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All the aching and oily bodies lounging and milling about the airport are just like a seething colony of roaches: undulating, expanding, and contracting. An obese woman holds a look of perpetual consternation as if nothing could satisfy her clearly discerning tastes for existing comfortably. She speaks to the medium weight man next to her with tattoos on either calf who taps on the bare skateboard decks propped up against the seat between his legs. They converse with the guarded impersonal airport body language that dictates looking across but never directly at ones communicative partner, and chuckling lightly at simple observations that are not really funny. Now I look up and the suited man in his mid-fifties looks away as he had been watching me just prior to my glancing up. I look down, then up again, catching him again. I don’t think I will catch him again, at least for a few minutes. It never smells bad, but it doesn’t smell nice either. The scents men wear are overt colognic exclamations, like a cover up for some foul character flaw that could only be squelched with pungent smells equal in repugnance to their brooding internal stench. All things are plastic here, except the shabby carpet and seat cushions that persons of a certain fetish would relish cramming their nose into with a deep inhale full of pleasure for all of the stale thinly clothed and covered asses that have compressed their scent into the already curdled cushion. The whole place could be sterilized and it would still somehow feel dirtier, in the same way that a hospitals white walls make you feel germy and sick. It’s as if the air is impregnated with festering bacteria and a deathly sickly haze. It’s soaks into your body into it fills your limbs and lungs, and soon it is emanating from you like little wavy brown waves of stench in a cartoon. The kind of filth only a green field and a good shower with pleasant smelling body wash can rinse out. The clothes are lost, though, they must be burned. A sweet relief, a shimmering ray of humanity sparks and penetrates through the puke green clouds in the room. An older man in a wheelchair holds his dignity and looks softly to the left with weathered but not bitter eyes. The airport attendance sort if barks out some half-heartfelt diatribe on latrine locations and boarding procedure. A whisper of confirmation wisps from his lips without derision or amusement. When she speaks he tilts his head to lift his full face to her words; lion-like. He were a straw hat.

The stale smell of sweat off my body from a long summer’s day spent outside. The intoxicating aroma of the cool summer nights air floating in through the window. “Time Bomb” by The Format is playing on my slightly tinny computer speakers. I’m in Cary the summer of Freshman year at Appalachian. I’ve just been forced away from a neighborhood game of capture the flag by the fading sunlight in Illinois, in third grade. It’s soccer. It’s twilight. There’s still so much ahead of me. There’s still so many things I haven’t done. What will college be like? Will I ever stop being so nervous around people? This air, the air I breathed then, which is the same that I’m breathing now, it holds many sweet memories of my youth. 

I’m sitting in the living room, and there is no one else in the house. There’s a dirty plate and bowl on the table in front of me, as well as some empty beer bottles and a cardboard six pack case strewn about. The carpet is dingy and yellowed, as is the couch. The whole room has a grimy feel to it. The sun is shining outside and it’s about 58 degrees. It’s the kind of day that in Boone that I’ve been inspired by so many times over the past four years, but today it feels sad. These are the last sunny days that I’ll have in this town. This is the last streak of summer that I’ll experience in Boone. This is my farewell tour, and already, at it’s outset, the nostalgia of this place is beginning to seep in and poison my humour. Four long years have skimmed right by, just as quick as my memory can flick through all the places I’ve lived and friends I’ve kept. It’s all there in a flash and suddenly, here, closing towards the end, it all seems almost insignificant. All the relationships I’ve made, classes attended, any impact I have on this community, will simply slip away as I slither quietly out of the town one day, not looking back for the people that aren’t there watching me go. I’ll be just another graduate who used this place for it’s resources, academic, recreational, and otherwise, without any lasting impact, forgotten almost immediately by those who will still be here, and for those that I never knew, they’ll never realized I even left. It’s just another sunny day in Boone, and someone is driving away from here for the last time. I don’t know their name or what they look like, and they don’t know me, but somewhere on the horizon there’s a silhouette on a horse, like an old western movie, and he turning his horse sidelong at the hill top and glancing back one last time as he tilts his hat, and now he’s turning away, and galloping off.

Sometimes the space of an entire day can be illustrated with one seemingly small decision. “I’ll go to her house tonight.” We get breakfast in the morning because we are hungover, hungry, and don’t want to cook. I take her to the car shop because I’m already with her and I have my truck. We go back to my place because there’s really nothing else to do in the three hours before work. We watch a movie, I shower, then I go to work. I come home, I’m too tired to accomplish anything. This day has been rolled out for me since last night, although I didn’t realize exactly how at the outset. Each event has been the inevitable successor to the one before, all from the one initial catalyst. This is an example, but many hours are shaped in this way. One could even scale back and look at whole years from this perspective. For instance, I’m going to Appalachian. It’s freshman year, I’m drinking. It’s sophomore year, I’m smoking. It’s junior year, I’m alone. It’s senior year, I’m not alone anymore. If you view humans as complex, but still reactionary, robots, we are all on a set path of one inevitable action, thought, and emotion after another. I don’t think this is too much of a stretch. Free will is real, but often it is not exercised. I mean, when was the last time you surprised yourself?

I saw a man in a trenchcoat. he bellowed out a curse at the passing bus which was too full to pick him. Just as he let out his tortured cry, the wind gusted and buffeted his jacket like a sheet on a clothesline, exposing his thin frame and hunched posture. The buildings behind him were gray and tall with square windows. His shoes were black with thin little black laces tied neatly into bows. After the bus had past he shuddered and pulled his jacket back across his body like a bathrobe, and tied it with a sash. He turned hard right, parallel to the street, and marched off. He was going home, this day had not been good to him. 

I enter my room, but I don’t just enter it. I leave the bathroom, and as I turn left my eye is caught by a large silverfish looking bug on the ground. I watch it briefly and I don’t even feel my feet pressing into the carpet as I move quietly across the floor. It’s three or four paces from the bathroom door to my bedroom door, but I don’t count them. I’m not aware of the musty smell in the air of faint urine and unclean tile. I don’t feel the temperature of the air on my bare chest. I am holding my loose basketball shorts up that I always where to bed. The band on the shorts is so loose that if I don’t hold them they’ll fall. I take my steps and am aware of the bunched waistband in my left hand. I unknowingly become aware of this inkling of a thought I am expressing right now, that I move through the world without noticing most of the details, as I reach out to push open my ajar bedroom door. I feel the tensile muscle holding my arm at an acute angle to my body as my fingers press lightly against the wood. I feel like a video game character who’s motions are poorly calibrated onscreen and awkward for there task, as my bodies momentum pushes through my fingers and the door swings inward. I do not smell the dirty clothes in the hamper or the oddly pleasing musk of my comforter as I fall any which way upon my bed. I do not remember how I fell, I was not paying attention. Rapt with thought I don’t feel my fingers press the keys, until this moment. The physical world and my mental realm co-exist constantly but I can only focus on one at a time, so no matter what I do, I’m missing something, either a thought escapes me, or there is no carpet beneath my toes. The way I experience the world is not objective, my experience is subject to my whim and choosing, consciously or subconsciously. I move through it, and mercifully, it reacts as if I were paying it great attention so as to correct any missteps it might make, like a physics teacher. I breathe in, I breathe out, cold air rushes in as all the little molecules are compressed and fight to enter my nasal cavity, to fill my chest and make it rise. Then I exhale and it falls and I’m no longer aware of my breathing, because I’m writing again. 

A person’s life is segmented into short eras, and each era has a prevailing thematic feeling that a person only discovers in hindsight, when it’s trigger is switched. This trigger is usually a smell or a sound, like a song. When the trigger is switched and a person is swept over in revelation with the prevailing feeling the pain can be too much, and the pain can drive a person away from that song or smell, so they hit the skip button on their itunes, or plug their nose. 

Notes: 

On “the prevailing thematic feeling”: This feeling is really a dual creation of both reality and perspective. The reality of the things that transpired in an era sets the canvas for the perspective. The perspective paints the emotion unto said canvas. Fills it with regret or longing or happiness or whatever. “Prevailing Feelings” are the plight of the person with poor memory. We see things in big chunks and faces. An apartment, the girl’s face who lived next door. That time I came across her outside the cafeteria, and the time I went hiking into the mountains and returned to her apartment. 

So the Woods album plays “the number” and I’m heaved backwards. Amongst all the turmoil of events and people and countless details of days from the era, I have just this one overall feel. A feel that is, in theory, the agglomeration of, say, 6 months of living. 

more notes: 

I use the word “pain” which may seem limiting, as not all memories are necessarily painful in themselves. However, the pain doesn’t stem from the memory necessarily. Even a happy memory is very apparently gone, that portion of life is over, now the most one can do is look back at it, this is where the pain comes from. It’s the pain of loss, which is at the dead center root of nostalgia, loss. 

Wake up. My mouth is dry like desert sand, and I’m desperate for water. Teeter to the sink, blast open the faucet, bring my face and mouth to the water gushing out. I can’t even enjoy it i’m so thirsty. The water slides over my dry tongue without even quenching it for the first few gulps, as if my tongue were oil, deflecting the fresh relief of H2O. The same goes for my parched throat. Gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp. I start counting them. I know I should go for at least ten. One, two, three, four. It gets unpleasant around four, gulping down water without coming up for air, but I know it’s best to forge on despite this. Five, six, just a couple more and I’ll be satisfied, my thirst fended off for a while longer, so I can sleep for a while longer. Tip back to bed, “how can it be! my mouth is already beginning to dry out again!” Too tired, too lazy, won’t go back for a couple hours. Draw spit out from under my tongue, support the illusion, back to bed for a couple more hours, I’ve earned as much. I would poison my life away, for better recreation. 

Today I had a long long dream. It lasted much longer than it needed to. The whole story played out in this dream, and it got boring towards the end. At one point I ran out of money up my outback worksleeve while at a grocery store register. That symbolizes my fears of running out of money and having to ask my dad for more. The body of the dream was all about a racist cashier accusing me of theft, but I proved him wrong and made him drive him drive me to his store owner as punishment. Halfway to the store owner I just told him to turn around and let me go, I didn’t want him to be punished. Earlier I had been tracking a girl who was running up and down every single aisle. To track her, I casually ran along the outside of the aisles at a pace slow enough that her snacklike route would stay just in front of me. Even earlier there was a war. This parts pretty foggy. I remember ducking behind cover and firing powerful weapons. Usually when I dream about weapons they backfire and become nothing more than a petty projectile that I throw lamely at an enemy (much like the problem of slow-running that I’ve encountered so many times). But this time the weapons were firing but the battle was mostly stalemate. This part was a result of me watching the Lord of the Rings last night, which has plenty of fighting but is always hard to discern who exactly hast he edge, because the battle scenes are mostly up close action shots. My dream was in action shots, I had no perspective of scale. What’s strange about last night is that I never awoke over the five hour period of very light sleep that started at 7:00 am. I know the sleep is light when I remember so much and the dreams become bland. I should have been in and out starting around eleven, at least. I like to believe that this is just a sign that my body is recovering from this protracted cold. It’s pushing for one last sustained rest to tackle all the little virals from my blood. I can’t be sick forever, I’m too young and strong. Perhaps I’ll go for a run. 

My dad comes into the bonus room where me and Brian are sitting, while Jen is doing ab exercises. Brian is playing Batttlefield 3. I am on my computer. He approaches with a delicate subject, it’s apparent in his body language. Also, my sister had innocently prepped me for the impending interchange about three minutes prior to dad’s entrance. “Dad wants us to go to church tonight.” Splendid, I can’t wait for this to unfold. Oh, passive aggressive hardcore Christian grandma’s downstairs? That’ll be fine. Mom’s here too, quietly awaiting my answer, although she doesn’t know it yet? Great, what’s another broken heart. What’s three more hours of quiet weeping and prayer on my behalf. But for God’s sakes I didn’t ask for this! I love my mom. I don’t want to make her sad, but more than that, I don’t want to keep playing this illusory game. It’s all so silly, my dad can’t even help but pull a painful half smile when I tell him I’d rather not go. I’ve discovered the secret of the game. The secret is silence. As long as no one asks the uncomfortable questions, “Do you really believe a man lived in a large fish belly and survived after three days? Come on, really?” I’ve come to understand the guilt and fear that spawns this irrational belief, even in very pragmatic people such as my dad, and these emotions are effective in persuasion. I’ve grown past it. I’m still scared sometimes, or unsure, but I know that those emotions are a poor basis for constructing an entire belief system. They are a poor basis for “faith,” a word I understand less all the time. Part of me wants them to confront me, as they’ve done once before. Then I could tell them how silly this charade is. I would tell them that I don’t want to hurt them, and that it’s precisely because I love and respect them that I don’t want to sustain this dishonest delusion. Family’s should be honest with each other. We should support each other despite our differences. Our family never has communicated the difficult issues well. We are all too awkward and it makes us uncomfortable to leave and force other’s to leave the comfort zone. This dissonance, however, is not a funny family quirk in situation’s such as the one I’ve just described. This dissonance is damaging to our family relations and our unity. It drives us from one another and everything gets very quiet. The thoughts, though, behind the silence, are loud and clattering and disruptive. The disharmony between our thoughts and our silence damages our psyche, makes us weak by our own example.