# 21 || C L O U D B U R S T S

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How do you want to spend the rest of your life? I ask.

And then I tell her (or I tell myself, rather), 

To forever chase winter's tail and watch her transform into spring
to swallow tonic that makes me giddy and dance down dusty roads with my arms outstretched
to watch the sunrise every morning with a cup of tea and a pen that spills black over an unlined page
and to kill the inhibitions that keep me from indulging in the above.

∆

It seems I left pieces of myself all over the world - from the city to the sea to the sky - only to come home to my big white bed with little-to-nothing left. Jetlag is the sensation tingling behind my ears, like my hair is on fire and flames are licking the past, leaving a trail of ash behind me. Wake me up when September ends ---  because until then everything is jibberish and there is a mysterious fog lingering over the streets and the ceiling sky.  

If I stay in the present then it's an eternal grey, but if I gaze to the future then I can see the gold and the black-blue summer nights feeling infinity plus one. I gotta get rid of my wits because they've got the better of me and it's tricky to see what's real and what's not when you can talk yourself in and out of just about everything.

"Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring." — Vladimir Nabokov.

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# 20 || existentialism |ˌegziˈsten ch əˌlizəm| !

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"There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place . . ." -- Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet.

( the sky over canada on sunday )

I don't know how much influence where you were born and bred has on where you end up -- because there seems to be a bridge in between where is Home and where I belong. If soy lattes and sisters and Strawberry-the-cat followed me all around the world, maybe I could stay anywhere forever. Because now I know where to be and it isn't always where I keep leaving my heart every other day. Home is where the city and the sea and the meadows are entangled together in a dusty day, home is where I love my sister, home is morning lattes with my papa, home is Masterchef on the sofa with a cup of tea and my mummy. Home is in the future and the past but never the present. Does that make any sense?

Maybe it could be adequate to fall in love with a place inside your imagination. But turn fantasy into reality and live inside a reverie. Live inside a Nightmare! If awake were better than asleep --- that's what I dream of. To weep when I wake because I'm so overwhelmingly happy to be alive. To sob before I sleep because I have to kiss goodbye a life I love for several hours. Make memories to last a lifetime and scribble words that romanticise everything about it so the story is the most beautiful that it could ever be. Fear and haze and confusion make wonderful lessons --- it's exciting, it's special and it's something you'll never forget. You'll float on okay.    

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There I was last week on a train crawling across Belgium with a notebook between my fingers. Je te vois, a-fille-far-up-in-the-sky, I can see you from the clouds, your hands dancing golden in the sun. Despair doesn't exist in your world. I think apathy is worse than defeat. To watch faces fade into the past because you let terror and ego get the better of you. It's all nonsense, you know. Being scared or shy ofzo. Happy is real because it's a reality you created or walked your way into. It's a state of mind you have to hold onto. If you don't forget then you can't let go, remember the butterflies and the smile you tried to swallow (but why!) and the sillyfaces you made while you were daydreaming and the fascination that some things can make you feel opalescent. I don't know if happy would really exist unless you understand melancholia.

There I was last week-end in Paris with a suitcase and 90 steps down, down, down Abbesses. The ache and exhaustion disappear, but the inner strength lasts a lifetime. Fairylights in Montmartre and a €1.60 container of dinner. Long for company but imagine how different these words would sound if somebody were there. 

There I was on the roof in a different time-zone. Sometimes lately my heart doesn't beat, it trembles. It's not panic or angst but a shiver in the heat. Maybe it's nostalgia, new and nausea mingled together to become an awkward blend of untitled emotion.

 

"Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." -- Oscar Wilde

And here I am now strolling streets I've never seen before and I can't remember my footsteps if I move too quick. The grey matter of my mind is vacuum-esque, but somehow it's not. The current of my thoughts move fast and ebb-flow with the moon. But I'll tell you one thing -- lately I'm frightened that if everywhere could feel like home, then nowhere will ever feel like home. 

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