Portrait of a Trailer

Maybe I'm here to enjoy the fact that I'm lonely. Maybe I'm here to suffer it.

I've forgotten all that motivated me to leave. I remember what pushed, but not all of what pulled me. I don't mean that deterministically. Not that I wouldn't argue for teleology - sometimes I do. Particularly in the company of that impressionable type of girl whose yoga classes have left her unfulfilled, the one who never found that promised qi in her pantheistic surrender to the trees of the great North Woods. I'm not suggesting I don't believe in some extrinsic finality that's drawing me to some predefined end. Nor am I necessarily suggesting I do believe.

That's neither here nor there, at least right now. That sort of conversation is reserved for Finn. And even then, only for that soft parenthetical moment between my second and sixth drink. He tends to ignore me before that. And merely tolerates me after. Stuffed penguins are like that, I'm told.

The decision to leave was equally reaction and action, each independent of the other. I was pushed. I was pulled.

Arghh. Pushed, pulled...the physical metaphor is clearly failing me here. Instead of continuing to elaborate on a fundamentally flawed theme, like some fifteenth century monk contributing intellectual accretion upon accretion to the failed concept of geocentricity, tweaking each elliptical orbit with an endless array of exceptions all to defend earth's centrality, I will, in an equally flawed extension of the previous metaphor, recant like Galileo before the pontificate ("Eppur si muove"): I was not pushed, I was not pulled.

I will accept responsibility for my actions. I hitched my trailer in visceral reaction to The Event. That's true. And it was clearly obvious to everyone who knew me at the time. But also, I hitched my trailer in visceral reaction to desire, to inchoate longings which had entangled all my thoughts, like a web spun around my soul.

Forgive my imagery again. A web? My soul? Soul?! This isn't something I would rationally accept (and again, for clarity, it is not something I would rationally reject either). We are, each of us, insignificant waves on the shore - the final visible evidence of a wind from a distant fetch, a force propagated across the ocean surface carrying with it all the factors of its creation. Soul? I cannot escape the momentum of my own humanity. Nor should I. Soul. I don't need to accept or believe in this thing to share in it.

Could I have written "like a web spun across my being?" Certainly. But "being" invites a tsunami of ontological questions which the reductive simplicity of "soul" avoids. So trite a descriptor as "soul" is hardly found. I'd wager if there are any students left in the seats of the departments of theology, they do not reflect on the nature of the "soul". It is a caricature of our essence.

Clearly my use of the effortless metaphor "web" then justifies the attendant use of an equally effortless construct as the "soul". So the phrase stands.

I have not saved today's bottle caps. Nothing but my memory now marks the number of drinks I've had already. Judging from the shifted eyes of that contemptuous penguin straddling the shelf beside my jar of desert sand - I've had at least six. At four or five he would have been nodding agreeably, putting in his own two cents. But now, the sun within an hour of the horizon, he stares dejectedly out the window, the crack in the glass splintering the fading light of the sunset.

I don't often think about The Event. For starters, there's no pressing need to anymore. It never comes up in conversation with the people I meet. You'd be surprised by how rarely a stranger will ask what set you adrift with a trailer in tow. They don't care where you've come from. They want to know where you're going.