© Rochelle Potkar | Powered by I thought I would be talking about Iowa, speaking about it. But it is so huge an experience that I am swimming and swimming in it. There were so many things that happened to me there – it has changed the climate inside my head.
In the people i met, the lives I glimpsed, the pain and lightness in the words and writings, the pourings of the soul, the purring, the fun, the food, the good and cold. Forget returning to the same place, Mumbai, I haven’t even returned to the same person – my old/er self. We never do return in any case, do we? Each day we are new people – our older selves watching.
But what when a large experience happens? We have heard of PTSD for unfavorable situations. Have you heard of it for favorable ones? That’s why I presented a bucket list of what I did in the last post. So I can be unhinged of this responsibility of pouring an ocean into a mere jug/mug of a blog post. This experience like a slow-release drug attacks me with an epiphany every single day and I know an iota more of what happened. What if even on my last day, my last breath I receive the final epiphany of Iowa, from Iowa?
So let me stay with ghosts, phantoms, echoes, reverberations, gurgles, wing-beats, shivers, shadows, stutters, gasps, claps, the sun on corn, heaven, drawbridges over rivers, the color turquoise, weather-beaten prairie land. Day by day Iowa changes and becomes something else, new, like the cult of heaven. It fine-tunes into a kaleidoscopic orgasmic thought with every remembrance. Then i remember the friends who live in Iowa – who get stunned with the ‘distortion’ with which we (others) hyper-perceive Iowa. Iowa to them is not the Iowa to us. For us it is the womb of nourishment, something so pure, jovial, lush, green, nourishing – it could only be heaven on earth. To them it is many more and other things: skiing, shoveling, house, garden, car, mart, bills, parties, work, life, changing weather.
Perception is place. Distortion is place. Memory too. And no one can take the Iowa from my head. What if I say it is better to perish inside a distortion, a delusion, than anything else?
I don’t know how all this will fossilize into and inside me OR will I become a fossilized human-person?
For everyone Iowa was different. A different heaven. Haven.
If i don’t write more on Iowa and just move on with other posts, news just know that I am lost in its wilderness, its great ever-expanding spaces and that I can’t write anything more. Incapacitated. And that give me 15 years, no 20, 25 and I will tell you – I might be able to, by then – of what this really was.
But trust me on this one: I saw the unicorn, and I fear nothing/ no one now.