Total number of days it took to realize the moon is missing: 13
I didn’t quite make note of the gesture when saying goodbye to the moon—she who is the major catalyst for the form of solitude I enjoy most, in which my own energy is reflected back to me, othering me. The moon splits me so that me and I may reconnect. She, Mother, instigates a playdate. It is Gemini season, a time defined by twins of the self. I have felt intellectually stunted and out of place, off my feet, in the air (literally, as the wind has situated itself as the primary weather condition on my radar visually, audibly and materially, not to mention the regular experience of shifting altitudes so rapidly yet subtly that I’m hardly conscious of it.) Does the moon, like anything, truly exist when beyond my registry? What does it mean to be castrated sensationally from an element so basic, especially when it flies beneath one’s nose for nearly two weeks’ time in the shadow of “minor”[1]?
Gemini also belongs to the element of air, which rules abstraction, zippy thinking, problem solving and communication, extracting balance from an environment’s Ups and Downs. Perhaps its role, in the absence of the world’s most prominent environmental up and down, is to challenge me to make and fill crevices beyond those which have tactile presence—to use and live within the parts of my mind rooted elsewhere rather than replacing them with all things Iceland.
I have decided it is a good time
to hone my French.
[1] In reference to Anne Carson’s “On Major and Minor”, from the collection Plainwater. “Major things are wind. Evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the names of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct time” (33-34).