Becoming & the Alphabet Dream Circus

I would stare up at the roof of my house in Togo while daydreaming of the Alphabet Dream Circus, trying to escape the heat. Not pictured: the tropical heat. (Author’s Photo)

There is a special sort of discomfort that beginnings & becomings share. The inability to truly grab ahold of them, mercurial, incessantly shifting things. The turning point of a beginning that implies the closure of something else. The constant spiral growth of becoming. They are both liminal spaces, I suppose, but that was a word overused to the point of comedic effect in my freshman year of college. So, instead, let me just say that I’m trying to suss out why going on a big ol’ bicycle tour of something like 9,000 miles is a good idea. I think it is, but it’s hard to grab ahold of, here at the start. The original threads of the idea are houseplant roots in too small of a pot.

Thread no.1 or the Writer

I once had the privilege of meeting Kelly Link (the author of Get in Trouble, among others) in a writing class, & she put into words something that I had been subconsciously internalizing for quite some time: “Risks in life translate to risks in writing.”

This was a substantial reason for why I chose to spend two years of my life in Togo with the Peace Corps after graduating from college. My service was, unfortunately, cut short by a handful of months due to the pandemic, but I figured I’d still be able to more or less stay the career course I had laid out for myself. Graduate programs, however, had other ideas, &…