A Horizon Within
as seen on CEREAL MAG
TRAVEL WITHOUT TRAVELLING
Some of us are born with a crack in our souls. Itchy feet. Eyes that are unable to focus on anything other than the far-flung. We were folded once, and then left like that for too long; there is a line inside us. I know it is there, because it speaks to another line, outside. They whisper at one another, gaze at one another. They will never rest until they are moving closer. There can be no doubt; the line outside beckons; this simple fold between land and sky. It is the answer to a complex equation, made trickier by topography, trees, the jumble of the city, and the relative density of air. It is a trick of the eye, brought about by the curvature of the Earth, muddled with atmospheric haze. I align the fold inside me to it, just as I point my deckchair to the sea.
I have, at times, tried to ignore its call. But the horizon is demanding. Its desire to draw me ever closer gnaws at my dreams, crawls across those quiet moments where I should find contentment. It prises me open, like an oyster, and the fold becomes the crack that lets the world in. It ties strings to my insides, pulling on each one as it whispers its promises. I will pick you up, it sings, in my tumbling embrace. Rock you like flotsam on my waves. Throw you back on the volcanic sand where I found you, forever changed. It promises an undoing quite unlike any other, its fury matched only – perhaps – by the devastation of love. I stumble, squinting, bent out of shape, unable, quite, to find my way back in through doors that have grown narrower somehow, into rooms more careworn than I remember them. It unscrews the hinges on that word home.
I imagine that there was a time when people were content to live out short lives, circumscribed by the boundary of a muddy field and a scattering of low, smoky cottages, an inn, a tower. But I know that this crack in my soul is older than that. Written in my DNA is a story of migration: from hunger to plenty; from oppression to freedom; from poverty to promise; from thronging alleys to a wild frontier. We follow hummocks and hoof prints in the wake of great beasts that sustain us; the promise of gold in the hills, dreams of fortune and fame. The mud of the road is churned. Oceans become ponds. Borders swept away, languages silenced, old stories drowned out by the tramp of hoping feet. Even when dictators and despots try to tie our bodies to the land, clip the feathers at our heels with stamps and permits, watchtowers, strip searches, our minds, unfettered, up and fly away. The longing is ever present; to open our eyes, to broaden our minds, to mix our genes.
I sit, breathing hard. In wonder.
In the books on my shelves; a life inserted like a pressed flower between each pair of pages.
The pictures on my wall; lives captured in light and squeezed under sheets of glass.
A name signed with the drag of a stylus through wet clay. Threads dampened with someone’s spit pressed between someone’s forefinger, someone’s thumb.
Each spice a childhood memory. Every note sung, plucked, or struck the beat of a heart folded in two with a horizon of its own. The fold in me reaches for the fold in the other.
The horizon is the point we meet. As I reach, so I am reached for. As I am the starting point, so I am someone else’s destination. I travel without travelling. I go without going. I feel myself transported towards all these unknowable others. Symmetry without rotation or return. This is the search, I realise.
To really move is to be moved.
Each journey can only end not somewhere, but with someone.