Posters

The theme for this week is "moving." On Wednesday, I posted an essay about a book by John Steinbeck entitled Travels With Charley. Today, I am posting a song inspired by a comment my college roommate made in our last week as sophomores. Upon entering the room, he halted and stared at the empty walls that had, until a few hours before, been covered with my posters. "It's real," he said. "We're really leaving in a few days." A few months later, I wrote this song.




Down come the posters -
no more clinging to the wall.
They're starting out tomorrow,
a four hour drive ahead.
And though they wish to stay here,
if they don't move, summer's heat
will weld tape to wall.

It's too hot;
the windows are locked.
Close the door
and step out.

Finish the pie slice,
the evening's fallen asleep.
Night's casino revolution,
the last thing that you see.
But recent friends return home;
you'll see them soon
when another world has become cooled.

It's too hot;
the windows are locked.
Close the door
and step out.

The posters that I had hung in our dorm room were there for months. I had covered the walls with pictures of musicians and bands; they brought that white brick room some color and life. To my roommate and I, those posters helped make our dorm room our home. When they were gone, we were no longer in our safe space on the campus of Elmira College -- we were guests, transitory beings that would be gone within a few days.

It's a humbling experience, packing up all of your belongings every nine months to move somewhere else. Every poster, every trinket, every book and pen -- even your bedspread reinforces your existence. These things matter because they contain a bit of your essence, your uniqueness. To think that you can put them all in boxes and load them in a car, leaving behind a barren shell of a home -- you question whether who we are and the things we do can have any permanence when you see how simple it is to cleanse a place of yourself.

But this song is not just about the idea that we can disappear with ease. It's about the necessity of leaving when it's time. If I had tried to stay in that room over the summer or into the next year, I would have been attempting to recreate the past. What a hideous idea that is. The discoveries I made in the 2006-2007 school year were the discoveries of that year and they set me up for things I would learn the next year. To grow, to explore, to challenge ourselves in an unfamiliar land -- that is what living is all about. So onward we go, never staying in one place longer than we need to, seeking new ideas and relationships with others in a quest to become better human beings.

-Paul