Don’t tell me you didn’t think it all through before, that this isn’t what you wanted before you knew what wanting was. You know that music’s deeper than listening, that the hand around my heart didn’t get there by itself.
Ignorance is just a lie we tell ourselves. Our lives are not by accident. Our passions aren’t some random thing. We lie to ourselves about the evils of a random, uncaring universe, or the sovereignty of a plan outside our ability to influence or understand. Because the alternative is hard. That we did this, that we made this, that we meant this, that we chose this. That we are the universe too, and anything that is everything is also us. Not in some flippant hippy connectedness bullshit way.
In a deep, fundamental, literal way. This is us. We did this. We are doing this right now.
I did this.
I went looking for her once. I’d only half-woken up from sleeping, and my mind was just malleable enough to believe she was there with me. This girl I’ve only met in dreams; no, not even a girl. The shape of a girl, the vaguest pre-perception of a human being. Not a person.
So I asked her. And she said: (town I’d never heard of). A few miles north of (well-known city).
I woke up. I went about my day. Some time that afternoon I remembered, and didn’t know what the fuck was going on with my head. So I googled it, as you would. And there it was. 5 hours drive away. Who knows where the idea came from, who knows why that place in particular. So I went. It took a year, and a lot of back-and-forth, but, really, it was inevitable. How could I not be curious enough to go and see?
It was a nice place. The weather was beautiful, and there were nice forests to hike around in the area. It was out of the way and unremarkable, the kind of place people lived but didn’t have any particular reason to visit. I felt out of place, like an intruder.
I’m not really sure what I expected from the trip. I wandered around, wondering if I’d run into her. Wondered if I was crazy, thought about the odds of actually running into a single specific person in a place like that. I looked up the census data: 20 thousand souls. And, hey. It had taken me a whole year to actually go. Even if it had been real, who’s to say she’d have still been there.
In short, it was one of the strangest things I’ve ever done. The oddest thing was, and I suppose is, how difficult to explain or justify it was. I drove somewhere out of the way and unremarkable, hung around for a couple days, and drove back home. And I did it because a couple of words popped into my head one morning.
I don’t regret it. I just don’t know what to do with it. It’s a story I have, a true thing that happened to me. But I have no idea what the point of it is. I have no idea if there’s a moral, and if I’m entirely honest I don’t really understand how it all happened. I don’t understand what happened to me while I was there; in many respects nothing did it all, and I came back no different than I did before.
But just the fact that I sat down to start writing and that came pouring out says something about it. It’s a serious story, a significant one.
Maybe it’s because all we are is the choices we make. And that was something that came entirely from me, an impulse I pulled out from nothing which I followed a long way.
Maybe it’s because the whole thing makes me feel stupid, and I need to make some kind of sense out of it.
Maybe it’s because it didn’t work, and something important broke inside me when it finally came time to leave, and I had to drive back and pretend like nothing changed. Maybe I don’t want to admit it, but I thought something would happen, and I don’t want to admit how badly it hurt to fail when it was stupid to expect anything in the first place.
I don’t want to tell it that way, but it’s true. I took a leap of faith, I let myself hope. And hope is such a cruel, cruel thing. Because it’s not something you do because it’s reasonable, or rational, or based in facts. It’s something you do because you just need it to be okay anyway, even if it’s not.
There was a quote: Why did the rain dances always work? Because they didn’t stop until it rained.
It hurts to need something like that. To need something in a way which is not connected to the world around you, but emerges only from yourself. Is not conditional, transitory, malleable. Does not negotiate, does not back down, does not diminish or decline.
To need something even if you can never have it, and chasing it will kill you. To take the leap of faith even when the only possible outcome is a long and fatal fall.
In the abstract, it’s romantic, tragic, and beautiful, because our stories are always filled with the impossible coming true. But you have to remember, that people write stories because they are dissatisfied with the truth.
And the truth is that, one way or another, there’s always so much blood. That fatal stops being just a word when you see the real wreckage of a human being, whether the devastation is physical, emotional, spiritual.
The truth is, I jumped. I thought that when I went to that picturesque little town someone would catch me. And I’ve been falling ever since. There’s only two ways that can end, and I don’t know if I still have that capacity for irrational hope in me.
But there’s the other thing, and I don’t know if you can understand. It was a choice I made, a choice I’m still making, and I don’t have it in me to regret it. It’s part of me, it is me. This is who I am. This is what I want. Even though it seems foolish to believe it’s even possible.
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