One of Milan Kundera's book titles.But life is always elsewhere, at least for a person like me, it is.
The constant being at elsewhere--whether mentally or physically or both.
I crossed the physical boundary of T into Y. My body is back at Y but the encounters at T, good and bad ones always end up as memorable ones in retrospect, imprisoned part of me. Unknowingly, I left part of myself at T.
I saw images of it by chance in the TV, read a line in a book about it, touched by a song about Z in a cafe and these coincidences gradually built up the fantasy of Z in me. I started living forward from here to Z.
I am here in the present but that scenary I saw 20 years ago is still fresh in my mind, clear as crystal. The colours have faded into a new coat of paint; the scent has weakened into the smell of age that lingered faithfully.......the strong, undeniable presence of being there. Waiting to be travelled back to it some time in the future. It's just a reconstruction of the past in the form of present tense, with inputs from my memory that is sprinkled with a touch of interpretation on my part, manoeuvred by my unconsciousness, so as to enact something which holds more credible truth than the actual truth itself.
Forever lost in the space between the past and the future, between being just there and being elsewhere. Always failing to find the path that leads to now and here.
But this is.
