The Goodbyes

The goodbyes hurt the most.

Yet, strangely, the goodbyes were what you wanted, as you lay in bed gently pleasuring each other in those sleepy dawn hours.

Because goodbye charged each kiss with a divinity.

The unknown sanctified every word that was playfully lost in translation, thrown into that cauldron of ancient semantics that had shed blood over the entirety of the Mediterranean and had then thirsted for the shedding of more when the doves returned to their captains clutching gold and free labor.

And you were the master of gentle endings. The ceremonious host of magical beginnings.

And yet, when each curtain inevitably fell, it was you who wept behind sunglasses on the cheap bus rides and inside toilet cubicles in airports, you’d never heard of until you sat drinking puffy-eyed in their overpriced lounges, watching those Arabian flight attendants parade from gate to gate trying to discern why on earth you didn’t just start over as a pilot for a Saudi-owned-airline.

You who wondered if you were ever going to slay that yearning to roam from landscape to landscape and woman to woman

You, who figured there was something absurd to the way you were constructed as you seemed to share your body so effortlessly, so sincerely, that you knew it was more than a gratified fetishization of all things divinely feminine.

Eventually gambling your youth on the bet that it was society that was insane and you were just living in the only way that had ever made any sense.

In flow with a charade so wondrous it proved all but the indefinable truly absurd.

Because each ending transmuted into another beginning, leaving you so perpetually marooned between memory and anticipation that all you could do to digest the sheer force of such experiences was cast both aside.

Something that came to be understood as the great initiation into the present moment.

That most coveted chalice, echoed in the hallways of all sacred human institutions, seemingly handed to you amidst the ephemerality of desire between the legs of all those foreign beauties.

And the most poignant moments were always the simplest.

A 7 am coffee in a deserted café.

The perfect word pressing itself into your navel as you scrambled to catch it.

A belly laugh with new and old friends over cheap wine as you sat on red plastic chairs down the side streets where English was something the waiters only heard in movies.

Siestas in strange cities. Coiled lovers soaking in the fluids of hours well spent.

The songs that you found on the road sung to you in bars by beautiful souls as they explained what the lyrics actually meant to their people.

Strangers who became friends you’d never meet again.

Letters you agreed to write in the shop alcoves of Leon while the sun rose over another transient yet beautiful dance of mind and memory.

The ecstatic whispering in your only good ear as you came to realize that orgasms tasted the same in all languages, yet the romance languages were named as such for a reason, as you awoke to blow jobs cheekily followed by "Buenos Dias" and a hazy sea of jet-black Andalusian hair gliding feline-like into the bathroom.

Because, when you looked back, life was the little things.

The incense gently burning in some cheap hotel. The homemade soap you’d picked up from the street vendor in the back alleys of Amman. That moment you clicked “submit” and your work was temporarily suspended, free to roam drunkenly for the day. Freer than you already were, if that was possible.

It was the mornings waking up to a sunrise and a phone call from your mother. Texts from friends sitting five hours away in Barcelona.

The sounds of Peter Tosh reminding you of those powerful, lonely days you’d walk across the park, to the Sacred Heart. A man on a mission to create his universe.

A deeper way of experiencing. To see the world.

It was the thrill of seeing people you’d connected with again. The beauty in maintaining those connections. The back-and-forth banter. The song-sending, knowing you really should have just paid the 10 euros a month for Spotify in gratitude for the joy it had brought to your life.

It was the push-ups, the cold showers, and the morning pages. The creative bursts synchronistically arriving at the strangest moments.

Walking through the Spanish Maseta, tumbling through little Nepalese towns in busses that would have marched any reasonable engineer into cardiac arrest.

The words made you feel like you’d fallen through a portal into another dimension, leaving you momentarily suspended between worlds as you scampered to gather whatever you could before the doors shut.

It was the lovemaking in new cities. Those first moments you sheepishly undressed half-drunk after a few hours of getting-to-know-each-other’s.

Each encounter proving to you that life without women and music would surely be a mistake.

It was stepping out of the bus and not knowing where on earth to go next, using that inner compass to navigate you to lunch in some busy diner. Connecting to the Wi-Fi as you pieced together your next best move.

That first cold beer after an afternoon of exploring.

Embracing friends as you finally met at Highbury and Islington after a wild lifetime in India.

It was the goodbyes that-preceded-the-hellos-that-preceded-goodbyes. An endless montage of words and wisdom that seemed to leave the lips of the very people you met in the streets.

The gift enjoyed only through the sheer boldness of throwing yourself into the mystery and striving to see God in each soul you encountered.

It was the mornings when you awoke to a warm soft body smiling at you as you pulled her close, gently kissing her neck, before making love as the rest of the city began to purr.

And in time, it became difficult to express to those who cared what was going on in this soup of moments that had become your life, as one wild moment was followed only by another so unbelievable that it felt like you were constructing a fiction.

Such that you’d almost forgotten about the days and weeks preceding that rare moment your phone was revived, and you’d hear those voices on the other end that felt like they were a galaxy away as geography and home were losing their chemistry and stillness was increasingly found reflected between the eyes of all those enchanting souls you encountered along the way.