thispresentsojourn

If capacity were not a question, this would be one valid: who couldn’t write a book about a weekend?

On the beginning of the trip, the saturation and difference is the most remarkable with persons in contexts and contexts in persons.  That is to say: take a speck of red paint from a wall and transplant it to a wall that’s all blues and greens and it’s awfuleasy to observe the difference of the speck.

So send that little red speck in some white Explorer one Friday and at the first it’s difficult to see that anything’s different.  When after one weekend, it can seem that everything is, where forgetfulness is blending and the remembering is sharing.

The inverse is true, too. The greens and the blues of the humid country can see the red city hues, silent declarations of demarcations and the unmentioned mysterious, while the perceptions are equal from each of the other.

It’s a remarkable thing, and what it takes is no more than a few miles south of the city, though even more apparent some 200 miles east in a city still unexplored.

So I spun my tires exactly that direction, the drive no less similar to my drives north to Arkansas than the 10-digit difference between interstates 30 and 20.  Cedars hang over the asphalt, humidity steaming up and fogging the windows where the temperature of the air conditioner doesn’t match the exterior’s.

Gain a little more road on into East Texas and you begin to see some hills and bridges and unoccupied territories made of mossy pines and muddy riverbanks and the mother Mississippi, not too far east of there. And the clear traditions of the Second Great Awakening and some Southern drawl steeping its inhabitants can be painfully endearing if only for a shorter bit.

Throw in some darts and some American Honey in a coffee mug on the cobblestone edge of a midnight pool, and the distance seems to license one to be lost in passion and emotion without apology, some adolescent adults aloof responsibility with good reason — to be in order to be.

And much like it was once in some younger Arkansas summer, the welling in our stomachs is intense and spirals, and we can begin to understand, both comparable and contrastable from the most comfortable of contexts, the persons we most truly are to become.