In this mutable and concave room, this purveyor of nimbus and cradle, shapeshifting occurs at a phenomenal rate. The room alters its dimensions, and I in turn am altered. It is reciprocal harmony and symbiotic intimacy. The room is significantly empathic. It tunes to me, my needs, my secret and deep-down longing. From this raw and fetal material, means for travel and modes of departure are arrived at. The room is the ultimate agency for travel, specifically for what you might call placeless travel, hard-wired to my wants and desires. In this regard, the room is a genetic whisperer and mind-reader. It knows exactly what to say and do. It is, in an abstract sense, the double of my autobiography. It has traversed lengths of me I have yet to go to, or reach, parlaying reconnaissance into a customized road map. I can leave the room, but really I’m never outside it, because the room remains inside me always, and I it. There is the physical space defined as “the room,” but there is also the metaphysical character of the room that is inside me. The physical room can be exited, but not the metaphysical one. Where would it go? Where would I go? I would leave the room only to end up right back inside the room. Is it all the same room? Or is it a different one I enter after exiting? The only answer I’ve come up with so far regarding that: same same different.
I suspect that the room, unlike my organism, is immune to entropy. It is a room that, if vacated, would simply relocate. It would go where it was needed, and attach itself accordingly. I know this much—without the room, I would not have been written by the author who has obsessively stalked me since childhood. I used to think of this author not as author, but as a panther or wolf whose sole objective was to catch and devour me. I figured I was the Road Runner to its Wile E. Coyote. And in never getting caught, this Roadrunner-Coyote analogy only deepened and solidified. Then I realized it was no wild animal wanting to devour me, it was an author that wanted to track my every move so as to keep me written, to contain me as existential proof and test study. Since birth, or more than likely before birth (as I believe this author’s stalking preceded my delivery date into this world, the akashic length of karmic stalking, if you will), I was assigned an author, and that author would need a room in which he, I, it could exist in a mad lab of co-habitation. I was part of an ongoing equation. They say the demons have a harder time tracking you down if you keep moving. I kept moving but also I was inside the room that was inside of me. In other words, I went nowhere. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The room provided plenty of space for both travel and staying put. Or I should say the travel of staying put. In this respect, the more put you stayed, the further you traveled, or could travel. These were the governing principles and basic physics of the room. It took me many years to understand this. And I still can’t say I really understand it. Mostly I’ve acclimated to it. I am, as always, inside this room, being written and unfinished. Unfinishable. This thorny incompleteness keeps me musing on both the room and its author as accompanists to solitude.
