Yes. It has been a long time. At least it feels that way. I have traveled to far away lands and experienced entirely different worlds where time stretches and strings like the strongest taffy.
We entered the humidity like light enters water and like the light we slowed and bent. We waited to shoot back out into the air at a slightly different angle and return to the previous speed.
I wrote on leaflets of Marriot note paper throughout the entire trip with the idea that I would copy those words down, those words that made up the thoughts and feelings that I was having during the trip. I was thinking of making it episodic and the whole deal. But now I am looking at these leaflets and I am thinking I do not have the energy to copy (or at the moment anyway, maybe this can be a future ordeal). And to think, just as my homesickness begins to subside I go right back out to a place I have trouble calling my own.
I am very tired. This trip was a stunningly refined double-edged sword, a perfectly symmetrical work of art with two very opposite faces. One edge--this edge is of extreme sharpness--is a gushing esctatic sort of self-transcendence; in other words it was of a self-growth and reprogramming of such epic proportions in such a short amount of time that I can actually smile genuinely when I look back over it (and not feel the dull aching in my stomach accompanied with the feelings of inadequacy). Like the effect of speed on ADD, I succumbed to a darkness, a darkness that showed me a light that I have never seen before. The other edge of this sword--this edge is equally sharp--is of a sprawling and oceanic depression that I have only felt long ago when I was lost in cold space.
Now the side of the sword I choose to cut with will depend on me. I was given the tools. I can build this town. I can also destroy it (and usually faster than construction).
On one side I can think of the front of the ship, and the endless perfect blue water reflecting the pink-orange light of a dignified sea sunset. Then the other side shows a great smoke stack spewing out that jet black sludge all over the endless blue. Choices, choices.
I just returned from a Carribbean paradise and a tropical hell, depending on who you talk to. Yeah, and staying put on the point of a double-edged blade is a difficult and short-lived affair.
That ship was a great metal cocoon. Something happened when I was in there. But I haven't made the metamorphosis complete. Not yet. Growing pains.
