City Seaweed

-The doors opens and we’re introduced to our new home, six thousand mile away from home. There’s a thick smell in the air, the kind you find when you go into a perpetually moist restroom on a cold morning, or any time of day for that matter. It permeates throughout the house, getting more faint, the closer you make your way to the windows. I wonder if this is the smell of this country also curious as to whether I’ll ever get used to it. We open up the windows and sleep with the cool breeze blowing the apartment dry. As I enter the restroom the discovery is eminent that this, the small room with a window facing another window, is the place where all the mischief rises into the air. “It’s seaweed,” my roommate comments. “Really,” I ask, I had never thought it could smell this bad. And somehow, that first night, I could smell it everyehere, even as we had made our way to that two bedroom, linoleum floored place, but by morning it had vanished, from everyehwere except the restroom. It wasn’t ’til days later that our boss demonstrated that a simple covering could hold back the seaweed moisture stench. So it’s pretty much gone now. But that was how we arrived, six thousand miles to the smell of seaweed.
Now, the initial shock I think has faded into the recesses of some memory I’ll recall someday after this has all ended however it may end. At the moment, I’m at the brink of discovering if this was the right move for me from where I was when I left and from where I am as me. And each decision has always been for me like the move of a chess piece, bringing me closer to that inescapable demise-none of us can escape-or closer perhaps, to that magical moment I’ve been waiting for since I was born. It was possibly the cold wind here that stole it, before the wind I could feel it getting closer. I don’t know where I am, sometimes I even question what, but a quick glance in the mirror reveals the answer to that question. At moments I feel my world in tailspin, almost ripping from me my hold, and yet at others I feel like I continue on the jagged path of my journey as if nothing has changed. I think I’m still settling.
These days however, both the weeks before this outward manifestation of foreigness and the week I’ve spent here, have brought me many memories of what I’ve been and who I’ve been in the moments of my past. In them and through them, I haven’t seen myself make much progress in the growing of self, in the becoming that I need to embrace and how do I do that I wonder. There are nights when I go to sleep Telling myself to let go…just let go and I wake up still holding on. To what? I’m not quite sure, but there’s some stumbling block I carry with me and it toubles me that I can not loosen my grip and let it fall so that I may overcome it. Before I left, when my cards were read, I was told that all I need to find my way is all within me, but something blocks my way. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is why I’m here, or at least this is why I think I’m here, to find myself and somehow release me. But I grow impatient, wanting that magical moment to arise, to set me free from my cycle of self scrutiny and insecurity. So I continue on, knowing the past is never far and that though it is not there, there are days when I wake and still smell the city seaweed.