Light, Dark, Light Again

On silver firs and paw prints in the snow

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Maybe that’s all we can do; for the longest time, I used to think that the big things must be big – one big fell swoop, big heroic arches, big revelations and moments that etch themselves into your memory like exploding stars, a love that’s earth-shattering and grief so deep you never come out the same, and longing so acute you suddenly notice hot, childlike tears running down your face as the sun sets over a blue mountain range somewhere in the distance, right here and just out of your reach;

oh, I thought I would go far, so far, I would roll under the stars and the big skies, forever in motion, alone on the road until it ran out, and then onwards still, to the very ends of the earth and back again through forgotten valleys and sleepy villages and strange deserts;

well, so I left, I left never to return because of course IT would never quite reveal itself – I did not know what it was, and that, I guess, was the point, because I would find it, in Argentina or in the cloud forests of some eerie Andean pass or, surely, surely, once I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time; I kept going and burning bridges and clutches and my own tattered soul as the sun beat down on the sands of the Atacama and the winds of Patagonia tore at my hair and the still, thin air of the Bolivian altiplano blanketed the Mars-like rock formations on the roof of the world; a tiny traveling speck of hurt and hope all wrapped in one, always leaving and never arriving, kickstand up, head down, bracing against the gale and blinking against the snowfall on the Garibaldi Pass;

back North again through Ecuador and Colombia shrouded in dreamlike mist, over the Atlantic and back again and suddenly there IT was, the sign that said “Ogallala”, the one from Kerouac’s books, somewhere in Nebraska under those impossibly big skies – I stood there crying for a little while because that was it, and wasn’t, all at the same time, but at least now I knew it was real; well, I didn’t linger long at that sign, what with the rain clouds gathering, I needed to find a camping spot, and yet there I was for one fleeting moment, the teenager in a grey ex-Soviet apartment block wearing an oversized black sweater and razor blade cuts on my arms reading “On the Road” for the seventeenth time like it was a holy script and the thirty-something me standing there on the outskirts of Ogallala, across to Mississippi, across to Tennessee, across the Niagara, home I’ll never be – then we were in New Mexico, I think, and Colorado and Louisiana and everywhere else and South again, and then I was crossing the Atacama once more on my own as if the devil was on my heels rushing for the port of Valparaiso and missing Chile already, in advance, I like to pay my invoices early, you see;