You can always come back

By: Daniel Shuffield

A carved stone portal in A Coruña, Galicia, facing north off the Spanish coast.

Or so they tell me / I hear it in both languages as I leave that which became my home / me dicen / Nos vamos a ver otra vez / ya verás / I hear it in the waves I hear it again / in the next wave, as a child / I found it silly / the way sailors of old used to fall in love / with the sea / the sea is not a person / one ought not elevate things / one ought not tell themselves a story, rather / live and let Homer tell it / though I do wonder / I wonder / if Odysseus was living in the moment / I wonder if he ever thought about Calypso / I wonder if, as she handed him the tools to build his boat, she whispered a final phrase / you can always come back / I wonder if he ever considered immortality, or perhaps, he knew / the poem in which he lived may repeat but it may never return

Near the end of the school year, I confess to my students that I know how to travel in time / qué dice / let me explain / I can send a message to my future self and so can you / I turn on the projector / they roll their eyes when they realize what this means / one page / handwritten / a time capsule of words / what would you like to ask the version of yourself who has already finished their journey through high school / some are confused why they would ask questions if they expect no response / the most confused and enlightened of them all begins / writing down questions and trying to answer them himself / what was your favorite class in high school / spanish / are you and Aitor still best friends / yes / are you happy / I tell him these questions are not for us to answer / let me explain / you are writing for someone else / you will never again be this you who knew this me / or rather, the passage of time is experienced in one direction / -age elevates it all / I encourage my students / I would like to instill heart in them / with time, a mess can become a message / language is the lifting of a tongue / a trip has a return leg / ida y vuelta / but / a voy-age: I go, a process / I am going / you can always come back, my students tell me / no, have heart, I say / a voyage is that which changes you

Here is the most human place / a bar bathroom wall / an artifact of who has passed through this place and what ached in them / enough to let the rest of humanity read it / the goodbyes, the new beginnings, the words they want to remember before time marches on / above all, the sharpies scrawl a manifest upon the stone / love, once, was here / I wash my hands of it and think of the sailors who mapped their love / never to return but to go deeper / the maps ask the reader, their future selves, what lies beyond / the maps are clear: I was here / I have discovered there is far more than we thought / here be dragons / as a child, I found it silly / but I understand now / no sailor sinks in the same waters twice / I dry my hands and travel further back / when those versions of us who dwelt in caves splayed their hands upon the wall / I wonder if they understood it as the first use of the past tense / I was here / I wonder if they understood it as an elevation of their personage / how long the red ochre question stained the back of their hands and why they let it fade / if they placed their hand with care or if it stung with a slap / if the echo was meant for us

you can always come back / you can always come back