Displacement

Posted by Joe Deegan (Waterville, ME, United States) on 22 August 2008 in Miscellaneous.

It’s a bizarre feeling.

Looking out of my window at night, sometimes I fool myself into thinking this is all not real. I listen to a train roll by in the distance. Sometimes, I think it could somehow be the same one passing through my mind, the train I faintly remember hearing as a child-- the very same train, in fact, that I later heard from my dorm room in college. I know that it is not, but not in any significant way. I am only vaguely aware of the great distance between me and everything that I have known. It is almost like I never travelled here, that I have remained at home despite having flown over 4000 miles away. I tell myself: ‘This journey is a significant milestone in your life. It divides your experience of the world-- from now on, there will be life-before-Slovakia and life-after-Slovakia.’ But fundamentally, this is still a lie. The divide hasn’t taken place yet. I am still the same person, just living in a new place.

Ironically, I do have the luxury of being able to look at my life in America as if through a backwards telescope. I can see my small strivings, my confused dreams. I can spot all the empty spaces in the pattern-- like that deck my father and I never got to build around our swimming pool; the empty space in my life left by my ex two years ago; that trip to the ocean or the mountains never taken; the unfinished poems in my notebook. Other spaces come to mind too, ones created by my departure--the bedroom that I vacated so quickly preparing to leave for Europe; the seat of my motorcycle collecting dust. To borrow the language of Arundhati Roy, I am somewhat overwhelmed by the hundreds of ‘Joe-shaped holes’ in my former universe.

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