In a Strange Room

by Damon Galgut

Life becomes a series of tiny threatening details, he feels no connection with anything around him, he’s constantly afraid of dying. As a result he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is also never going towards something, but always away, away.

And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else travelling is like free-fall, or flight.

In every departure, deep down and tiny, like a black seed, there is the fear of death.

A large part of travelling consists purely in waiting, with all the attendant ennui and depression.

Between them there is an excitement made partly from fear, they are committed to a situation of which the outcome is unknown, travel and love have this much in common.

They walk and walk, all the motion latent in the vast curves of the earth somehow contracted into the dynamics of this movement, one leg swinging past the other, each foot planted and uprooted in turn, the whole surface of the world has been trodden down just like this over time.

There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it’s a long way from home.

it’s only human, after all, to look for a hint of destiny where love or longing is concerned.

He has always been drawn by the strangeness of places, by what he doesn’t know instead of what he does.

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Would it make any difference to what follows, perhaps it would, perhaps everything comes down to one silence too many.

There is nothing to do, but his body struggles to accept it. He is constantly on edge, constantly prepared for crisis. He sleeps badly and lightly, and wakes long before dawn. The days are empty and he doesn’t know how to fill them.

I would like to tell the story just once, she says now. I want somebody to hear it, then I might be able to leave it and walk away. Do you know what I mean.