I’m on a narrow alley of this ancient city heading toward yet another cafe. I am sitting here for an hour at least, watching how the light cuts through the sails as the sun sets, listening to a wayward halyard slap against the mast. I am in a taxi. I am walking. I am on my fifth ferry ride in ten days. I am amazed at the way an entire cathedral is hiding behind a corner of these tiny streets, or how one whole spire fell in the earthquake, or at the deep deep blue of this mosque’s ceiling. I am taking a long shower with the heat cranked as high as it can go after hitting three, or was it four, museums today and languishing in this wet that encases me in comfort and release. I am on my tiptoes in the corner as the water fills the drain, encroaches, refusing to wander down the miracle that is Eastern European indoor plumbing. I am gasping at the view. I am pulling the corners off the left side — my side — of another bed so I can tuck my feet into the burrito of their fold. I am practicing my pronunciation, hvala very much. I am looking at the map and can’t quite comprehend that we’re not hopping from country to country ad infinitum. I am remembering that, given the circumstances of life, dancing in this jukebox dive is the most likely thing for someone with a predilection such as myself to do and I’m watching you on the sidelines thinking that all I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you.

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I am alone in a clean 3-star hotel, feeling so full and free and expanded that anything could be possible. I’m just one night away from wiping a clean blank slate of a life and suddenly everything being okay forever. Just one order of room service that arrives five seconds after I step out of the shower. One far too generous tip because I am relishing in being on my own in a hotel room, wrapped in a towel and the person who brought the food has fabulous nails and a gender identity that refuses to be pinned down to a single binary. One meal eaten naked on the bed with dripping hair while I read. I’m one soul-stirring novel away from picking it all up and moving moving moving and never stopping. I’m one roomful of childhood nostalgia watching men I knew as boys dancing with their children away from slipping into a fresh new take on life. I’m one complimentary breakfast away, one cup of shitty hotel drip coffee, one more kindly Canadian middle aged woman wiping tables around me asking if I need anything else. I’m one drive back to Vancouver, one hour and ten minutes of Joni Mitchell. I’m one more repeat through this album away from lighting this car on fire and grabbing the fumes as they lift up into the sky, my body pumping to some unknown but not unremembered beat, dancing through the clouds. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling looking for something what can it be?

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I’ve been back home for over a month now. Back in the swing of things at work and already hosted a Canadian Thanksgiving picnic. Already it feels like the two weeks with Phoenix in Sarajevo and Croatia didn’t happen. And the week on my own on the West Coast with my friends and at Steve and Bonnie’s wedding. Can I tap into the spaciousness of a holiday while getting emails to finalize my ever-changing work schedule? Can I remember the way the light falls and the shadows cast over rocky streets hewn centuries ago? The edges were still rough, I remember that. But the center of the roads were scuffed smooth from a hundred million citizens’ and tourists’ clambering. That’s what memories turn into over time when we try to look right at them — a nondescript beige. We see slight details in our periphery, but now the middle is all smudging to vague, worn over time to something indecipherable.

Another Covid exposure at work. I get the text after thirteen hours and 300 miles driven in a van with a person who tested positive the next day. I’m grateful for modern medicine, to be boosted and to not get sick. No physical symptoms at all, really. Four seconds of sensation in my throat — could this be something? should I test? — and then nothing.

Nothing, then anyway. But what about in the lull of Hawaiʻi’s autumn shoulder season, when tourists aren’t booking as many trips to waterfalls and volcano parks? Those unstructured days off where I only leave the house to go look at ocean waves and for not much else.

The resulting brain fog and depression is a fishing net. It stretches over my mind, sinking me down into an ocean deeper than I can see. It’s a net that’s full of holes, but instead of creating escape routes, they turn into gaps of my synapses. I’m left with a neural network struggling not only to turn a thought into action, but to complete a thought at all. There are too many holes. Vacuum the house. Dust. Go for a bike ride. Go to the gym. Play the guitar. Make dinner. Each possible act dissolves into a sea of unmet potentials, my brain awash in cheap dopamine mined from scrolling content I never actually wanted to see. Nighttime is magnesium drinks downed in a desperation to get these twitches out of my legs. I am at the mercy of a heaviness I can’t resist. I want to stand in defiance, escape the net. I want to be strong. I want to laugh along. I want to belong to the living.

I want to have fun. I want to shine like the sun.

I want to make you feel free.

I want to make you feel free.