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.
