Hamburg 30.12.99: Millennium Approaching, Past Dragging Along

A feeling of finality, as the end of our trip approaches, as well as the end of a year that ends a millennium (no problem for me, calling 2000 the first year of the new millennium). This journal, too, is soon to end, physically.

I’m sitting in the dim light of this Missionsakademie room, a room unbelievably ill-appointed. Suddenly thoughts of that “other house,” on Lee St. in Little Rock, come to mind.

Why does that house haunt me? At some level, I know: some amazing traumas occurred to me there. It’s also the first house we lived in that I can remember with more or less total clarity. And it’s the house where I first went to school, which is to say, first began to read, and in doing so, found ways to escape the suffering my parents imposed on me.

At another level, though, I’m not sure why this house haunts me, why it won’t let me go. It’s like the idea that I should write: just there, inside, repressed but constantly reasserting itself.

Perhaps I should write about the house? If so, how, what? Am I in Little Rock again to retrieve something, some connection to my puer self that will free me to be creative.

I don’t know. I fear I grasp at straws. Nothing seems to manifest redemption to me; at least, not the kind of redemption I need. I’ve felt so leaden and tired on this trip, unable to think and write (and, my mind whispers, full of dread).