In exactly one week I will be in PDX airport, waiting to board a flight to San Francisco, an airport I assume will smell the exact same as Portland’s, to then board a flight to Manchester, England and finally to Dusseldorf, Germany. Whether the last two will hold up to my belief that all airports have the same smell, a fragrance I would like to coin “liminal space,” with a subtext of “where alcoholism does not exist nor does real-time,” is something that will I will relay to this journal in a week.
Being so close to leaving, and getting the nervousness that comes with new experience, a feeling akin to going rockclimbing for the first time in a while and getting high up and looking down at the belayer standing boredly while they straddle your life on an inch-thick rope, and your stomach dropping out, I am preemptively missing Portland, my friends, my limited contact with my ex-girlfriend, and an America that my common initial reaction to is “Oh, no thank you.” This is a strange time in my life. I am twenty-three and have recently completed college, finished the second draft of a novel that I would describe as “passable,” will hopefully record an album in the next week with the hopes that seven p.m. stops rolling around, triggering my brain to tell me it’s time to think about my ex (even if that is not necessarily in the “I miss you” sense and just in the nefarious way your brain misses someone you cannot see after seeing them constantly for a long period of time), and I am going on a trip that few have the privilege to take.
I feel lucky and I feel proud. I feel lucky that I can take this trip, that I spent the time with my ex that I did, and I feel pride in the work I have accomplished in the past six months and in my volition to continue on this trip despite my yearning to stay here because my life is not where I thought it would be and I still feel like I’m settling into my new apartment with my new and wonderful roommate and settling into life and the feeling of completing a piece work that I would like to pursue working on more (though I know it’s best to get distance from all of these for a while).
My hyper-caution as a child was frequently the only voice of reason to my friend-groups. While I generally went along with most of the stupid decisions that granted me good stories to tell (usually standing back and watching with deep fascination at our ability to be so self-destructive at such a young age), I like to think that the caution I exhibited while young turned into self-discipline. Though, make no mistake, that caution and subsequent self-discipline stems from a fear of losing control; of myself, of the situation I’m in, of life. I am learning that you can have self-discipline in a riptide, and while it doesn’t get you out of the riptide, it does make it easier to tread water until someone or someones help to get you out. This trip is not a test in self-discipline—since I think I have that at least relatively covered for my age. What this trip is, is my ability to throw myself into a riptide and see if I can use my caution and discipline and fear to find something beautiful. Continuing with the riptide analogy, maybe a cove down the shoreline, or maybe I will drown floating helplessly above a coral reef and my body will dissolve and be picked at and I will become coral, small fish floating through my eye sockets and finding a home there.
I am missing people and places preemptively, in the way you miss your grandparents as you are getting ready to leave their house and realize they are getting older and so are you. I am missing time that I feel may be lost to me on this trip. What that time would actuate any more than this trip, I can’t say, and my logical brain tells me that I can pick up where I left off with friends, and art, and trying to build a friendship with my ex. The fear—the illogical maze of “what if”—is telling me that I will not be able to regain that lost time in any way. Though, what I can say, is that I know I can use my time in Europe effectively, to gain new experiences to filter through art, and maybe finding a new ex-girlfriend, but the illogical maze has writing on the wall: “You will be lost and it will not be worth it. You are a fool.”
This is what I feel right now, a week out from the beginning of this experience. And it feels like a lot and I am still blundering through this maze, trying to make sure I am looking ahead and not at the writing on the wall.
-Daylon M. Phillips (07/31/2018)
Daylon M. Phillips 