A Short Story, or Starting Fresh

I'm on my way to Israel, where I will be photographing my journey... I took a similar trip last year which you can see throughout this blog. I have been going through my old writings and sketches from last years Israel/France/Spain trip, and found a short story I thought I could share with everyone... Enjoy.






There was once a man who woke up everyday in a new part of the world. Everyday he did the same neccesary things in order to survive. The first thing he did when he woke up was draw a picture of the landscape directly outside the place where he woke in his book that he carried everywhere. When he finished, he walked through the town looking at people. He studied their ways of life all morning. He gathered any information he could about the people and their culture from the clothes they wore, the music they played in stores, the food they ate and the way they talked. He recorded all of this information in his book, and constantly checked back to refer to other places he had visited. The man became fluent in culture, perfect with a pen, and spoke well in any region of the world. The information he gathered in his travels made it easy for him to make small amounts of money- enough for him to get by day to day. The man would draw, write, knit, make shoes, pick flowers, fish, anything that the people needed. His life flew by. He lived under the radar, avoiding any real commitments to anyone. His life seemed perfect. He enjoyed the simpler pleasures in life, because the more complicated things got, the less time he was able to spend with them. He met women, and had the occasional one night romance, only to wake up in another part of the world. This hurt the women more than it hurt the man though, as he became numb to this type of emotion over time. But as one could expect, the man fell in love with a woman one day and could only spend a single night with her. In an attempt to save his own heart, the man never wrote down her information in his book. He knew that love could never work for him... That is, until one day when his story began to change. The man noticed he had woken up in a town where he had been before. He checked his book to see what he had drawn there many years earlier. It was a cabin by a lake. The man went to the lakeside to search for the cabin. When he found the cabin he walked in and saw an old man who welcomed him into the cabin for some tea. When he showed the drawing to the old man, a tear wept from the old mans eye. He explained that his late wife always wanted a portrait of their cabin to hang over their fireplace. So the man ripped the page out of his book and gave it to the old man. That night he stayed in the cabin once again. When the sun rose the next morning he woke up in a garden halfway across the world. A garden where he had once been. He looked in his book, where he found the phone numbers of friends from a long while back. He met with them and had a blast. The following day a similar thing happened. The man began reliving his past through the information he kept in his book. Months went by and all he could think about was the woman he fell in love with many years ago. He looked in his book and found only a delicate drawing of her. When the man closed his eyes, he saw the woman clear as day. He could smell her hair and touch her skin. He waited patiently until one day when he would wake up in her city and could find her. When this day came, the man searched for his long lost love from sunrise to sunrise. He wouldn't let himself sleep, for fear of losing his only opportunity to spend one more night with the woman he loves. The man did everything in his power to stay awake, and managed to pull it off for weeks, until one day he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, the portrait of his love had been erased from his book completely, along with the details of his fond memories. He noticed his book was beginning to rearrange its information. The phone numbers were not clear, the drawings had blank spots, even the language began to make no sense. Distraught and angry, the man fell into a bit of a depressive time. His memories were fading. His book was being erased... With urgency, the man ran around searching for some kind of memory, but ultimately failing. He spent much of his days attempting to fill the void where his book left off. Eventually the book emptied itself completely and the man had to start over with an empty book. His memories meant nothing anymore without the book. The man had to teach himself about the world all over again, on the same pages he once took for granted.

-Paris, France 1.15.09


Justin.

Location:In the air.