Separated

Sometimes separation is unbearable. Not the violence of the moment of separation, or the obscurity or distance that we sometimes mistake for separation. It is the object's awareness of another, and the other's awareness of it, without rendevous or hope of meeting, that is separation. Earth and Luna dance about each other, tidally locked, separated. We watch the lovelorn orbit a beloved, yearning, as Kim Stanley Robinson so aptly put it, "for orbital decay", the moment of impact and ecstasy. In the vacuum of modern life orbits never decay, and we fly through lives unimpacted, unscarred, and alone.

I have many scars. The tracks of sharp instruments are everywhere, some wielded by another in anger, more wielded by myself upon myself. Lines where the teeth of a bear entered into me. Doctor's cuts over my lower back. The long wide scar underneath my left arm, where that limb was torn from my body. The arm is again part of me but will never be as it was. I have been separated.

My bedsheets stink of fearful dreams, disfigurement, and madness. Six thousand newtons on my twenty-third birthday, I fly from the saddle at one hundred and fifteen feet per second, forearm the first to make contact with five tons of concrete. Angular momentum twists my body around; the humerus rotates in the shoulder joint until it comes out. It keeps rotating, pulling the flesh from its moorings, like a drumstick being pulled from a turkey. No pain, not yet, but in dreams the pain is always there, the swinging useless meat is filled with it. I often dream of old love before the dream-arm is torn from me. I see the face, feel sweetness, a hot fire, wholeness, then impact, and the agony of something taken away forever. I can see me coming apart from me. It is no dream.

So I avoid mirrors. I avoid them for the same reason I can not watch the end of Cinema Paradiso, or enjoy romance, or read Inferno without bursting into tears. The flesh, the love, the divine: all of these things are separated from the self by a barrier. We build the first barriers between our selves and the outside. Barriers outside of the self are the key to language and intelligent existence. They are necessary. Some barriers are unneeded, and their erection causes pain, as they separate things that should be inseparable. My barrier is between myself and myself. I can see it in my reflection. It has been put there by enormous energies, and it will take an enormous energy to remove. I will do this.

I am leaving early next year to walk two thousand miles up the Eastern seaboard of the United States. I am enough of a backpacker to know that no great understanding comes of this. There is too much pain, eating, sleeping to be done for serious cogitation. But it can shrink these terrible spaces. I will draw closer to the world and to my own poor body, the separation drawing down to a tiny distance. And then we shall dance, like the Earth and the Moon, separated.