"Journey" by El.Seth is a pretty sizable collection (22 pages) of poems written and arranged as a Google Slides presentation. It's an interesting aesthetic, and I like that the pages are in landscape and not portrait. It's always cool to see what sites or software or tools a writer uses to collect their poetry! Journey is about how "Leaving, and living in a different country, away from home and away from familiarity, is tough, but it is my choice." which I can definitely relate to, as I've been spending time living in my partner's country before returning to the US in March. It's never easy leaving behind worlds of rules that make sense, and also enter a scene where you know no one and the ways people make friends are entirely different and based in a sphere of atmospheres and long term developments you can't access or which you don't understand. It's still a very lucky opportunity and choice to be able to make, and can really teach you a sense of humility ... about how self-absorbed in the nationalism your home country has taught you that you've been. How small and singular you are in the grand scheme of things. How the world is so much more than the small world you've been so preoccupied with. Those kinds of realizations definitely coincided with my initial dive into being anti-press. On the whole it's changed me for the better, and means I think in much bigger and more material ways about who I am and what I'm doing and what I should be trying to achieve with what I do.
Journey isn't that sort of message ... it's more about being in a different place and that deeper loneliness attached with the difficult task of getting through situations where people have betrayed your trust. It captures that frantic energy of always compensating for perpetually playing catch up when you're the hypothetical 'outsider' in your own anxious mind for once. It's interesting, and I always think it's good to consider and remember we are not as important individually as we think we are. That doesn't mean we don't matter, because every human life is worth happiness and respect, but that at any time in any of our experiences in life we must remember it's bigger than just us, and that these difficult and lonely moments might be the things which help us realize that.
"I missed the constant compliance, Radio waves' static silence, The roads rolled on, no fuss or rush, An empty mind, all my thoughts hushed."