I flew for the first time on my new passport today – BTV to JFK. Almost exactly five years ago, I flew from YYZ to CDG. Like 5 years ago, my passport received expedited renewal service. Like 5 years ago, I flew out the next day. 5 years of traveling, and what have I learned? Time can sometimes be bought – with a lot of money, and timing is somewhat of a mysterious thing. To get it just right is magic, but most of the time, it’s a bad word. The timing of things – like the rests in a piece of music, shapes and changes everything. Rachmaninoff with zero rests? You don’t want to…
“It’s always easier to leave than to be left” – so it became my modus operandi for the better part of a decade. There’s a strange sense of ease I feel at airports, and thank goodness for that, for I suppose I earned the “trouble-maker” label from a former boss of mine, and life still constantly reminds me of such, so I guess I’m still growing up. I have “no age”, or “none that matters”, as it had been remarked a few times.
Map reading is not my forté – home is where you can roam around without a GPS, and wearing a compass around my neck would probably serve me better than wearing a Steinway key, but navigation at airports is instinctual and second nature. I’ve done it since I was 4. A lot of it. I’ve learned the hard way who to avoid upsetting, how to be so charming to skip most lines, hold a departing flight, and a few other things that should remain private. The stamps in my passport make for a better blueprint of my life thus far, than any other tangible record. From one airport to the next, lessons were many, stories are plenty, and tears always needed to be there.
A couple passports ago, I was still an undergrad in England (Herstmonceux Castle, to be exact). It was 15:55, I had just handed in an essay due for 16h, and with a generous 5 minutes to spare, I was dashing through the ballroom trying to catch the next train out of Polegate to London Victoria for a dinner date, and a send off. The date was special, Lebanese food & co., mostly the co./M, because he’d been the only one with whom I didn’t mind sharing my “temple” – the alcove of the ballroom where I had just dashed from. There was a piano, on which I practised every day, usually alone, with the exception of tour groups coming through every so often. While M was still a student there, he would study in the ballroom – either by the bar, on the floor by the far windows, or somewhere far enough to still respect my “private practice”… When he was no longer a student, he would visit, and there would be flowers left on the piano bench… M and I don’t have a “settled” story, as it were, because we were mostly going places, yet throughout the fragments, there had been enough to distill it all into an “I love you”…
Just like that, at LHR, “I love you”… and I didn’t echo back.
I didn’t because I didn’t know how. I couldn’t give something I didn’t have; I couldn’t give something I lacked. Repeating those words back would have been a lie, a crime, because the genuine place where that should have come from, was a void, was darkness, was a hole… Of what little I knew about love, I knew that I didn’t have it there to give. So the years that followed, from one airport to the next, I drowned myself in affairs and conditions of the heart. The years that followed, from ZAG to YUL, I learned to love, to fully engage, to fully commit, to fully fall, and to fully fail. Yet, the irony of it all is that by loving, I seem to have killed my darlings.
Gotta be the way I love,
Or perhaps I still don’t know how.
And timing is still a bad word,
So I just peace on out…
{X}
#JeNeSaisQuoi 