Quintessence

And I give away my secrets too early.

This is the quintessence of life—I am at my normal coffee shop-restaurant waiting for the United States Army to arrive. They come here every week, just like me. I will order my usual—a green chile cheeseburger and eat it with reckless abandon. Simple pleasure. I will wait, long for maybe someone to come up and say hello. Life is the music playing overhead as I dream. Life is perhaps the five seconds of courage I will have one day to make a move.

Life is also a plane ticket to somewhere new. Maybe I bought it on the fly, or maybe I planned it. It is exploring. Tasting. Laughing. Crying. Shivering in the cold because I forgot my jacket, or sweating in the heat because I remembered it. Seeing my building in the sky as I come back to Dallas—dancing on clouds. Did I miss it? Am I longing for someplace else?

If we can define home, then what is life? And if we can define life, is not home the place where we can feel alive? A symbiotic relationship. Two beating hearts conjoined at a crossroads in the forest. A yell and a kiss. Two beautiful, frightening things. The absence of which one is nothing more than a rock by a road that others drive on. That is what I search for—life and home. I feel most alive when I am walking the streets of a foreign city and journaling on the coast. Putting my camera down and listening to the honking of horns and the intelligible radio chatter in the back of a taxi. I yell with my roommate sometimes on the terrace—we let loose the bellies of our souls and sometimes someone yells back—a calling to better times and a pushing out of things that tie us down. Spontaneity is also life. Where can I dance and sing? Take me there. Where can I sweat and crash? Take me there. Where does my phone go down and my eyes go up? That is where I want to stay forever. That is home to me.

--Written July 2024. xx