She kept emailing me all through Asia, and now that I'm back I've agreed to let her call me. She has 'things' she wants to 'talk over,' or something like that, and apparently I want to hear them. The tortured body of our love is still breathing on the rack, and Eve and I are prolonging its inevitable death.
My foreign travels also are done, but I will not let them expire, either. I recently wrote that sometimes you travel because you want to go, other times because you want to leave. And then there seems to be a third kind of travel that is not about place at all, but time. As though you cannot die as long as you keep moving.
The anthropologists Christy and Jacqueline Turner wrote a book, called Man Corn, about the aboriginal Anasazi people of the American Southwest. They coin a phrase to describe the circumstances surrounding an individual's death: perimortem. Around dying. The Turners are concerned mainly with studying physical evidence that (they believe) proves history. See how they died, and you will learn how they lived.
These months of travel and broken love have entered their perimortem. I am in the twilight of endings. This is the moment when Romeo takes his poison and briefly laments; this is the scene in the movie when the hero is bleeding to death on the floor but has one more thing to sputter out (probably "I... love you... baby") between his last gasps. If we resist the temptation to laugh, and if the scenarist is honest, we may find meaning here. We may find the particles of life in the process of death. Perhaps that same search drew me instinctively to the Tuol Sleng prison and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and now to this desert full of ancient ruins, ancient deaths.