full of running

As I write this, I’m listening to Goodbye Horses (feat. Q Lazzurus) by Garvey, one of my favorite new songs. I’ve never listened to Garvey, and this song makes me feel almost repentant of that if the rest of his stuff is this good. the thing that’s been shadowing me these last few days is the space between what we mean and how we express what we mean. We all spend our lives trying to say something true. to make something true. to write something true. we aren’t lying before we do, it’s just that our hearts and minds and lives deepen faster than our words. Things don’t have infinite characteristics, but their characteristics have infinite depth, and our words to describe them feel mostly like buckets down a well that’s always deepening, and changing. Heraclitus was right, you never step into the same river twice. and you never taste the same thing twice. and you never feel the same thing twice. always growing, always deeper.

if it’s anything, writing is a pilgrimage. a there-and-back-again to taste and to see, and to tell. and then go back. and we all have to go, because we are all depending on each other.

the other night, a friend of mine and I went for a walk down to a local store to get out of the house for a bit. We had been working on music for hours already, and had hours and hours of work ahead of us, so we stepped out for a few minutes to take the city in and recenter ourselves. something that happens to me fairly often is that I feel the weight of the moment while it’s happening, somehow taking in both the moment and the affect that the moment will have on me all at once. that might not be a strange thing, maybe it’s that way for everyone, but it’s still something that happens to me all the time. anyways, when we were walking back from the store, we were crossing Monument avenue and no cars where coming or going and it was still, in the way that only broad streets with heavy trees along them can be still, and the traffic lights were spilling their colors on everything like they always do, and halfway across the street, I surfaced, and realized that there I was, walking across the street not just on my way to my friend’s apartment, but on my way to the rest of my life. it was only for a moment, but it was one of those moments that you’ll still find written down somewhere on your mind decades later, and even though the handwriting is faded and the paper wrinkled, you’ll find yourself right back where you were when you wrote that. and you’ll ache. not because the memory is painful, but because it’s a memory.