Here I find myself on the brink of a new adventure: grad school. And as I go through my shelf of journals from the past couple years, intending to box them up and store them away in a perfunctory attempt at downsizing, I am drawn magnetically into the thoughts I recorded during and in the year after my last great adventure, studying abroad. I came across something I wrote in March of 2014, and it struck a chord within me, although notably a different chord than from which it arose. Reading the poem/passage now feels rather like tasting a wine that has had a chance to age a couple years. The same thoughts are still in my head, but they've sat for a good long while in the dark, cool shelves of my brain, and thus now have a slightly more complex flavor (or so it seems, probably only to me). I changed a small thing or two as I typed this up here, to align more with my present palate.
Give me my pen
so I can draw these thoughts out from the invisible,
ephemeral atmosphere of my consciousness,
out from nonexistence---
for if a thought falls through a mind
in the middle of a forest,
but is never written, never spoken,
does it make a sound?
Give me my pen
so I can draw these thoughts into my physical being,
deeper into my Self,
into the hand that steadies and baffles me
with its dexterity, and further
into this organism's modest cave of memory.
Give me my pen,
for the "smart" mass of meticulously manufactured metals
that connects me to humanity's collective intelligence
is weighing too heavily in my hand,
and does not lend the same satisfaction,
the same sensation,
when recording my ruminations.
Give me my pen,
for the internet feels just as immaterial, just as transient
as the thoughts in my head.
And although it may last longer
than the paper on which I write...
it doesn't feel that way.
Give me my pen,
so that I may converse with this nymph called Impermanence,
internalizing her ink-like footsteps just as they evaporate on the page before me.
