The generation before me, my father's generation, went off in search of America but that journey is long since over and done. They did not find it or found it and lost it before I was even old enough to know something was missing from our lives. This was in the days after our souls had gone missing, before we realized anything was gone. This was before I went looking for something that wasn't there and found a hole where I was supposed to be. They searched and returned home and then I was born into a generation of emptiness, of boys and girls with minds as sharp as clear winter skies and hearts like any other generation of boys and girls...and holes in the places where WE ourselves were supposed to be.
Just blank space. And silence.
Or maybe it was just me. Even with a clear mind, the world is an unclear place and sometimes it's hard to tell where you end and everyone else begins. All I know for sure is that you do end somewhere and somewhere they begin, and in between is a bridge you are supposed to cross to find a place for yourself in someone else. But the part of you that knows the way across, or even how to see the bridge at all, is just a hole. So you stay at home and look for something inside. But before too long, you fill the gap, and the daylight, with cartoons on Saturday and comic books, and later with longer shows from the nice people at the alphabet factories where they make the pictures of the world we live in, and you take those pictures with you to school and try to use them to find and cross the bridge because eventually...eventually and inevitably...you look up one day and find that your eyes are filled with the eyes of a girl who sees you.
And you wanted someone to see you.
But it's just holes staring into holes and so...and so you are blind and the bridge is nowhere to be found. Or maybe it is just that I am blind, because maybe it's just me. And even though I FEEL filled to bursting with everything, I AM empty of anything, or at least anything I can see.
Just more blank space. And silence.
Or maybe it is, as Carolyn Forche once wrote, that "the silence of God is God."