Detroit International Airport

It is snowing tonight in Detroit, where I fly in for my connecting flight to Indianapolis. I left Paris this morning in order to come to Indiana to be with Akiko. She has recently returned to Indiana from Japan, where her mother just passed away. I am arriving as a pilgrim of grief, knowing that the gesture of my movement here might be the main thing I am accomplishing. I am led more by love than by reason, knowing that I have nothing more concrete than presence to offer.

During the plane’s descent bringing me closer back to home, I recognize the efficient anonymity of the hotel clusters which sprout around all American airports with the speedy tenacity of mold. From the distance the sky affords, these many Marriot Inns and Motor Lodges look about as substantial as Lego villages. With the plane descending into the familiar American landscape, I feel the downward pull of grief.

The journey of grieving and its signposts are familiar. Years ago, I took a Greyhound bus from Winter Park, Florida to Lost Valley, Oregon. Up till this point, the geography of the country had been mostly abstract for me. I saw the states fly by in the square patches of color from the bus window: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California… By focusing on the details of landscape alone, I was trying to still the hollow echoes of my first relationship dissolving, devolving into nothing more mundane than love disappearing. My decision to cover the entire width of the nation by bus was my attempt physicalize the magnitude of the pain I felt. While tinged with a tad of the dramatic and the hysteric, it was the only way that I could enunciate my grief. I found comfort in the name of my Greyhound destination: Lost Valley. It was a writer’s commune in Oregon where I decided to live for a while, staying in a cabin in exchange for cultivation of the organic zucchini patch.

With the death of her mother, another color is added to the spectrum of similarities between Akiko and I. When my father died, I was two years old. I was unable to verbalize my own experience of grief; I did not have the vocabulary to grasp what had happened to him. Since then, in a way, I have been lugging behind me the body of my father, covered in a shrouded silence. While I have no answers for Akiko, I am comforted by her questions. As we retrace all the familiar steps of our shared life in Bloomington, I cling with a certainty that it is the distance I have covered which will address a love so deep that I could not otherwise name.

In the meantime, I am stringing together my epiphanies like so many Christmas lights, pinpoints of illumination against a larger darkness.