Equivocality

If I got the offer I would go instantly. I’d pack up everything and nothing and leave next week, or probably tomorrow. Even if I could never come back. Maybe especially if I couldn’t. I want to see the Solar System that badly.

Yeah, the technology, the adventure, the leap into the unknown is exciting. But I’ve always imagined turning off my radio at the end of the day, unplugging from Earth and having the cold planet all to myself for a little while in the dusk light. Boots crunching on the dry-ice frost, I’d sit down a rock and look at the sky.

And probably see something like this NASA video of drifting dust in the night-time Martian sky.

These images make me suddenly lonely, happy, and hopelessly yearning all at once.

What I do in my Wednesday and Friday morning aerial class is mostly sucking. These are the sort of classes you take if you want to be an aerialist, a trapeze artist or something. Accordingly, my Russian instructor has made me hurt. She’s thoroughly professional, but isn’t known for being warmhearted or encouraging.

This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. In fact, it was many years before I got bad at anything. When I went to university, I even made the lucky decision to study something I already knew something about. There were always these kids in the back of the class going, “wait… what??” but I was never one of them. In fact I didn’t even understand such people. I mean, how could you sit through class after class and never, you know, bother to work out what the fuck we were all talking about?

I know better now. In circus school I sit at the back of the class.

When I began Equivocality in 2005, I didn’t know what I was doing, just that I wanted to publicly share some of my writing. A lot of things have happened since then; I went traveling (again), I started the Writer’s Travel Scholarship, I began to write fiction. Equivocality has become a sort of scrapbook of my attempts to communicate. I really enjoy the fact that I can put anything here, that I am free to experiment with different forms — prose, poetry, photography.

But it’s surely not to everyone’s taste. It’s too much about me. (Also, no one can spell it!)

That’s why I have begun another writing project. More of a standard blog, with more frequent updates. Something you can add to your reader, something that most curious people will hopefully find interesting. It’s taken me a few weeks to find my footing, to figure out what it’s actually about, but I think I’m seeing a pattern in the things I want to write about.