up at a window overlooking the street. The window whose glasses were creaking under the wind by your face a moment ago. The window that all this time has shown you the life that you could not be part of. Because you could not move. Your eyes look up at your window.
And as you do so, it is har to believe that the road you used to stared at from above is again under your feet. You are walking on it. You finally moved. And it does feel good, no doubt about it. In spite of the rain. In spite of the gloom. Or perhaps because of it.
And while the lone man comes to you, a smile of gratitude on his face, your eyes now turn to that line on the road that disappears into the horizon. And you wonder where it ends.

Under the rain

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-KlVd_-Wfo

And so all these years together lead to this very moment. Surreal and hard to believe. Even when deep inside you knew it was coming for a long time. The moment where it all ends.
And in spite of the ache, there are memories. There are smiles. Then laughter. Quietness. Remorse. Regrets. Forgiveness. Redemption. Tears. An embrace.  The comfort of being held by arms you know.  Of being close to a body, of feeling the heartbeat that once was your own. And then silence. Silence that speaks louder than words. Silence that only couples can keep. Like the couple that you both still are.

And then there is goodbye. And as you stand up and walk away without daring to look back, you know that this is the point of no return. The morning when the world changes forever. The morning when you change forever. A morning like any other. A morning that most people will soon forget. A morning that you will remember forever.

Farewell to the heartbeat that once was my own.

Farewell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EopQN6XXHEU

Whenever I travel to Europe I find the trip back West incredibly hard, the never ending evening that accompanies it excruciating. Never has this agonizing feeling been more acute than during my last trip a few weeks ago, when at some point the shadows surrounding the plane just seemed to seep inside me .

I boarded the plane one winter morning. The clear, crisp light as we departed for the US lasted for the first 4 or 5 hours. Then, somewhere above the Atlantic, it became a dim twilight. And after a while, a complete, thick, endless darkness that stretched on and on.

In a trip so long, there is time to think about so many things. The darkness outside the window made me think of departures. The oddity of knowing a foreigner country almost better than my own. The loneliness of living far away from some friends and family. But also of friendships I have struck up in this country. Precious. Like the lights of lonely ships in the ocean that every now and then broke the shadows around the aircraft, glimmering shyly in the night.

It was well past midnight by the time I arrived to town  after a 24 hours trip. By then, the tiredness of the trip along with the gloom and darkness of the endless night felt unbearably oppressive.
Upon arriving to town, I shared a ride home in a taxi with a young guy who lived nearby. Too tired to participate, I sat by myself in the back seat of the car and just listened to the conversation that the driver and my companion, sitting  by his side, began as soon as we started moving.
Brief polite comments on the chill of the night were exchanged before myfellow traveller confessed that he was from Puerto Rico and had never been in cold weather. He was coming to visit an uncle in town and prepare the admission tests for medical school. It was his first time out of Puerto Rico.
The driver found it amusing that someone could have lived all his life in a place where is never cold and, with a very thick Asian accent explained that he was from Tibet and his winters there were so cold that most streams and rivers were frozen solid for months at a time. He said he lived in a cabin in the mountains, and that the first thing he did every morning was to go out to the river by his house  armed with something to break the ice and a bucket to bring back water for his family.

Hearing that he was from Tibet, the other traveller shifted the conversation towards politics, and as they kept on talking I closed my eyes and leaned my head back in the seat until we finally pulled over in front of my house. As I got off the car, I could not help but think of that ride like an oasis of light in the desert of an endless night. I stood on the street and saw the car drive away, its lights and chatter receding in the night until they disappeared. I was by myself, alone in the dark. 

I turned around and went up the stairs to my apartment, the relief of being finally at home soon diluted by the emptiness and darkness I found waiting for me inside. It was 3 am and I needed to get early to work. Too tired to sleep, I turned on some lights, prepared myself a cup of tea and sat by the window to drink it. Looking at the silence out there. Feeling its weight over me as clear as the warmth of the cup I was holding. Oppressed by the darkness. Waiting for the sunrise.

I finished my tea, poured another cup, drank it quickly, took a long, hot shower, got dressed, and left for work. It was still dark outside, and started to wonder wherther the sun would ever rise again. I stopped by a coffee shop, grabbed a capuccino and then drove off to a beach. I parked, rolled down the window to let the ocean in and sat there sipping my coffee with the car running and the heater on. I fell asleep.

When I woke up, the darkness was finally fading away, giving way to the first light of the day. I was so grateful for that light, even if dim. Tired, I closed my eyes and thought of the trip. Of the darkness inside me replicating the one surrounding the plane. 
Then, for some reason, I thought of the taxi ride home. A Puerto Rican, a Tibetian and a Spaniard, conversing while travelling through the night. Only possible in the US. I opened my eyes and smiled. The first ray of light of the day broke through the clouds.

Today I went back to Ellwood. I love Ellwood, I identify myself with it. Because it doesn’t belong here. It is a forest of Australian eucalyptus that made his way to California most likely in the hooves of the horses arriving to the nearby pier. By accident. Like I did.
Whenever I go to there, I usually take a long walk following a path that runs through the woods and reaches the cliffs alongside the ocean. But today I didn’t. I couldn’t. The rigidity of the path felt unbearable and instead I found myself irresistibly drawn to wandering the forest itself. And so I just strolled among the trees, simply enjoying the moment. Pretty soon I was deep in the woods, surrounded by a beautiful, silent,  damp, greenish darkness in the late hours of a warm, overcast, stormy, fall-like afternoon with the sound of an owl as my only company.

I came across a small clearing and was about to keep on walking when I noticed a big eucalyptus. Thinking about it now, I am not sure what I found so intriguing about this specific tree. I guess that sometimes we have a resonance with things around us that we perceive clearly but an unconscious level, and that’s probably what happened to me today.  I felt an irresistible attraction towards this tree. I could not get past it.
I stood there for a while, observing it. Trying too hard to identify my feelings at first and then deciding to let it go and enjoying the emotion itself. The connection.

There was a fallen trunk next to tree and I sat on it. The quietness of the forest surrounding me felt good. I closed my eyes.  I don’t know how long I was sitting there for. But in the beginning, there was the sound of the owl above and the rustling of birds in the bushes. And then these sounds slowly faded away until they disappeared. And then there was nothing.
And then after a while, somehow, I felt that either the eucalyptus became me or I became the eucalyptus. Or perhaps we just became one. It doesn’t matter. I opened my eyes and in looking at the tree I saw myself. Letting go of layers and layers of trunk. Letting go of the tree itself. Its essence. I wondered whether it would hurt. I thought of my own layers peeling off and slowly falling away. It does hurt.

I stood up and started walking around the tree. I noticed fallen branches and chunks of trunk on the ground, slowly losing color and consistency, melting with the ground itself. Like tears in the rain. I thought about the birds that these branches might have sheltered, the sap that at some point must have ran through the trunk now fallen at my feet.  The love messages that someone might have carved on it.
I thought of moments, memories of people that were once part of me but departed and are far away, my memories becoming a little more forgotten every day. Like these branches fallen on the ground. I felt an indescribable sense of loss.

I sat down again on the trunk and was pondering all this when I once again heard the owl. He sounded so close that I looked up, sure he would be right above my head. I couldn’t find him. Instead, I saw something that brought tears to my eyes.
Because the tree that I was sitting next to was tall. Never-ending. Eternal. Infinite. Reaching for the sky. And almost touching it. Thanks to the fallen branches and layers of trunk laying around, melting on the ground, nurturing it. Making the tree grow as high as the sky…