And again I tried to explain distance

Writers attempt to express emotions in innovative ways we've all felt before. If I die tomorrow, it could be said that I spent my life trying to express distance but never really could. Like all writers, trying to has been the most fun I've had with a pen.

What I think most of us strive to do is draw from memories that we've come to obsess over. I've been there when I was furious and starving and devastated and used up. Those times you don't have a choice but to focus on your emotions like a hawk on a field mouse. There’s nothing pleasant about it. As those instance fade, there’s a warmness to them that you never see up close. They're badges and hallmarks of the road you've been on. The distance from those memories softens the blow, enhances the worth, and strengthens bond. But this is a distance of time. We can't help but end up there.

I mean to speak about the distance of emotion, that proverb that says it makes the heart grow fonder. Bobby Kennedy was fond of quoting Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." And that’s where I mean to be. Not describe the action, which the ancient Greek did well, but what stirs in the soul and mind when that happens. When the bodys pain becomes the souls wisdom, there isn't another time I can think of when that happens; a perfect marriage of the animal and the spirit.

In distance the hurt is not erased, but the wisdom of the entire providence shows us why there was pain to begin with. It is an overly articulate emotion that I've never been able to express. it might be the some emotions are inexplicable with the tools of English. It might be that in that pain, we still find a lack of wisdom and I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

In the past there was color, and a goal. Things seemed virtuous because our emotions were clear and raw. We could drive toward the end without concern about the small things. There was no responsibility or duty there, it was a satisfaction for the id of two people and when emotions can be legally satisfied, there is an intoxicated effect unattainable in chemistry.

Somehow, in all the distance of emotion, there seems to be a magnified distance of everything. The world has seemed distant, and there were no dead ends. The world seemed like it went on forever.

I have, in my mind, an imagine of what seems like a merging of multiple places. the rotten-wood fences that divide dune from grass on those Cape Cod beaches that always seem abandoned come 3 pm on an August afternoon. And as you drive out along that dying peninsula, the world seems to climb, and the entangling growth of some berry bush covers the land in the girl doodled swirls of overgrowth that tells you you're alone; no one comes here and no one cares enough to clean it out. And the wind is always singing and it makes it hard to breath and on the best days it still rains with ocean mist. In the distance, someone’s created a camp fire in their own world, and the flames lash out of a makeshift pit and the seagulls cling to stay in flight.

Every now and again I'm there, inadvertently, the world just throws one at me and I'm there. Its not scene perfect as I've seen it before, but I can't help but thinking about everyone I've lost. Those winds, on the beaches and the highways at 3 am, they close in around me and my emotions become remote, there in front of me to explore in fine detail like an ape searching for insects on the back of another. Meticulous and with an intensity of hunger, and survival, and love.

And then its all gone again. We've moved on, or it was a passing scene on the horizon or someone calls me back to reality and I'm in the here and the now. I can feel things again as they are, and the cold clammy distance is gone. I'll never catch what I see there again, just as I'll never explain distance as acutely as I see it, and feel it. Its as defined by what I feel as what I can't feel when I'm there. There are no smells in a fading memory, I can't tell when you touch my arm. There’s just the numb sensation that two objects have collided into one another. Unable to breath. Off in a place the worlds forgotten.