Email Reminder: Your flight is departing in 7 days’ time.

Every time I am tasked to do a big piece of (presumptuous) brainy writing, I end up on 1 of my 5 blogs or 3 Tumblrs and ramble to every one but no one in particular. I am fond of trivializing the amount of heart and effort I put into things I am really really passionate about, and thus often jest that I am merely procrastinating. But I think I’m beginning to conceptualize this ritual as clearing head/heart space.

Writing is intimate to me. Words are intimate to me. And not being able to seek out the perfect term to articulate these visualizations and sound scapes and scents and locale/people-based emotions is painful. I feel a somatic agony in my body. How do I tell you what’s inside my head if we do not, cannot, will never be able to share a common vernacular? There is always music in my head and rhythm in my bones and they are always beautiful, but I cannot process and project them without taking away from their character.

I have been on the road for 30 days now.

What does hopping around 6 cities in 4 countries do to me? Not much, considering the frequent travels from my chorale/orchestral days + the past 3 years of officious academic things and fieldwork. What has hopping around 6 cities in 4 countries done to me at this point of my life? I have left pieces of myself in every place, and I don’t know what to do with all these ties.

I have always been dramatically nostalgic about snapshots of time and interactive bursts with peoples and being in spaces. My brain archive makes me happy inside. But it is only just hitting me that a life in academia is very likely a life of endless rotations and competitive positions and crowded airports and disorienting time belts and fleeting peoples and empty spaces. What am I meant to do when I become full of all these things?

7 days to go.