The US border control were very interested in me when I arrived in San Francisco.
A suspicious-looking Englishman, who couldn't answer specific questions about my plans there, and who had to look up the address I was staying at on my mobile.
They asked me to provide evidence that I'd ever leave the country again - requesting to see the e-mail with my return flight details - and questioned me about my job, interests, and the woman I was meeting. Who is she, sir? Friend? Girlfriend? How do you two know each other, sir?
More than anything, though, the US border control were keen to learn more about the book I had chosen as my in-flight reading: The Balkans by Misha Glenny.
So you have an interest in the Balkans, do you, sir?
I do, sir, yes - I find the area fascinating.
Seems like rather a large book for a flight, sir, don't you think?
I agree, I agree. It is very heavy! I kept falling asleep, waking up, reading a bit, and then drifting off back to sleep.
It can't be that interesting a book, then, sir?
On the contrary, sir, it is very interesting to me.
The conversation went on in this way for some time, and I was waved through after all my luggage had been opened and thoroughly searched.
Of course, it is only now that I realise my choice of book had given away my sub-conscious thoughts about going to the USA at all - I am more interested in the past than the present, and so the events in the present will never be permitted to proceed harmoniously.
This was confirmed two days into my trip, when I announced that I ought to have never fucking travelled in the first place, and my wish was to go back to England.
I dream of the past, and the past that never was: reading about the Ottomans and the Yugoslavs, and sitting on a bed in San Francisco declaring my love for the woman I haven't seen in almost two years, and will never see again.
I dream of the future that never will be, and this is the third horse, as yet unmentioned - it holds the other two in check and yet scares them sufficiently that they run amok.
It is enough to acknowledge that the third horse exists; an aggregation of hope and pain and failure. Perhaps it isn't so much a horse as a fence - Eidos and Onto look at it, and it seems as though it can be scaled. In reality, nothing they can ever do will see them emerge over the other side.
It seems as though it can be scaled because it constitute no more than a series of memory-traces - the image of a smile, a pair of eyes, fingers pushing through hair. Bodies who try to leap over it, though, find that is far higher and much more solid than they imagine, and they fall back to earth, hurt and bruised.
