"...Faceless the mystery, nameless the traveler..."

This is writ in reverse, parts fresh, others weeks in the making, stitched together in a French airplane over international waters. Playback, substance rewound, everything I have felt since seeing it pass.

These people have become slow portraits, characters abstract to themselves as filtered in my eye. The more I know the world, the less I understand myself. 

But they have names: Ionut (or Ionuts, or John), Bianca, Bogdan, Gita and Radiana, Betty, Sobi, Lavigna (like my grandmother, spoke different), and two Claudius,. I still do not know them all, and the few who find representation in my head are petty abstracts of the real thing--haircuts and clothes wearing human lives. 

Such algorithms of behavior break apart in line for pizza, or when you look them straight in the face. They surprise you. Life attacks when they learn you instead. You never know just how to answer when they ask in your language what's up. I know to fumble "stau" and try to be so.

I met a man who spoke in tongues, whose mouth would fill up with letters in god's name. His teeth would melt down his throat to make room for the multitudes to dance around antiquity in articulate crashes of babel. Everyone would listen silent, for the echoes themselves to ring truth.

I didn't get his name.

So many more fade into a picnic ambiance. I fate Paul: He embraced me from the beginning, just after lightning on the road changed him from Saul.

Monika and Laurena changed names in the air on the trampoline. They gave mine to the crickets.

So I'll live on in Cicadidae, and try in my own way to sort the language of faces into some language I may speak.

Of god and his own name my own tongue recedes down my throat and grasps like a raffle for the right noise to make. 

I hold onto the little graces I can read: faces, feelings, the footprints which lead me from home. I look for patterns squinting through the signs till all the traffic lights blur into heavenly bodies dancing notes of grace onto nothing and night. 

I can sometimes discern whole atoms of purpose, once in the dejected nod of a host parent expecting a darling little orphan. Taking in their idiosyncratic cameraman instead. Her name is Spring.

We drive into mountains, the first incline in Indiana since speedbumps leaving Illinois. In that distance we made small talk large, her children stare like vistas. They make me laugh, tugging vacancies only family can fill.

They open their doors, familiar children's blue handprints all over the wall, their feet on the table gathering chairs as we talked the whole night gone.

I told them all these things I feel must keep inside with only the attic light as proof they are there. They listened, unblinking. Sharing. Knowing much more. 

I left them a note, told them our lovely misfit families must vacation together soon.

I am in Romania now, in medias res. Sorting ever more unutterable lunastic sightseeing down to its simplest forms.

Hollow fare like this, leaving so much I cannot tell you, can never tell you. 

I lack so much the capacity. 

Dear reader dear friend this is only as I experienced it, in an airplane 34,000 and

5 feet, 8 inches in the air. I am saying this firmly on the ground, so green, it's like the end of all red. 

Try to understand. 

Know that this is not madness. 

Still,

the days rush around switching places, preparing their voyage into memory like postage: the boys toss suitcases into the belly of the bus, Joseph sees his son Joe off. And the days before he tells me, all his life they called him the orphan. He wandered the glowing streets alone. His parents gave everything to the kids in Romania when communism fell. They spared nothing for him. We laughed, still laugh, and spread apart.

Nicolas, one of the houseparents biological children, watches Laurenciu and Monika jealously while they toss the ball back and forth, shifting importance, ordering themselves to face all time.

The days turn into minutes, vibrate down to their essential heartstrings. They get heavy like memories, and rear up like wheels in reverse. Ionuts flips the host's dirtbike all the way around, as his grin in days to come thrashes just the same. I see him fight, I see him want, and try, and fight himself. I want to join in and play-fight with them, wrestle on the banks of Great Lakes and circumstance. Or pop helium balloons and laugh in atmospheric pitches, deepening as we retire and the jokes give way to story, all Grecian and repeating, grotesques of human life: my mother left me in the hospital, I was 2 months old. She told to her parents that I died. "Doi ani," Sammy translates another. Two years old. 

Firelight shapes and reshapes Sobi's story across his face, stolid, searching, steam gets in his eyes and anger takes on laughing. He tells me in Romanian and I feel it in blood. His eyes force out the smoke in tears. I can't tell I just can't, how he is feeling. He was just a little baby when it happened. 

When she left him for anyone, she left him for no one. 

The days are stories just the same, flushes of color shapeless in number, whirling and ending without our say. I could not tell you we were here or there, how many days for how long or even what day. Marcel tells me what day it is, brother John drives us where we need to go. The children together seem to go through the whole human spectrum, little ultraviolets in daylight. Anything they look for they can find: I have a feeling they could harmonize with their own echo, if they had to. The past weighs at me. Their future is held aloft by all people good and bad.

Everything else is too airy for history and too heavy to disappear. Just spare color and feature welded neither here nor there, stitched together haphazard in pareidolia. 

It all blinks at me in binary and gapes words no one could understand. It sounds like the rattle of legos and reads like sheet music for wolves. It has no name, but I never forget a face. 

From the Evening

I have seen them summer nights turn into dawn on the road. 

I am starting to notice the curve of the earth, and wonder why all things slip away.

I don't know anything going on that isn't 15 feet ahead through my camera. 

I've had to turn it away from time to time, when I become a witness to the kind of brittle moments that break apart in sharing:

The youngest share a kiss on a balcony. I see them in the jungle moonlight, in the last breath of ancient history. I will hold onto this long after they've outgrown the moment. The others just point and giggle.

The older boys tell me I have the mind of a child (and that is why I don't have a girlfriend). I hope they're right, really I do. 

As they doze in church I can fidget and keep myself awake with nonsense thoughts and wonder. I have filmed them singing in half the Romanian churches in Illinois. When the shutter closes I sit in the back and squint at the pastors lips, struggling to read them.

Sometimes they offer earpiece translators. I put them in and hear static, background radiation: the creation of the universe. I always turn it up loud.

I don't understand the words, but some part of me--an old gypsy in a rocking chair within knows how to feel them.

I can't sit still on the bus, shaking its way through the north. The group debates hotly some query of God and Man. I listen for electric translations of the Holy Spirit, words that sound like my words, eccentric gestures the same in any language. 

Sobi (a listener, like me) pulls their words from his phone to my ear in English: they are talking of devils, there was a demon boy, that ten priests could not hold down, or...

He can't find the right words..."cast out".

My foot taps, nervous. Inaudible rhythms take me back ten years-- my distractions echo in every steeple chiming every hour chiming. Cast out. It took nine more priests to give up on my demons.

They dunk my head in plain water and call it a day. 

I tap my left foot in church in time to my right in school. There doctors diagnose the devil in me with a jumble of letters. If you pronounced them, it might sound Romanian to you. But they failed to cure it, nuking inhibition with prescriptioned street drugs instead. 

These sordid devils will kick in my belly for ten years before I cast them out in handfuls myself. 

They swim around my shoulders, their tails curl up in childhood every night. They whisper good and evil in my ear, switching shoulders. 

A whisper to the right tells me I am in the wrong place. I am too odd. I stray too far from their ideas about God and Man. 

You will live with me your whole life, it seems to say.

I wrestle its tongue from my ear and retort, but careful not to wake the boys in the room. They don't hear the demons, and they sure don't believe in ghosts.

The boys wake me up every day in a chorus of jokes. Their eyes assure me we aren't so different: there are two of them, with two hands to shake. They have just one heart, and innumerable hopes and fears, just like you. Mathematically, we are identical. We all have two parents: the earth is our mother, the sky is our father, and no cruel surrogate can take that from any of you. 

None of our mistakes can hold us through the night. When we see them in the morning the sun always finds them in different shape.

When the children throw things in the air and push each other over, they are teaching themselves physics.

When one of the boys takes from another, he is learning to count, and how not to feel bad for anything he does, or maybe not.

The boys will fart on each other just to feel the warmth, but the girls play for fire. They let the indian sun kiss them till they're burnt their favorite colors.

They take turns pushing each other over. The sweetest is Lorraina, and her game is to pick them all up again. I wonder what she is learning. She teaches me that some things are worth un-learning.

 

The smallest, Laurencio has a kissing problem. I bought him a toy for this. I want to tell him there won't always be new toys, in life.

I want to tell him that all his problems are just future solutions.

 

(But I'm still waiting for something to tell me the same)

Everyone they meet gets them some toy for their hardship. They trade them for a change in their own face, a batch of new rhythms for an old heart to beat.

Dear reader you would love a darling orphan in your life. You would want to give them all you have. You would empty your pockets of life lessons. 

You would hold them to dust. 

It's all your body wants, and it would strangle your dreams to do it.

 

I have learned that we are all the servant of a child. We do it all for the future, and this is why it's so rare to feel the present in your hands.

The bad seeds in our backyard years will grow into tomorrow, where no force of man can ever touch them. They will flourish in the sun, tomorrow we will see that we are never finished, never right or wrong or anything but children in the round eyes of God. 

And our little masters will sing:

Datta. Damyata. Dayadhvam.

  Holy father

         (Holy mother)

I love you, beyond meaning.

So much and more in a kiss on the cheek goodnight, a hug tighter so much tighter than the shake of any priest.

So much and more will haunt me into dawn, where ten years come and go as they please.

Marcel, the head of the tour, keeps telling me in quiet times they will stay with me: like a weed, these moments will stay with me. 

I think about them late at night--I have to echo them back to you like a ghost so I can keep smiling for the kids. 

-------

We will be in the Chicago area for two more weeks. 

Then we fly away for Romania.

From the air to the ground

 "The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgement. [He] took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. [He] forced me down to the last and simplest things". 

-Carl Jung, Liber Novus

"The weather up there is much nicer than down here," says the pilot on the ground, as the attendant stows my inhibitions with ribboned totebags and seeing eye-birds in the belly of the plane while atmosphere, the ghost of the earth, hums outside. I rest my head on an army jacket. The girl in 2A leaves the window all but mostly up. No one in first class opens them (they have reached the top and forgotten what it's like to look up). I'm reading about making sheep into men, and not the other way around. Thinking I could have been--nothing, blessed with no one. 

Gorgeous thoughts hurtle through the window closed, the only light lands on this scared young girl next to me with enough leg room to stand for all the world's despair (yet not enough light for my camera to understand an image). What does it mean: to be, to do Good, to even just sleep, or to ever hurtle through ever and there?

I am welcome on the ground, and it seems people there are the same as back home. Everywhere and across time, people smile the same. 

They welcomed me into today, (yesterday if you're reading this across time). 

A good man named Joseph Isfans picked me up from the airport, talking loudly into the phone. Before the door was closed he told two people on the street passing flowers to come Sunday, come and see the Romanian orphans sing.

I blink the door closed and before I have time to listen, let alone film, he is telling me his life story: how he has lived in Romania and here in Skokie Illinois, and as we pass a parade of internation flags, how the blue and yellow and red one imprisoned him, not just for reading a bible, but believing it. He stands some 40 years ago in a basement with the rats, singing songs with no fear through the walls, psalm 23 'the lord as his Shepard' smuggled in his shoe. He tells of all he's given since then. I nod, and listen like it's in another language--the dialect of stories. 

Everyone here has a story, can't even finish it before starting it for someone else. 

Only the littlest can't put light on their troubles yet, so they share only a blaze and the roaring of song. Ticklish is a language we all know. 

I haven't seen Chicago yet, two picnics and churches, or the choir in their white traditional clothes. Just the viewfinder of my camera, and the levels on my microphone (on the way to the bathroom maybe). This is the first I've seen of my distance: lights humble, low where the boys pitch jokes from bags across the floor. 

Where I sleep in nether directions the boys come up close and ask me, why I don't join them in the light? 

I just like my space.

Here is everything I own, am or was, a digital exposure of all the shadows and colors the light never touches. 

I will sleep here as the video I took before bed zooms in and out and racks me to infinity in focus: the boys circled around so close together their features paint a living Picasso on the bed. 

Everyone shares a mouthful of kind words. They thank me for being here. They out-clown me every time.

I have no idea what I'm doing, but the next day filming, my hands know just what to do: my beating heart told them just how to expose the lightness of these kind people, so eventually the world can see, and feel something (a rarity in the dirt or at 34,000 feet). 

I am beginning to feel something, like laughter on my skin. Or gravity from below; I can hear it against a seashell or a bottle pressed up tight. I can almost taste it in a recording: the rumble of a thousand red prayers. In a Romanian church everyone says their prayers aloud, into the ground or swinging madly up above. 

I am beginning to understand something in those bellows, a single word. 

I do not so much see it in every dandelion these precious children blow out. It's more in the spores, a syllable I can't yet pronounce, a whisper deep in my ears late at night. I want to pull it out like a splinter and scream it at the passing cars. There is something unatural in us, when we roll over at midnight, or hold a heavy door: a lust for meaning, a base goodness beyond fear that we yearn to exercise, yearn to understand. To cut it open and write in what spills out.

But first I must learn how to talk.