There’s a phenomenon in dreams that I’ve only previously known to exist within them. You’ve experienced it, I’ve no doubt, we all have. One thing becomes another thing, one place morphs into somewhere else, the transition seamless and the effect instantaneous.
You’re here then you’re there, they are them before becoming someone else.
If I close my eyes tight enough, sitting here and staring at a blinking cursor on another Signal Fire essay waiting to be born from my bizarre brain, I am looking down at my old weathered boots walking across cobblestones several centuries old. I see fog rising as though sea-born, I see crow stepped gables rising to where the light still peeks through, I see dark and dirty walls that haven’t changed in 800 years. Then, without opening these tired eyes, that fog gives way to a rugged coastline on an island off another island, winding road seven hundred feet above the sea below, no guardrails, but a mist still hangs and obscures that strange isolated cove.
I swear I am there, I think I know I was once. Not now, but then. I swear I was. But then again, maybe I wasn’t, maybe those things never happened, maybe not. Maybe it was all a dream I had on some long-haul flight after 26 sleepless hours, maybe it was my brain combining hundreds of photographs I’ve taken. Maybe.
Fifteen years of nearly constant travel sounds like this, a dream to those I try to describe it to. Sometimes, it was. What no one tells you though, what no one shares when they too have been where you have been, when their bodies have been at motion as long as yours is this:
When you never stop moving, never stop absorbing memories and visuals and places, nothing really feels real anymore when you stop.
Somehow, your memories stop stitching themselves together like a quilt, a tapestry of your wandering, somehow they stop telling one cohesive story. Instead, memories become flashcards, become glimpses, become postcards entirely out-of-order in your mind—unsent and unstamped and collected for someone, sometime later.
When I fall into myself, which happens often as an Autistic who is constantly struggling to cope with the overwhelming noise of this life, I get lost in this liminal space. I go somewhere else, somewhere with softer edges and quieter sounds, as all things are made gentle after the sandpaper of time.
There’s the smell of street food wafting and laced with temptation, but I cannot remember which city held it, which streets it was cooked on. There’s the stars above some ocean, the smoothness of sea glass in the palm of my hand. I don’t know which ocean, I cannot recall the sea.
There’s laughter over sixty-six dozen cups of morning tea, the walls rise and fall and shift and move like some elaborate stage set. The hotel blends from one to another, my mind inventing the space from every photograph I’ve taken, every morning I’ve risen from bed, stumbled into the dining area of each temporary lodging we’ve called home.
This cup in the far east of France, this cup the north of Ireland, this cup in the rainforest of Belize with howler monkeys serenading our breakfast taken al fresco. I know they are real, they must be, but they blend into one thing and that one thing transforms into another and I am left with a muddled mixture of a million memories. They meld, and I wonder of it all.
Life in motion is never meant to be a rooting thing. The tendrils of its survival cannot find the depth in the soil of our existence. It’s a hovering thing, if it’s anything at all. A life in motion is altogether untethered, and then when you sit in the stillness of some brand new morning you begin to wonder if all those memories that swirl around in the steam from your cup are real, if you ever lived them at all.
Was I there, was I that, did it change me like I thought it did? This memory that feels foundational, was it mine or was it borrowed from some other photograph taken by some other camera? Was I there, was I that?
This movement, this wild life spent packing and unpacking the same suitcases for years on years, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I am shaped by what I have seen, I am built by the bombardment of these flashcard memories, though time seems to blend, though the past begins to feel like a dream of a dream.
There’s a remedy, I think, and I’m learning how to practice it. I’m learning now to slow down, just enough to let my fingers do their stitching, let my mind make quilts of where I’ve been, what I’ve seen. If I sit longer in these melancholic moments, these nostalgic nuggets of wanderlust, I can try harder. I can remember on purpose.
It’s been quieter these last few years, our business still has not rebounded to how it was before COVID spread across the surface of this place like a fever and stole our livelihood. We’re trying, we’re working hard to rebuild and convince people of the value of seeing yourself in a way you’ve never imagined, through photographs you cannot believe we captured, but it’s been hard. We go less now, which leaves more time to think back, to see again what we have seen.
This is where it happens, this dreamlike fade from one to another, this is where I question—often to myself, often to my wife as she falls into sleep beside me—Where were we when…Do you remember the place…What was the name of that pub…Did we ever see…?
Maybe you’ve done this, too. Maybe you look back and wonder if you really saw what you saw, if you really did all the things you did. Maybe you misplace your memories and confuse their origins, maybe you glance at a chapter of your life and just barely remember reading it, though the details are still so clear.
Which of your memories feel the most like a dream? Which meld into others, which leave you unsure of the when, the where, the who, the how?
I do not believe myself unique in this bizarre consequence of a life spent traveling, of years invested in a wandering life. I cannot be alone in feeling unanchored from time to time, thoughts rising up through the clouds like a balloon loosed from some joyful wrist.
We are all the constitutions of our consciousness, we are an amalgam of every single thing we’ve ever seen, every conversation in every place our bodies have ever come to rest, even if temporary. We are the adventures, the days of stillness, we are the stories we tell—others, ourselves—even when they do not feel real, not anymore.
There is a consequence to all these wandering years, a price we must pay, and I know I will happily pay it.
Everywhere, nowhere, it matters little. Maybe it doesn’t matter, all this blending, maybe it’s the point. Maybe all life is, all it should be, is the collecting of a million memories so when it all comes to an end and we begin again, the highlight reel we see before we go will be something stunning. Maybe all there is for us to do, is fill it with these beautiful blending images, these stories that combine and coalesce into one thing, a billion chances to be kind that we took, and remembered.
We’ll see. For now, these old boots have more miles to walk.
See you out there.
There’s a consequence
to all these wandering years.
Is anything real?
Song of the Week
I’ve wandered a lot, these poems are born from that, the photographs testaments to it. Wanna see? Tickle that little link below with your mouses…
