exposure

This town is wind swept bleached by hundreds of days of pure sun. The buildings stand precariously on the edge of collapse giving the area an atmosphere of neglect, isolation, devolution...as if the desert wishes to incorporate these structures in a purity of wildness. Each day these structures make a stand in their isolation, in the staunch disregard to encroaching sands, even as they are swallowed. In these years of travel and observance a peculiar truth has made itself manifest. Generally the state and appearance of structures reflect the state of the individuals who abide within, have constructed, or passed through their walls.

After five hours of rough sleep, the sleep of the exhausted is seldom as deep or restful as needed, I made my way across from the hotel to a diner to read and write as long as my mental faculties could with stand the fatigue. As I sought to enclose myself in a world of concepts, reflections, contemplations etched onto paper the presence of the people broke in continually. Never have I been in a place where I am allowed the solitude I see others afforded. But no more will contempt for these interruptions hold any power.

A middle aged woman of Mexican decent began the interrogation by simply approaching and breaking into that delicate silence I was attempting to construct. After the obligatory questions of origins, occupation, and how did you, an outsider, arrive in this place she launched into a discourse of her son who is serving in the military, her dead husband, and the satisfaction at the happiness of her only child. But she seemed lost attempting to make sense of something she had and still has not been able to conceive of properly. There was a sense of her grasping at something intangible something just outside her ability to know. So she rested in the arms of a comfort constructed by her sons happiness and success...she seemed caught in the tension between her child's youthful striving for meaning and the ultimate finality of death. She like the structures surrounding this place stands on the edge of entropy. She is lonely. And the quiet unknown which seemed to shadow her is the knowledge that soon she will follow her husband, her son will follow her, and her grandchildren will follow him into that space where all striving becomes nullified. She needed to be heard, to be seen, before that firm inevitability of eternal breathlessness breaks upon her frail bones.

But is that not our collective story? Each individual seeks to be seen, known....we reach out to our parents in youth and seldom are we seen, so we reach out to gods who are either deaf, mute, blind, or nonexistent. And as that cycle of exposure and misunderstanding rolls on and breaks ceaselessly we expose ourselves to strangers in hopes that they will see us, that someone will look past themselves and see the exposed as a person, as an entity not as an object before we find ourselves silenced buried in the deep, forever unknown.