Sojourn

There are moments of waking, in the still, darkness of night; the question echoes, an almost silent thought; where am I? There’s a displacement when consciousness is first roused. Sometimes there are several of these moments in the seemingly eternal night. Sleep is heavy here. Short, usually. The journey weighs, the phantom weight on his shoulders, even as the backpack sits slumped in a corner and he rests his back on the heated floor. His eyes heavy as this foreign continent disappears and he drifts again to the oblivion of sleep.
The journey has begun, this journey; his previous sojourn mitigated. There are moments, similar, with slight variations. His first waking from oblivionon this sojourn, he placed himself, where on the last he had lost himself. But it was mostly a placing of self belonging to that first moment. There is a similar placing every time he wakes, but it is less. Not the wonderful confirmation of a beginning that the first awareness, after brief oblivion, was.
He walks through the streets as if he’s been here all along, though it has been a year since. There is less timidity in his walk, less a fear of exploration, less a fear of getting lost. Now, a hope of becoming entangled in some life changing experience, getting lost and resurfacing with a new perspective. And afterall, that may very well be his real reason, his only reason for jumping in with both feet. If you stay in the same place too long, twenty some odd years, you run out of stories. Comfort sets in and the same characters and the same ghosts walk across the mind’s stage. The voices all start singing the same song and the same cityscape remains the dillapidated backdrop of every tale in every lyric. Even when the languages change, the city walls have closed in and the world has shrunk to a singular sollipsistic view. So he jumped. Both feet into this journey, one he hopes will reveal the possibility he’s chased after in his waking moments, years now.
The thoughts in his mind scurry round as his eyes dart from street vendor cart to neon sign. There’s a constant yearning to piece it all together, to be the architect of this shift in perspective, and these are cumbersome thoughts. He knows the journey alone must lead him to whatever new experiences he will find, he cannot create them, not in his undiscovered country. And it was perhaps there, in that greater awareness that manifests only as action, that the impetus of this sojourn was born. For so long it seemed to be only a possibility, among the many. Even as preparations were underway and he contemplated the possible trajectory of this voyage, it seemed still a thought and nothing more. So many thoughts have travelled this same path, in the end, losing themselves from the greater awareness and manifestation. It was the scattered remnants of their journey that kept this thought in the shadow of what is possible and away from the stage of what is manifesting. His friends would speak of its proximity and its bohemian nature, he would join in, but it was as if they were speaking of someone else; a manifesting essence of himself he wasn’t quite aware of, perhaps. That essence did not become his own until two days before it was him on the plane, flying six thousand miles to the other side of the world.
Even as he sat in the 28 inch wide seat, in the false night of the plane’s gut, with the windows covered, he was still becoming aware of the essence, he now was, which had chosen this sojourn. Sitting there, he could feel the pressure of the escalating elevation and sought the meaning of his present action. It felt much as if he had been through this, but never in such a way. There was both a familiarity and a discovery in the moment, in the concatenation of action that had begin with his stepping on to the aluminum vessel. He was caught in trying to disentangle the familiar from the new. In those thoughts, he misplaced the old past experience, which was precisely where the familiar sprung from. For fourteen and a half hours, he sat between the present and the past, thinking of neither. During that time he ceased to exist, plunging into oblivion repeatedly and finding no reaction in waking. Each time his eyes opened, he found himself still, peaceful in the womb of the flying vessel, somewhere further from and closer to the worlds of his awareness.
His eyes were heavy, warm, as the aluminum belly got colder and the window shades began rising. Outside the horizon tilted before it straightened again with a hard thump. His eyelids jumped and the dust of sleep that weighed on them fell. Though he had not been asleep for the past thirty minutes, he entered a state of slow waking, incited by both the thump and a peek out the window. His eyes, formerly dilated, shrink to pin heads and he sees clearly out the window. A thick blanket of fog blurring out the foreign characters along building edges. As he steps off the plane, weighed down by his carry ons, he breathes in a familiar smell and he knows his journey has begun.