(n): the state of fully inhabiting each moment of life by consciously entering into each aspect of the lived experience: the physical, emotional, and intellectual.
a poet and a fiction writer go on a road trip and find vastly different things to talk about.
songs:
. epitaph - hippo campus
. agnes - glass animals
. way it goes - hippo campus
. don't take the money - bleachers
. silvertongue - young the giant
. everything now - arcade fire
the expanse of road stretches before us, the lines of lanes neatly dividing the world before us into
manageable slices. oh how i wish it could always be this simple.
the passing headlights shine in your eyes, a sparkle of hope cutting through darkness of freeway
asphalt. a visible manifestation of your tendency to shine the hope given to you onto others. my
darling moon, i wish i could be the source of your light. I tell you this, and you furrow your
brow. you tell me you don't understand.
we pass through towns and suburbias unfamiliar to us both and you become Mnemosyne, the
personification of memories giving rise to the 9 muses, spinning stories of the towns we drive
through and their inhabitants with such vivid detail i swear you've lived those lives before.
we pass a couple walking on the street and you tell me why they love each other when they got
married, and why they don't after 32 years.
we pass a man walking his dog and you tell me about the day he went to the shelter, how he
saved the dog but the dog ended up saving him.
we pass another couple in a car and you tell me how they have just finished a road trip similar to
our own and now they are both heading home. you tell me that home for the girl is a place. you
tell me that home for the boy is a feeling. you tell me how they're both going to go home to the
same place, but only one of them is going to find that familiar comfort.
you tell these stories as if they've breathed a new life into you. you tell these stories with such passion, and awe, and raw emotion, it's as if you become a vessel for these stories, these lives forgotten, these experiences that are foreign to us both. you tell me with such reverence and conviction what the human experience is like for those neither of us resemble or could ever begin to fathom.
the difference between us is that i write poetry and you write fiction. nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than driving through the central united states. i write about you, how it feels to sit there in the car and share this experience with you. you spin tales of ordinary grandeous about the cities we pass. on a particularly boring stretch of road, i ask you to tell me the story of how we got to sit in your 1995 toyota. you recount the events to me and i realize in this moment that you can only breathe life into the strange, the unfamiliar. me, i can only breathe life into the ordinary. i tell you about this revelation and you furrow your brow yet again. you tell me that you know what i am saying but you do not understand.
i tell you, starkly and simply, that the difference between us is that i write poetry and you write fiction. you nod. i tell you that there is nowhere this phenomenon is more apparent than in our relationship. you look at me. i turn to face you, "i can write about us. you can't."
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