Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Movement and sound.

Here it seems that every restaurant is tucked in a corner, or set into an opening small enough that you cannot look inside unless directly in front, but large enough to move hungry crowds in and out in a flurry. While the door may only be wide enough to allow a peek, here movement and sound are enough to pull your senses the rest of the way.

The movement: a new generation in jeans and t-shirts, or older men that appear to have just stepped out of a storybook in their white kurtas, thick beards grown with the years, and old thick rimmed glasses with deep lenses but simple character in their frames. The women enter in colorful saris draped over and around. Primary colors, absent in this unstitched cloth, are replaced by violet, Oxblood, magenta, periwinkle, tangerine, and Han purple.

The sound: it changes. Chatter spoken over reckless taxi cabs, and rickshaw wheels that *click clack* on rough streets. A busy kitchen with an atmosphere of its own in fierce spices, aroma and heat. A Sikh man with an orange turban, tightly wrapped, and iron bracelet speaks the few words necessary to instruct his staff in their grimy t-shirts and cuffed jeans. Sometimes there is only silence, but this is a neglected sound in itself. Since most eat with their fingers there is the rare scrape of fork against plate, but at times only silence.

Now here I sit by myself but enjoy the minutes I have in this atmosphere. Everything is worn and in dark spots it shows. The places where plates and bowls have slid in minute increments, back and forth; the vinyl covered seats, cracked to open stuffing inside. Neither are ancient by age; only by use. Those who slide in and out; who sit heavy with drooping fat, the weight of the years, or heavy with empty stares, the weight of the mind. Those who move fast in order to continue the night, or quiet groups of companions without words in their midst.

And then there is me. I sit alone but soak in this tiny room of atmosphere and heat. I listen for the stories in the cracked plaster and crooked picture frames. Those that have been written and the ones still to come. Today my story is in India, but it is more than my story alone, it is yours too. We are much more alike than we are different. I feel in Kolkata and you feel from where you read.

I do not understand all that surrounds me, but I will keep trying. I am chasing after change, trying to comprehend its monumental movements or sneaking reforms. Maybe change is chasing me. Maybe it makes all that difference that I am moving; I refuse to be stagnate.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

My heart, my mind, my God. (From the airport.)

Tears pooled upon her eyelids that had been given careful attention in the half hour between our momentary parting and a reunion. It was a somber reunion; one leading to goodbye.

She rode with me in the cab and words were barely spoken. I looked out the window for most of the trip and squeezed her hand tighter when her searching eyes caught the corner of my vision.

We arrived at the airport. Check-in was flawless. It was time to go.

Standing in a cold room of glass and steel, I gave her a red journal with a letter on the first four pages that instructed her to fill this book with hopes, fears, and loves. I insisted that she take a small wad of bills -- the taxi fare home and a little bit more. Before the revolving glass entrance I held her and squeezed her tight. She wrapped her arms around my back. I forgot the people below who stared up at a short kiss; I forgot about everyone else.

At passport control we stood together one final time, and words moved from my mouth to her ear. "No promises," I said, and she nodded. "But you will always know me."

With head turned, I walked into the opening of a frosted glass barricade and pressed my last words through the air with a raised palm and spread fingers.

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My heart, (my mind), and ("my God").

For 6 1/2 months I have been traipsing around Southeast Asia, but now my ticket has come and its time to move. In one hour and twenty-two minutes I will be on a plane to India. I hope the flight is longer than I expect. I don't know how ready I am. (But remember Seth, no expectations, you can't have them.) It might be shocking. (It might be beautiful.) ("This is not your plan.") I am afraid. I shouldn't be. ("I am with you.") That Indian man at check-in made a horrible lusting sound as he walked near Chon. (You cannot base an entire population on one man.) ("Aren't you guilty of the same? Though not always verbally, or even with your eyes, then surely with your mind.") This isn't mine anymore; it never has been. Take it from me. (Nor is it mine.) ("I have you.")

"At the least, bear it bravely if you cannot
bear it cheerfully." - Thomas A. Kempis

Monday, July 21, 2008

Tomorrow brings change.

I cannot make any promises. It is not that I cannot keep them, but if I did it would break your heart, and break my own.

Tomorrow I fly to India. I do not feel ready to go, to leave your strength, but I have to step in the only direction time allows me: forward. This is more than me, this is my calling.

Last night I stood on the bridge over the canal and I said goodnight for two hours. Was it really that long? Did the morning already come? I can still taste the night.

Life is moving at a steady clip, but it races in the final hours. I will not drag my feet, but if I can I will stand in place while the world rushes on.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Its 3:00 a.m.

I am sitting in my room. I just arrived back at my guesthouse after seeing the last showing of the Dark Knight with Chon. On the ride home, as we sat together in the back of the cab I noticed her silently counting with her fingers in her lap.

"What are you counting?" I asked her.

"Three days left in Bangkok," she said to me, referring to my flight on the 23rd. "Today is the twentieth."

We parted ways at the "T" in the road and I turned on my heel to look at the empty raining path behind me, though once again I did not expect to see anything.

Friday, July 18, 2008

"Choke dee. Choke dee."

In a split second, my breath is gone.

I am standing on a narrow road of white cement slabs. I close my mouth and pull air in through my nose. All that I smell is of earth and oxygen, all that I see is color and shape. Before me are green shoots of rice -- tiny bundles saturated in green within a placid field of earthen walls, topped by a carpet of grass. These walls are the borders from one field to the next. Prepared by diligent human hands, omnipresent cycles of mother nature, now set through a history of planetary shifts and cycles of weather, now meticulously carry the weight. The well-being of a nation rests before me. My eyes, my father's eyes, must change in hue to match the gray sky above; still friendly in spite of overcast billows. In the distance, shafts of sunlight slice through humid cloud openings in places unknown to me, unknown to all except those who backs perhaps receive the blunt weight of heat. In front of me, an abandoned shelter stands on rotted wood stilts at a junction of green borders. A resting place for farmers, it once provided shade but now belongs to the sky and to the earth. Behind me is nothing but the same -- a jigsaw of borders and fields; green, green, and gray.

In a split second, my breath is back.

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Chon invited me to her home. I accepted. I keep telling myself that nothing can happen between us, and that's how the story goes. But to stay in a small Thai village in the far north with acquaintances who have quickly become friends was something I could not pass up.

It is the unknown which I now readily accept, yet in the moment I stepped through the open-fronted house belonging to Chon's "Paw" and "Ma," I began building something that will last. I sat down waiting, and Chon's "Ma" greeted me with a beaming smile and grabbed my forearm, feeling it with a squeeze and welcoming me once and again with the words, "Choke dee. Choke dee," (Good luck. Good luck.).

In the past five days...

I have lived with new friends in a traditional Thai village, I have stared at fertile fields of rice just planted by callused hands, I have listened to Buddhist chants in the early morning, I have sat cross-legged on a bamboo table for three meals a day, I have slept on the floor, I have stared at mountains and fog on rainy northern Thailand afternoons, I have sat comfortably in rooms for hours where words of English are rarely spoken, I have danced in the rain with 100 villagers, I have picked fruit that tastes like candy, I have been laughed at out of care, I have been blessed by grandmother ("Yai"), I have been missed in my absence from the village, and now I have cried.

In the past five days.

Soon, it will have been seven months since I first left my home in Joliet, but I suppose that it is only one of my homes. Now I know that to go back to the north, to the village of 100, would be to go back home.

Life is surreal.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

A short pause.

Maybe "A Long Pause" is a more appropriate title for this entry. My writing has suffered lately. Journal pages, that is my actual journal pages, were once separated by hastily written dates in order to reach the heart of my writing; the center of my mind's energy. Yet lately my paged book has become an unfinished sentence with clips of inky memories scrawled in a rush rather than for pleasure. Its not that nothing has happened -- in the past three to four weeks I have revisited Bangkok with a fresh perspective, visited old students and friends in Kanchanaburi, made a new friend (through conversation about music) with the guy who was handing out condoms on HIV/AIDs day at Nongkhao school, and went on one of the sweetest dates in my life where everything and nothing really happened. Lately, I just haven't loved writing. Lately, I haven't loved myself. Maybe though, I've loved myself too much. Selfishness is the center of the fall, the fall takes away from who I am, so taking away from who I am takes away from my writing.

There are many stories to speak of, but tonight I want to write about the most recent. This is a short pause to speak of something light-hearted, something soft, and kind. Maybe this is what I need to write to get back to where I was.

Tonight I went on a date.

Her name is Saichon; "Chon" for short. She is from the north of Thailand, but now lives in Bangkok with her two sisters, Pai and Fon. Believe me when I say that they are quite the silly bunch; in fact, they are self-proclaimed "dting dtong" (silly in Thai). The three of them live together in the northern part of the Banglamphu area while Pai studies at a university in the city, and Fon, who has graduated, works for a company. Chon has also graduated, with a bachelor's degree in biology, but while helping her parents and waiting for an opportunity to study medicine, she works at the four star Princess Hotel in the center of the city. This is where I agreed to meet her yesterday afternoon.

With the mobile phone I was lent from the wonderful teachers in Nongkhao, I called her when I arrived and waited in the lobby. I stared in awe at my surroundings. I don't think I've ever been inside a four star hotel. Beyond the glass doors and staff with double breasted suits and golden buttons was humid oppression, but inside these tall clear windows was a polished floor and a room cold with air conditioning. Everything was in its place. Earthy red-toned vases held single flowers purposefully set into balanced existence. Stacked on black granite slabs, they led your eye to silver steps and steel; the entry to a restaurant with folded linen napkins and empty tables.

My phone rang. It was Chon.

She was waiting in the connecting hallway to MBK -- a massive shopping center where every inch of floor space is covered in art, shoes, and t-shirts; a Thai-European hybrid fashion world. I saw her before she saw me. She was standing against the wall, waiting. Wearing a gray classy top, dark short-but-modestly-cut shorts, and white flats with a red stripe on the toe; she looked "cute."

We slowly wandered the hallways, getting a little lost, but eventually finding our way to the sushi restaurant downstairs.

"You can order, I like it all," she told me.

We both started with a frosty drink, hers watermelon and mine lemon, and then moved on to a large California and a Caterpillar sprawled across a white platter. We laughed through struggles to eat the enormous California roll and laughed at others in the restaurant doing the same. My mother has done well in sending several blackmail pictures of the early Wyncott years and Chon certainly laughed at these.

On a Sunday night, masses moved through the restaurant in the gourmet food center of the Siam Paragon, but we sat still, not moving from our table while people swirled around.

"What do we do now?" she asked me. Our table was now cleared of food and the bill was on its way.

I asked her, "Well, do you want to go back (a wrinkled brow) or go to a movie?" (a nod and a smile).

A movie it was.

She bought two massive drinks, and I bought the tickets. We stood up for the king, and we saw Wanted. It was ridiculous, but it didn't matter.

As the credits rolled we stepped out and slowly made our way back to the beginning; taking in everything as we went. We stepped onto the escalator going down and she asked me how long I would stay in Thailand. I told her I was leaving for India in a week and a half. Then it was quiet.

We took the number 15 bus and leaped off at Phra Atit Road, and after mentioning my hunger we made one final stop: a tiny Roti restaurant with two narrow floors sandwiched in a street of restaurants, bars, and cafes. Sitting in a tiny upstairs room Thai music videos sounding from an old TV we sat at a folding table with small stools and shared a late night snack of roti and masala.
We walked back, slowly as always and discovered our streets were leading the same way until we reached a "T" in the road.

"Goodnight," I said. "See you again soon."

"Goodnight," she said.

I walked back to my guesthouse along the river without looking back until I was too far off to expect anything other than an empty path.

She is Buddhist, I am Christian. She lives in Bangkok, I live in Joliet. Those two speak much, but there are more. Let's just name two. We are far apart, yet close for a night.

This was a short pause in my recent complexity for something soft and kind.