Land of cigarettes and humidity, smells not smelled in the New World, men and women with sullen faces. A certain reserve after the open-faced illusion of trust in Americans, something more hermetic, contained and fermenting, reprocessed: smoke collecting in enclosed spaces. The determined tones of speech after the open drawl of California with its avoidances of commitments, its reluctance to come down on one side or the other of any given line, all that space left for error, margins of probability we are unwilling to narrow.
You've come too far in your love of this direction to be either of here or of there (which is here and which is there?), hovering between the one and the zero at the apex of a trajectory. This is the metaphorical space where imagination lives, the true space of possibility, between two points or states which we are taught are the two sides of an indivisible line or border - but the French word for border is frontière, which in the language of the New World became the infinity of destiny, the vastest of open spaces and the breeding ground of dreams - mythic discoveries of gold or lawlessness, a future undetermined. The country of your ancestors on a journey from which there was no return, in a covered wagon with thirteen children.
Now technology offers you a way to shoot yourself into the sky between two points, the frontier that became the homeland to your family and this Old World, El Dorado because unknown. You shoot yourself back and forth until you are neither of one place nor the other, stuck in the sky somewhere exactly at your trajectory's midpoint, and you're thinking that this was the goal all along, ever since the adolescent yearning for elsewhere, for landscapes which you know now were landscapes of the imagination. Not to leave one place for another, but to attain the state in which all places are possible.
Then the moment passes, and gravity determines you.
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