Of The World Between the Worlds
June 12, 2012. In “The Magician’s Nephew,” the wood between the worlds is a forest of growing things and puddles. Each puddle leads to a new place. This place sounded even more magical when cuddled up together with my mom as she read aloud to Anna and I when we were little. Kudos to an amazing childhood.
I have discovered another wood between the worlds, and it is a cold place with gleaming floors and doors. Each door leads to a new place. Everything looks sanitized, even the people, staring up at informational screens with their mouths half-open. Maybe I should call it the world between the worlds.
I’ve been to airports all over the world, and they all look the same. Even out the window is the same pavement with lines to guide the planes. I always enter this world with a faraway look and feel—it is not home, and it will never let me forget the air is artificial and 10 degrees too cold. But it takes me places. Daily life shrinks my world down to where my eyes can see—travel explodes the possibilities once more. And sometimes, I get to escape into reality. The reality of somewhere else. Of someone else.
Layovers. No one knows me and I know no one. No pressures or immediate tugs for there is nothing I can do but wait. Who do I desire to be? What I show is all those around me will ever know. I raise my eyebrow with a wicked grin to imagine what I could do if I wanted, for I will leave to never return. But the lazy haze envelopes me, and I think airports only stay clean because people are too melancholy to create any great disturbance.
Melancholy. Like Wuthering Heights. I’ve never gotten through a whole Bronte sister book before. I still haven’t, for I am only on page 191. But so far I have found 3 paragraphs of beautiful expressions of love, and the whole rest of the book is selfish brats of people who ruin their kids and waste their lives. Not much of a love story, for I haven’t been able to summon up one iota of pity for Heathcliff or Catherine. Everyone told me to read it and raved about the beautiful love story. I’ve seen too much of this kind of selfish, consuming, manipulative love to ever want it that close to me. The book has 54 more pages to improve on me.
Sao Paulo supposedly has free internet. When I asked the woman why I couldn’t connect, I gathered, after a 10-minute conversation, that “Honey, this is Brazil. It isn’t working.” This is how most things that don’t work are explained. “This is Brazil.” Like that makes everything ok. Like I shouldn’t expect anything to work. Pretty degrading to the country, if you ask me. Sometimes. I get sick of not DOING something about it. Whatever “it” happens to be at the particular moment. There are just so many “its” and it is impossible to take them all on. But some—with some you can make a difference. Just not in the airport.
"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...my great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. I am Heathcliff! he's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, but as my own being." --Emily Bronte
She marries the other guy and everyone is mean and ends up dying over it. Depressing. But I guess it was an okay book to read in the world between the worlds.