the island of djerba

everyone who lived in djerba liked to say, "djerba is not a real place."

djerba was full of small gods. you either believed you had special powers or you didn't.

. . .

(some argue that djerba is a very real place, by virtue of external referents. others say djerba is entirely apocryphal. a majority of djerba residents believe that the meaning of djerba is ever-shifting, and has become colonized in recent years. others reject the idea of djerba altogether and believe it to exist only as a discursive symbol. my parents wouldn't shut up about how i went to djerba. the sibyls believed that djerba itself does not exist but only becomes real elsewhere. )

I feel very ambivalent about my time at djerba. I was manic, earnest, though not yet jaded; I pursued the absolute at the cost of everything else. I fell in love with objects and ideas and people who loved me in turn, but as the prodigal young are prone to do, I squandered it all. and because I acquired neither useful skills ("I told you so," said my mother,) nor present laughter, the cost of a stay at djerba hovers above me, a four-year Rorschach blotch that others see as a wreath, that stains my selfhood forever. why couldn't I have started working at 19, like the kabeiroi? why was I so angry among sleepy lotus-eaters, among prophets, who had tame wants and walked a tame land?

I try not to bring up my time at djerba to others lest it marks me more.