Echo: Chapter 1

The night comes with terrors, with shadow and darkness, and monsters untold. As such, we have created artificial lights to illumine our cities, to dispel the ancient fear of the world's ever and primal dark, to ward off being blind.

The night holds secrets, cradling criminals and hookers, broken dreams, abandonment, and illicit trysts. It is the time of shady dealings, of gunshots in the dark, of stealing babes away from mothers, of pillaging villages and wartime desperation, and of utter hopelessness in prisons.

The night is a time of silence, when we fully hear the great heartbeat of the city and the rumble of its arteries, the howls and songs of its citizens, the fatigue of the day slowly being replaced by the winding down of furious men and women whose hopes and resiliency are equaled only by the drudgery of the calendar going on and on in society running fast toward its own oblivion.

The night is a time for forgiveness, when we finally look at our creator in the eyes and tell him that we forgive him for his love, which is beautiful and awful to behold. It is the time when we look at creation in all its nakedness, without the redemption of sunlight, and realize that God is the saddest of us all.

The night is when it is the echo that is the real, the voice being swallowed by the full moon and returned, lovingly, to your puny ears, as the very sound of darkness itself.

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In the Ilocano Region of the Philippines, there is the poignant cultural practice that, when one travels far from their hometown and is about to return, they should say their name out loud following the word, “Maykan,” (“Come”) to call themselves back to themselves. They do this so as not to leave their souls behind and thus arrive an incomplete person. Ilocanos do this particularly when swimming in the ocean.

I have always found this particular custom to be beautiful, and I, as I am with the beautiful, always forget. Perhaps in the very encounter of beauty, my mind recoils from the inevitable trauma and protects itself from the delicious pain of having that experience, and hence buries the memory of it without it having quite risen to my consciousness. You will not see this, is how my head protects and has protected the rest of me: It is both the preemptive and the blind forgetting of a thing that my brain doesn’t want to happen at all to me. It is a terrible god, yes, but I have no other ones.

5:00 AM, Tuesday. After rooting around the bed for the shirt I somehow unknowingly took off in the night, I got up and set the electric kettle to boil. While waiting I washed the dishes left over from last night. I love washing dishes – it alone among anything I do allows me peace and the absence of the racing thoughts that have plagued me for as long as I remember.

I go to the café that I frequent, armed with a notebook, two pens, and a Terry Pratchett book I would have had read for the sixth time. This café opens at 8:00 AM, though, so I spend the three hours waiting talking with Bjørn, yet again about his disdain for his dad, about his distaste for the fact that his mom loves David Sedaris and surreptitiously left three of his books on Bjørn’s bookshelves, which, if all the people in the world were cultural elitists/existentialists/liberals, then Sedaris would be the president over all of it. As usual, Bjørn ended his rant echoing yet another idiocy said by his oldest brother, who, in his utter hatred of, makes him lose his words. I mean, this man drinks Pepsi-mango, for fuck’s sake. What the hell kind of a person is that?!

I listened to all of it, familiar and fascinated. I appreciate his anger more than I do his despondency, sometimes, since sadness does not make for a good life engine. Anger at least you could shackle and then use later, more potent for having been kept.

Having arrived at the café, I started to write. I wanted to save Sir Pratchett for later, for when my brain is purged from the nonsense in my head. Finding a fresh page in my notebook, I begin:

He was her happiness, he was her TOTGA: the one that got away. In an outside world that was noisy and an inner one more so, his voice was the only thing that rang, the only one that could call her back home.

Home.

I stare at that one word, cleared my throat, and realized that even my throat was subconsciously commanding my brain to let go of this particular story I had in mind. It was going to be, of course, the greatest love story never to see the light of day.

Home.

Next time we talk, I have to ask what Bjørn thinks of the idea of home – any home – being a red king crab fisherman frequenting the west of Nordkapp almost all year round except during April. He has taken a leave of absence from his captain and his boat, the Klovn og Tosk, for two months, and thus is free for those two months to speak with mere land-dwellers.

My story and my notebook momentarily derailed, I found myself musing about the Nordic deckhand. Bjørn Berg. He found my very outdated online dating profile and sent a rather terse preamble, and I, delighted with his name and his message, responded. Both of us, having sent more updated pictures to each other of ourselves (where we, incidentally, were wearing what seems to be identical black t-shirts), first talked briefly about serial killers and river-swimming. The rest, as idiots are wont to say, is history. I quickly did a Google search for Norwegian philosophers, because I am a pedantic motherfucker like that, and currently tired to vomiting of all these German nihilists, French existentialists and grammatologists, and most of all, American neurophilosophers.

So. Bjørn Berg. From the land of Dag Østerberg, hailing from a long line of Bergs and a longer line of Lithodidae catchers. Fascinated with the Google article, I considered asking him if the philosopher’s Forståelsesformer: Et filosofisk bidrag is available in his local bookstore. I was wanting him to get a copy and read it, wondering what he will think of it. That ought to be a good starting place in order to see his perspective on what he thinks is a home, yeah?