The circle of friends that slowly turns into something akin to a neolithic calendar. Placed on a plane near a highway. The roof gone for millennia.
One of the monoliths seems to have remnants of paint on it.
Many others have crumbled.
One was taken away.
Will anyone ever know how they got here, and what they really mean?
A circle of smoke. Disintegrating in the summer dust in the room to which I was first brought when freshly born. My uncle, a young, slightly arrogant man with a beard. He is on his way towards the peaks of a career nearby. Our escape will break things for him. But ultimately his own heart will break in a surprise attack.
I will return to his funeral in Krakow. We had no idea.
The days and the years and the decades, spinning in a spiral that appears to be round. Falling towards a place we can’t really imagine.
The wheels of our car on Ukrainian roads towards Romania. It’s 1978. I am old enough to not be the youngest. On this trip I will touch a dolphin for the first time.
I am awake at 3am, worried about invisible monsters, trying to breathe in circles. It barely works. But then it does. I walk into my dreams as if they were that funny bar in the subway station on 59th street. I think we got drunk there only once. The place closed soon after.
The wheels, the wheels, the many wheels. Some hiding underneath wings of airplanes taking off from beautiful places on beautiful days, when it would be tempting to look into the disk of the sun and let the eyes create a counter image right there and then. Blue and bright. Blinded for minutes.
The brush moves in curves around a small circle placed on the always similar spot on the sheet of paper. The rotary phone in the quiet apartment on the 8th floor. The phone is grey. I can only call two to three people. Their voices also appear to be black and white.
I turn on the gas stove and burn objects to see what will happen to them. Plastic cups create black snow. I try to wipe it all away before my mother returns or my father wakes up. They seemingly never do.
A roulette table and the silly idea of preventing losses. Hedging against everything except the idea itself. A coke fueled random man shouts in my ear that he just lost thousands. I have no idea why we are here right now. I wanted to close a circle and see what Paris looks like finished. It’s nothing like I had expected.
Burj Khalifa a gently shaped sand rose in the drawings that surround us, as we enter the elevator. It really is also a gorgeous thorn. Never have we been higher up and yet it feels like we are kites just about to be torn into the sky above a beautifully manicured wilderness.
Quite a few circles are about to close soon. There will be wheels again. And a journey I wanted to embark on for decades. I am so worried that I will not be able to feel it all the right way. I have been in that place before. Arrived at a water station without a mouth or eyes or chest.
I do hope that it is going to be different this time. I want to imagine that I will weave a new set of ideas into something unexpected. But perhaps I am just walking slowly around stones, trying to understand their surface, incapable though. Compared to them I am like the particles of smoke from the mouth of a man who himself is now dust.
As I am writing this, I am looking at the sky not far from Los Angeles. It is surprisingly foggy, but we are up in the mountains. This is before we watched Free Solo. The trees around us will never know. They and the sky are pixels.
Today has been a challenging day. A large imaginary knot in my chest is preventing me from thinking in any positive way. Time for a walk now. It’s green outside.
A plane is landing over the open brook.