Elsewhere

Lovelies,

I fell in love with liminality on a bus headed to southern Costa Rica.

I was eighteen, my memory and the calendar inform me.

But the point was I was ageless. Also history-less. Persona-less. It was as though between departure and destination a crack formed and I fell through. I watched a fiery sunset through a dusty bus window and felt, in the absence of everything I was meant to be, who I was. 

Perhaps it takes the abject thrill of traveling alone through Central America as a teenager to completely untether me from the trappings of selfhood. But I get a little kick of this, the power of the in-between, every time I get on a bus. Every time I get on a plane. Every time I walk to the store!

Really every time I concede that for the time being, anyway, I am constrained to bodily form. And so I’d better go ahead and get this body from one place to another.

The picture is from a New England forest. But currently I write you at altitude. Headed back, as ever, to California.

Those who keep up with my newsletters are aware they’ve been a bit play-by-play ever since my home burned down a few months ago. First: fire. Then: displaced. Then: new home. Well the latest installment of the Phoenix Chronicles is this: I got out of town. To leaf-covered Maine. To slanted-light Massachusetts. To the shatteringly beautiful southern coast of Jamaica.

Not only am I in-between on this plane flight. I have been in-between for thirty five days. I have been so thoroughly in-between that I feel like an untethered eighteen year old.

So thoroughly in-between that there is no way my destination will feel anything like the Oakland of September.

Cause not for nothing, I am INTACT.

With a breezy resolve for the remainder of this formidable year.

All my love,

Rachel