Remember the sixth night? The one where I sat there with my thumb over the send button at midnight, desperate to ask somebody, anybody, to just tell me — am I a Wanderer, yes or no, which world, whose am I. Remember how the question kept dissolving in my mouth, and how furious that made me, and how somebody long ago asked the very same thing and got, instead of an answer, a question back: why do you need to know so badly?
I finally have the answer to that one. And the answer is that I needed the label because I didn’t yet have the thing the label was pointing at.
I wanted the badge — Wanderer, from the gold, here on a mission — because a badge is something you can hold. Something that makes you special without requiring anything further of you. I wanted to be told I was one of the good ones so I could stop there, satisfied, identified, filed away. That’s what the question really was, underneath: a request to be let off the hook of actually doing it.
And somewhere this week — I can’t point to the night, it happened while I wasn’t looking — the question just… fell away. Not answered. Outgrown. I stopped needing to know whether I’m a Wanderer, because I was too busy wandering — too busy forgiving the boss and showing up for the one I wronged and choosing the kind thing forty times a day and failing at it and trying again. The label was a signpost. And you don’t stand around hugging a signpost once you’ve started walking the road it points down.
That’s the joke the old material was making, gently, the whole time. It wouldn’t hand the man his answer because the answer wasn’t a fact to be told. It was a life to be lived. You don’t find out you’re a Wanderer and then go be of service. You go be of service, and the question of what you are quietly stops mattering, because you’re finally doing the thing you’d have done anyway if you’d never doubted it for a second.
I came here to help. That’s it. That’s the whole identity, and it turns out it was never a noun. It was always a verb.
I don’t know what density I’m from. I’m not going to ask anymore. I’ve got work to do, and only — I checked — four days left to do it in before this strange month closes and something new begins.