A familiar unfamiliar place

I know this place. Yet I do not know this place. All cities look the same. I sift through photograph after photograph, peering at them under a magnifying glass forensically, methodically, then frantically, and then yet intoxicatingly. But one looks exactly like the next, and I whisper to the stars that I could be anywhere.

Except that I am not. They are merely a trick of the light.

What is it about familiar unfamiliar places that makes me want to walk and walk? I have walked many miles – kept walking even when I didn't know where I was, where I was going, or where I might end up. All I know. All I know is that all this does not matter, will not matter, in the end, now or ever. Not to you, and not to me – though in a different way – because as many miles as I swallow into me with my feet stepping one in front of the next, it will never take me to you.

So I think I will stop here, in this hut, walled three sides out of four. Stop the walk. Stop the talk. Have to. There are many words you could have uttered, gestures you could have made, but all I can think of right now is to scrape together every fifty-cent coin I have slavishly saved, to buy the tallest weakest splintering ladder, lean it against this hardening brickwall, and climb my way up and out, rickety after racketing step, one foot over another.

I have not forgotten that you used a word with two letters instead of three. Two, not three. A present tense, causing an ever-present tense. So I will climb up until the air grows thin, until my grip slips with the smell of wet clay dripping down my arms, unformed and unfired. Climb into another dimension intersecting with the fragmented glow of a gentle Gehry river. It is crystal clear yet shimmering magical, soothing yet it is flowing on, passing by, to be pooled in a shallow well elsewhere amongst polished stones polishing. Elsewhere. Somewhere close-by, down-stream. But elsewhere.

A man once told me there would be three significant kidney-shaped stones. In this familiar unfamiliar place, I met the first, said yes to the second, and now have to say goodbye to the third. Don't look back. I will try not to, even though I will.

I met here, I said yes here, and here in this box I will bid you farewell. I leave you all my words. Because they are not mine. There were never mine. You breathed life into them, and now to you they shall return. For without you, I will have no more words.