virginia and wristbands

it's difficult to say what has happened in the past two months, to convey the meaning behind the motions, but i'll put these memories before you, let you feel them, maneuver around their soft silky bones, grip their long and uneven edges, let the symbolism slip through your fingers like water. we are all blind once past the present and so let us fumble through the dark and uncertain corridors of memory.

observation:

people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.

explanation:

imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.

we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.

you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.

which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.

a final note: if you are one of the fourteen people who either wear a piece of pink flagging or a tie dye silly band, thank you for sharing your life with me, it has been an unforgettable experience.