Outside events

The transit ferry from Got pier to Cat Ba was so smooth that for half the crossing I didn’t realise we had left the shore, as I sat inside a bus inside the ferry, the bus unmoving, the ferry gliding like paper over glass, the sea surface gray all the way out, the drizzle pinching the water with the same intensity, the ships in the distance anchored to the same spots, and nothing changed, and nothing changed, until I overheard someone say we’re halfway there, and I looked up and the shore was gone, but nothing outside had changed, and I had moved miles. I wondered if this is how we move through our lives, living inside bodies that change at the same speed we do, so we can’t feel ourselves moving, and the everyday world stops registering too, as we fold it into our understanding and stop really looking, and what tells us we have moved is something from outside that breaks the pattern, like a remark from a stranger, or the sudden absence of a shore. Writing does this for me, when I go back through old journals I find out how much my understanding of the world has changed, or hasn’t, as I’m carried somewhere frozen at the moment of writing, where I don’t only remember the event I wrote down, I remember writing it, and what I felt while I wrote, each entry is a capsule with a date stamped on its side, filled with thoughts churned into powder, and opening each capsule acts like the conversation on the ferry, the voice from outside telling my mind, which has been drifting at its own speed all along, how far it has come.