Departure Bay

I had to wake up early today, it's Wednesday and group meetings start at 9.30. As I walked through the morning mist, on the way to the lab, I was mostly thinking on stuff other than work. Yesterday's concert or what Borges would say or write about iPods and Kindles. As I watched the grey breaking waves on the beach of Barceloneta under the sounds of "Closing Time", utterly distracted from anything relevant of a working day just about to start, I felt a bit guilty.

Then the meeting started and finished, we had lunch, got back up, still trying not to be distracted anymore but it so turns out that distraction is the natural order of things. It becomes clear when right there in the midst of all the work you can't do, the daydreaming you can't avoid and the guilt you cannot get over, that you get a phone call bringing you back to earth. Then you forget all about guilt, you feel all work is futile and oblige yourself to daydreaming, realizing that at the background of all your plans and endeavors, life still goes on and most of the time it goes on the hard way.

I find it so hard now to think of Tom Waits explaining "Closing Time" or what Borges would say to someone losing a beloved father, since writing about death may be one thing but one's loss is something completely different. You try and try to put yourself in your friends shoes, hoping to be able to share the grief, thinking -in rigorous math logic- that sharing automatically means lessening the burden. But it's not like this at all, since death defies all logic and can only cast unequal shadows. And one's mourning is a solitary torment. All the rest of us can do is wait until the departure fades at the back of the mind and the good times are fossilized in memory as tokens of something beautiful that -like all that is beautiful- has come and gone.

So "shiver me timbers, 'cause I am a-sailin' away"