Pillar of Salt

"Let us run away," Hamlet said wistfully.
"Hmmm," I agreed lazily.
"To Santorini." He continued.
I laughed, and then grimaced when I saw, in the little Skype screen before me, what laughing did to the contours of my face. But I allowed myself a few languorous moments to languish in Hamlet's fantasy of beatific, blue-roof'd Santorini, away from snow, stress and sordidness. What a life it would be, spent in the pursuit of beauty.

I can't do it.

Okay, maybe I could for a month or two.

There has been a lot of talk of running away recently. Not just me, but others too. And, for some reason, it's always on Skype! Charles and I were talking recently, and once I was done updating him on my Awakening a la Kate Chopin, he sang a dirge of his own:
"There was a time when I thought I was the city, but now, I know that I am just someone living in the city!"

I have reason to believe that T.S. Eliot felt the potency of mutability of city life, captured it in little vials, and distilled it to form his languid, loquacious, yet luxuriant city poems. There are many who say that cities, and the life they afford are uniform. Macroscopically speaking, this makes sense, for, macroscopically speaking, what do you see in a city but people accoutered in the clothes of their occupation rushing past one another, billboards of ostentation, vehicles of quality and kind? Yet, a microscopic glance (and just a glance, I promise you!) is necessary. For only microscopically will you see how the city is a state of mind. How the small-town student has his own way of seeing the city in the vibrant colours of freedom, how the executive sees all in a blur, his vision only fine-focusing on what is the order of the day, how, for the urban brat, the illumined picturesque has now become a grainy, repetitious picaresque. That is how I was in the Eternal City when I decided to seek my fortune elsewhere. The urgency to 'run away' is what I heard in Charles's voice. I heard the same rawness in Hamlet's drawn-out plea. Could it be, then, that the Spitsbergen, despite me snobbishly insisting otherwise, is actually a city?

I will begrudgingly answer in the affirmative, but a conditional affirmative. The Spitsbergen has a long way to go, trust me, in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of drama and attitudes, it is rather urban. Within reason, of course. Yet there is this constant theme these days: the theme of running away, an escape. Why? I have the fragments of an answer for me: my courses (with the exception of two) aren't doing anything for me this semester, I feel like I am just going through the motions. The drama, as defined by the frisson that accompanies romance(s) + my occupational drama (passive-aggressive fights and agreements to disagree with co-workers), is draining. At times such as these, Hamlet's whisper, Charles's unsaid supplication, they all become a heady siren song, serving up the idea of running away as tantalizingly as possible.

Last week, I threw a bit of a tantrum whilst speaking with daddy on the phone. I have decided to stay on in my foreign homestead over the summer and intern at a firm or a lab. My parents, judicious, prudent people as they are, are heartbroken but are saying the right things: "We are proud of you.", "We so want you to come home, but the benefits of this are so far-reaching.", "We wish you could come home, but we understand." My emotional entropy is a bit messy, so I ended blurting out a complicated sentence, the meaning of which my father distilled perfectly: "So you WANT to come home, but want US to say it? Beta, this isn't an approval thing, you can totally come home if you want to. We won't think any less of you." Oh dilemma! I did what I do best: "Daddy, I have to go..." Running away, again!

I feel like my time with the Spitsbergen is at an end. I cannot see myself for more than a year. There are those who seem to have gotten used to its two climatic seasons, and the bare seasons of the heart. I worry every time I feel something stirring in my heart, I fear falling headfirst into that ingenue's pattern of, "Do you know I am alive? Do you feel what I feel? Alas! You are gone, and I am ruined!" As Verlaine put it, "After all, we do not want another Eponine fiasco, do we?" No, we most certainly do not. This Eponine shall do what should have been done to begin with: leave the barricade, and get a PhD. Is that running away too? Is there really that much dynamism in stoicism? I can feel it throb beneath my skin, this beating of something wanderlust. I can feel it shuffling its feet impatiently during 09:00 am biochemistry, asking, in a very VERY out-of-character twist, what the point of it all is? It knows its own impermanence, it knows the perils of being sessile, and so it wants to move! For once, I feel like I am one with this Wanderlust Pulse, but all I want to do is go home. Just for a while, and have all the sordidness and drama fade into a faraway foreground. I do not want to answer these questions about me, and I do not want to stand witness to those of others; I just want to go home.

The Wanderlust Pulse tells me to forge ahead, however. It tells me to think of Lot's Wife who was sinful enough to look back, and became a part of the landscape. Forge ahead! Let the past burn, let it provide us some warmth, for what else is it good? Think. Of. Lot's. Wife. I am, actually. And I don't think that she was full of sin; I think she just missed her home, no matter how debauch a place it was.

Until the next time,
GossipGuy.