In (multi) medias res
In conscious and unconscious ways, I’ve always partitioned my life.
Over the winter, Helen and Irfaan at times struggled to reconcile the version of me that is walking to India with the one that can sit all day in front of the fire without the slightest restlessness.
In a hostel in Plovdiv I met Partha, a programmer from India, and he witnessed a version of me that few see: awake ’til 3am every night, waking again before 7am, a quick walk through the city — every remaining moment given over to that intent focus that I often dream of but which comes only rarely.
Joining me for the walk across Montenegro last year Mizuki, who has seen more of the life I choose to create than anyone else, saw something that she had seen before but not so completely, my comfort on the fringe. The comfort with which I trespass and occupy neglected spaces was unnatural to her, unnerving. We adjusted, figured out what was mutually comfortable,
Since then, Kyle and Avvai have probably come closest to witnessing the walking of the walk, first out on the road, then in Istanbul after back to back fifty kilometre days, the arrest on the Bosphorus Bridge. Now, in Vancouver, they are witness to another version of me, one who can join in an impromptu stand-up comedy show, go to art classes, and write something into the world each day. I talk about my shyness and they raise an eyebrow, they still haven’t seen that version of me, the one that used to swallow up every other version of me.
Every person and place that we meet is in medias res — in the middle of things, enacting only one part of a story — but for the traveller this becomes acute. To be in motion is to be ever in the middle of things. As in a kind of lucid dream, we become the true keeper of our story, freed to enact a different way of being. At times it feels like the only true way to know myself, at others it feels like a perpetual ab ovo, lingering at the beginning of things, locked in the interstitial. In my wandering, even close friends bear witness to me mostly in the second degree.
To stay in place is to distribute our being among those who witness us, in that reflection we become solid, durable, but changing our story is made harder, sometimes impossible.
So for now I try to balance the two. The walk lets me into a dream — the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot1 — so I lean in,
When you come over a ramp and go into an abyss, you would shrink back from it. You would lean back and that would somersault you backwards. But you have to lean into it. You have to do the unnatural. When you are really flying far, you are not a human anymore, you transform yourself. You transmute yourself into a bird.
But if I stay stay away too long will I become unmoored? Will anyone else be witness to enough of my story to say it wasn’t just a dream?
