The goats

Anywhere South will do. Loose shirt, bulky backpack, pocketable multi-tool.

You take your stove this time, long for something to gather around—can one ‘gather’ in solitude?— during cold nights.

An imperceptible mood separates this morning from routine. You step once more onto the same saddle, ride once more down the same quivering road. Today you will ride until sundown. Ride south until the world appears big, unnervingly boundless.

One could say you are escaping life. The room you leave behind is full of dirty laundry.

But escaping suggests something inevitable, daunting. Seeing you leave is a dance that offers no resistance. Only beauty, restlessness.

Your body moves like a samba, half joy and half saudade. Through coastal roads, old villages, mountain air that smells of nothing.

The leathery roughness of your hands stiffens around the handlebars. You build furniture, roads, houses. You think only of the movement, never see the product through.

The only thing worth building are these thin orange lines. Bellac to Saint Aiguilin. Basel to Bern. Elbistan to Baskil. They remain alive for a couple of days, then drown in some better news.

In the afternoons you sit with men drinking espressos, Turkish tea, Georgian wine. The old dark furniture intoxicates you, intoxicates them. The world shrinks, re-scales, closes in.

You become decreasingly stronger. The lines around your eyes deepen. But your eyes remain distant, piercing. They still look straight through lovers. No building.

You have lost and gained body weight, lost and gained body weight. The goats have given milk and died, have given milk and died.

Yet the days of a life that treads simply, productively, undeceivingly, have accumulated. You have built assets and stocks.

Escaping begets a void. But it takes too much to build a void.

And I—will I have built anything, while I wait, in my admiring disdain for the life you have chosen? These pages may be the closest resemblance, I gather. Yes, in solitude, I gather.