Tangerine Trees

‘Getting off the plane, I cannot wait to pick up my red suitcase (this time is the small one) and walk through the airport gates. I am here, I am in Athens. Trying to remember when I was last here...So much has happened since then. No, it can’t be that long...surely! In the taxi, I look outside the window and a strange kind of familiarity makes me smile. As the taxi approaches the inner city, we drive down a street with tangerine trees. I go back in time. Their smell reminds me of my childhood... this for some inexplicable reason makes me reflect on what has happened since the last time I arrived at the airport, picked up my suitcase, got a taxi (which way around? For a moment in time I lose track, my thoughts follow a path, or is it a circle); I arrive, pick up my suitcase, unpack, pack, go the airport, arrive, unpack… (which way around?); I am thinking of events that happened, news to share, things to do; I have already started telling stories, my mind already reconstructs the experiences since the last time I was there (here). ‘Which there’ (here)?

Does it matter? Maybe not anymore because I, during my plane or taxi rides away from home and towards home (which home?), always try to reconstruct the narrative, to identify…but the story never ends and I? I look back to all the accounts, the accounts of my life, my work, my-self and realize that it is all unfinished embeddings of old and new me, of here and there, fragments, fuzzy memories of my attempt to be. Momentarily, at times like this, I grasp it: the fluidity of being and the actuality of becoming, the smell of tangerines, me then and me now. I get off the taxi, I have arrived at work’ (Diary Entry, from the Airport, December 2009).