Ashlee McCarthy

Justin answered the door to his on-campus apartment with frayed jeans and a stone gray shirt that matched nicely with his blue eyes and warm smile. Even from the doorway, I could see the striped brown couch that sat directly across a wide screen TV that never seemed to turn off. The round kitchen table and wicker chairs were cast off to the side as though never used. The built-in bookshelf seemed more for storage than display; some levels were stuffed to the brim, while others were nearly barren.

My eyes scanned a collection of stuffed animals—penguins, an elephant, and a pig—which, as Justin immediately explained to me, were "not his." The rest of the shelves kept matted paintings, an assortment of old, bound books that looked like they better belonged in an antique shop than a college apartment, and a paradoxical hodgepodge of CD’s: I scratched my brow and wondered if Credence Clearwater, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Hootie and the Blowfish, and the Buena Vista Social Club really kept good company with each other. All and all, the place did not seem overly unkempt, only…transient. Noticing my undue attention to his surroundings, he began to give me the guided tour. He strolled over to the cabinets and handed me a string of thin, colorful squares of fabric.

"Do you know what these are?" he asked quizzically.

As luck would have it, my sophomore-year suitemate strung these across our common room. I recognized them immediately.

"Yeah, they’re Nepalese prayer flags. Where did you get these?"

He responded in a casual tone, "Oh, in St. Johns. I lived there."

At my astonishment, Justin sits down beside me and excitedly narrates his way through one of his photo albums. I squint at the pictures and wonder if they’re not just a bunch of postcards. The first photo he stops at is beaming with colors and light. Turquoise waves boldly crash against smooth, weathered boulders that create tiny but deceptively deep pools that scatter turbulence along an otherwise peaceful sea. Behind them, stark white sailboats surf the stiller, bluer waves. Even further, a mass of puffy white clouds form a canopy over the green, gently rolling slopes that seal off the perimeter of the bay. In the center of the photograph, an eighteen-year old Justin perches on a concave rock. His legs are pulled into his chest—he is tossed and battered by the waves—but he is triumphant. The rock is his throne.

"You swam all the way out there just so you could take a picture, didn’t you?"

His face lights up and his mouth splits into a wide grin. "Yeah, I did."

Now, I know what you’re thinking. But this guy is no Chris McCandless. Justin spent most of his senior year saving his money and solidifying his plans for his four month excursion. Almost nothing was left up to chance. St. Johns, he explained to me, is only eight miles wide—one in a chain of several islands that compose the Virgin Islands. Only miles from the Florida Peninsula, it combines the exotic paradise with the safety of American soil. His apartment had no air conditioning, and he had to walk to the restaurant where he worked as a server, but otherwise, it is accurate to say that he was hardly roughing it. "Roughing it," it seems, was not the point. But as an hour, then an hour and a half, of storytelling and illusive conversation rolled by, it became clear to me that my most pressing question was the one he didn’t want to answer: why?

Justin flips through the album and pauses at a second picture. Except for a trail of tiny ripples that stir about the rudders of the boat, the ocean is sleeping, enveloped in a blanket of thick, cotton candy clouds. Judging by the rich interplay between light and shadow, you can tell it is nearly noon, but the colors give off an impression of twilight. The black cliffs creep into the water like a phantom, and the silvery sea reflects the swirling blue and gray of a tepid sky. But through a break in the clouds radiates a beam of sunshine that pours from the pillowy banks onto the ocean and makes it shine like a sea of glass. With a soft smile and serious blue eyes Justin points to the photograph with his right index finger. "This," he tells me, "is the hand of God."

In the corner of his room rests a painting—almost three feet tall, is it nonetheless inconspicuous amidst the clutter of clothes strewn over the floor. Justin notices my attention being drawn to it and lifts it up for me to see more clearly. Harsh words—fail, quit, lose, spineless, limit—dart disorderly in midnight blue across a background of deep, envious green. The words are sparse about the margins but become gradually more and more frantic and condensed as they work their way toward the center of the painting. Reading them, I can almost hear their whispers mocking, swirling about my head. A blazing red—a red of passion on the verge of obsession and insanity—begins at the bottom and creeps up the edges like fire licking up the air. But in the center—in the height of chaos and unrest—reads in stark, white, block letters: RESIST.

"Yeah," he says, nodding his head, "I dig it, too."

Another portrait features a group of six people loosely resembling each other but clearly related. Justin stands on the far right sporting an iridescent graduation gown and a confused expression. The others wear suits, collared shirts, and dress slacks; they put their arms around each other and smile proudly into the camera. "This is my dad, this is my mom—they’re divorced. And these are my half brothers. These two are full brothers, and this one isn’t related to either of them. Now see if you can figure that out." With a smirk, he points to each of them, boasting of an eclectic but loving family.

In the years before his high school graduation, he has moved more times than he could clearly keep track of, from Fort Worth to North Carolina, and finally to a one room cabin with his mother on Lake Livingston—sometimes because of family, sometimes because of sheer boredom. Even at Southwestern, he finds it difficult to resist the impulse to pick up and leave. He admits to me that his constantly shifting childhood makes it easier for him to drift from one place to another. But it’s more than that.

"I would say family keeps me around in one spot." He later tells me. "They’re the only stable thing. Which is odd because my family split up to in the four corners of the world. One’s in Weatherford, one’s in Fort Worth, one’s in Arizona, one’s on the Islands, one’s in Los Angeles…."

At this point, I’m beyond perplexed. "So why is it that you can be content with where you are, and at the same time, have an urge to move around so much?"

He stands up from his bed and begins to pace around his room, pensive in his reflection. "I don’t really think about this stuff that much, I’m not really sure. It’s just two different aspects, I guess. It’s not like I ever get tired of looking at the same thing. I love trees...you ever looked at a tree? You can look at a tree for hours, and you’ll see something new every few minutes. You’ll say, ‘what kind of bug is that?’ or you’ll look at a leaf and see that it’s really two leaves in one, and then you’ll see all the different branches going in all kinds of different directions. It’s crazy."

Feeling metaphorical, I ask him, "Do you ever think you can stay in one place? Do you ever think you can just stop at one tree?"

"Well…" he pauses, "…it would have to be a special tree…."

A few days later, I took a walk with Justin to find out exactly what he meant. I followed him along the same, familiar path from the campus apartments to the academic mall. Our stroll was slow and deliberate; every twenty feet or so, Justin would pause to pick up a twig, a pebble, or a seed. By the time we were half way there, he had already accumulated quite a collection. "Check that tree out," he would frequently say to me. Often, it was a kind of tree I had seen countless times before and was embarrassed that I could not give you its name.

The limbs separated in twisting and haphazard directions, a few remnant honeybees buzzed around he downy pink flowers—drooping with age and weighing down the branches—but still vibrant with color. Sweet and citrusy fragrances flooded my nostrils as I took deep breaths from the hot, summer breeze. For the first time since childhood, I studied with vigor how the roots flowed to the trunk, to the boughs, and then to the individual leaves with grace and distinction; I reflected on my Modern Philosophy class, remembering how something can be both one and many—and at the same time—a whole. Learning to appreciate each and every sensation, my eyes darted from place to place, capturing the beauty of the ordinary. I might not have found a direct answer to my question, but I may have scratched the surface to something more meaningful. Only then did it finally occur to me: everywhere is paradise.

I’m not a very efficient journalist. I don’t really have interview sessions, per se; they’re more like discussions. I never go into an interview session with a canned list of questions; I just have a conversation and get to know my subject, and more often than not, he or she leads me in the right direction without feeling prompted. I prefer to use a recorder so I can look people in the eye—instead of my notepad—as I talk with them. That way, when I do write something—which isn’t often—I can make note of how the subject says something instead of being preoccupied with what he or she says. Towards the end of our sessions, I usually take pictures of significant things in my subject’s life, like his or her home, work, church, or hangout. Its helps me make detailed, accurate descriptions that are useful when I’m trying to set up a scene. Afterwards, I develop the pictures and transcribe the tapes. Granted, all of this takes a lot of extra time, but it allows me to see as much of the picture as I can before I sit down to write an article.

This process was actually perfect for my interviews with Justin. Justin struck me as a very complex person. He is an intriguing storyteller: very open about certain things and very guarded about others. The plus side is that he practically wrote the paper for me; I left the interview process with many vivid, engaging stories that just seemed to naturally flow into clearly mapped-out scenes. The down side is that he rarely gave me a straight answer to my questions. I had a lot of "what’s" with and very little "why’s." Often times, I felt more like a detective than a journalist. Instead of asking Justin to tell me the meaning of his stories, I had to piece them together using metaphors, objects from his room, and intuition. In the end, I decided to use pictures and objects to tell a more complete, but more subtle version of Justin’s story. My article aims to give light to my experience of Justin as I saw it, and let the reader interpret.