Darkness is the Greatest Thing

At a bar, sipping a hefeweizen, I allow my day to melt away from me, contemplating the aloneness as each gulp placates my omnipresent anxiety. Suddenly, the song comes on. It begins with a slow thumping beat, and at first its so faint that I can hardly tell it's begun. This is the song that followed me across my journey, in taverns and through tunnels beneath beds and in the expanse of airspace in a tower somewhere. Soon it crescendos to a recognizable riff, and as it reaches my ears and reverberates through my cloudy brain, some Pavlovian response warms the chill of my body, and I am awash with the memories of that summer. I am taken away almost instantly, immersed in a deep sea of nostalgia that floods my heart full of longing and loving and missing and wanting. In this spaceless dimension of memory immersion, I can taste the beer at the scrappy hipster dive bar in Neukolln, I can smell the sweat in a packed room of spent 20-somethings, I can see the fading bulbs of dim nighttime streetlights as I stumble down a mysterious medieval alley, I can feel the steps downward into the underground club and the impending excitement of what will happen next.

And its really the excitement that I miss the most; that feeling in the early part of the evening, sipping the first beer and wondering what will happen tonight, who will I talk to? who will I kiss?, where will I end up?, where am I now? It seemed at times there was a never-ending continuum of confusion and mystery, that the possibilities were truly endless. It didn’t take me long to embrace the feeling of being lost, because I had some unfounded faith that everything would end up okay, and somehow it always did. Some nights lasted forever. Some nights I couldn’t believe where I had ended up. In the indulgence of nostalgia--which is a thing almost always intensified with relative distance from the Current-- its hardly the experiences themselves that matter, but the feeling that came in anticipation of them. I felt that anything could happen at any moment, and nothing back in San Francisco mattered anymore, nothing from my past was relevant, only the Current had currency.

I went on this trip to find a part of myself that I longed to discover, but I think its more true to say that I lost a part of myself. I left something of myself among those experiences, perhaps on a speeding train or on the curb of a cobblestone road, and I’m okay with leaving it there. Losing part of oneself is a freeing experience for the soul, lightening the baggage of a heart too full of love for such a young man.

The song fades out and I am risen back onto my bar stool from the abyss of memories, floored that I forgot where I am or what I was doing or where I am going, which sort of comforts me if only for a moment. My heart still aches from the love-sick obsession with escapist fantasies, the day-dreaming and night-wishing of dropping it all and running away, much like I did. I close my eyes and think about how darkness is the greatest thing, and I wish I had more of it.