MENDES It wasn’t another lifetime but now, only sunlit moments ago, driving deep into the early evening. You see, we were on the road back from Mendes and I had no idea where we were really - just the long stretch of road spanning before us and the outlines of small towns sketched out by little beacons and filaments of light. My mind, by trigger of a song, happened upon a boy who gave me my first reciprocal taste of love. And so you see, I moved to New York after that which taught me my first real lesson about green lights at the end of the dock and the immense power of a mind that dwells in fantasy.
And so you see, I, well-accustomed to my flighty form couldn’t bear to “stick things out” and instead found myself accidentally trapped in Rio de Janeiro. And so you see, years later traversing on this dark highway, things have come full circle because I think of an old me and that boy again, unearthing the morsels I’d long buried. You know, it’s constantly revealed to me how humans are built for survival. I didn’t know what would come after him, but the next thing was better. And there have been so many things since - so many songs, slow dances, no two palms with exactly the same traces. Always, the highways and skies endless, naming that dip on the horizon ‘skyline’ so that we never have to reach it.
And so you see, driving back from Mendes, for the first time in these years that have passed, I let the song that I used to loop play out in full. And there was no lamentation. It came to me instead. A quiet gratitude. How lucky I am to have been held like that. And yes, I wanted to be understood scientifically, but mostly on a soul level. Maybe it’s yet to come. Sometimes this world, though I know it is very big, feels strangely small to me. I picture the ten thousand ladybirds and my eyes, both myopic and tired, start to glaze a little, blurring every headlight along the highway.
And so you see, it all started flooding back to me. Everything that I couldn’t have known then that has consequently led me to this moment of peace. And if I didn’t know that then, what might I not know now? There might be entire galaxies still to be revealed and so you see - we were driving through the night, the entire landscape coming back at me through the windshield, not a cloud or the full moon glimpsed in the sky. And in that moment I felt it viscerally, what it means to be entirely human: the sensation of inhaling and exhaling, of blood pumping around my body, of my vital organs beating in harmony to grant me another second on this earth. Us, driving. Time, always passing. Me, always moving. We’ll arrive in the city at a strange hour, everybody sleeping, a moment so tranquil that the world could be standing still in fact. But even then, we’ll keep moving and playing the damn song. None of us are looking back.
