The open road. The absence of restraint. The lust thereof.

a while ago i took a long bicycle tour alone (LongBikeTrip1). all that i have left of it is a copy of a book by Augustine and a journal that i wrote.

she asked me, once, what the wanderlust was, though i told her i can’t explain it. and i’ve tried, too: i’ve filled whole notebooks with attempts to explain it–why i would bike alone, or come to boston, or why, in the midst of what is an ideal situation, i’m leaving, again. i can quote a lot of poems:

              the sea moans round
With many voices. come my friends,
Tis not too late to seek a newer world

or from Chesterton:

spirits with sunset plumage throng and pass,
glassed darkly in the sea of gold and glass.
but still on every side, in every spot
I saw a million selves, who saw me not

i say that i don’t want happiness, that i know there is something better, all the while maintaining, with Borges that the world is paradise, and truly a place we are meant to be happy in. from time to time i compress my definitions into epigrams: ‘‘the things i love most are those i neither wanted or expected: fear, love, arrival, waking.’’ in the train from montana i wrote that wandering gives me more than just the present, gives me memory that my brain does not, with what has always seemed like unnecessary haste, fold back into itself, robbing it of its connection to the things i touched and the people i loved.

now i have a new explanation, courtesy of g.k. it is that i distrust happiness, order, and stability because they seem like the symptoms of madness. an insidious madness, one they rarely ever diagnose except in the most extreme of cases, a madness of seeing yourself in every face, in conforming or having conformed reality–utterly incongrous reality–into a vision of shadows and echoes played out on the surface of my brain (whatever that is).

and so i have another form of madness, the asp striking at my heels, the buzz in my head, the instinct for ceaseless, shark-like motion. it’s a terror, a quiet, violent terror–don’t underestimate the damage it’s done–a terror that has infused all my loves and casual relationships, so that i look desperately for something other than the voice of the stupid, mocking wind, all the time knowing that i haven’t gone far enough, fall deeply enough, paid whatever price there is for whatever it is i want.