In a stream of noisy traffic, the fumes mixed with the rain in the dark. 14-year-old kids go by riding motorcycles, smoking, haggling, telling dirty jokes, welding, chatting-up girls, repairing walls, flying paper kites. You think of the kids in western Europe who can't even tie their own shoelaces, who just cry out for more dessert. Everyone smoking cloves in doorways here, because there’s nothing else to do. You just watch the world go by and wait for the next meal, joke or cigarette.
The Javanese have warm smiles that always melt into laughter and come straight from the heart. They restore a little of your humility and remind you we’re really all the same human creatures down here, all in this together, and so there’s really no reason to worry or complain or fear anything really, only time itself, and the absence of the feeling of being adored that their smiles always convey. If we equate the mind with the self, then we are moving quite literally out of ourselves whenever we are forced to sit quietly with no other purpose than waiting. Hunched over packed into a rusty little mini bus, I was perched on the edge of a frayed leather seat, pressed up again a cold steel door, with an old Muslim man lying asleep against my back and another with his left leg hung over my right leg. We drive past a blur: thousands of tiny beat-up little ramshackle living-room restaurants where people sat looking out with empty stares, smoking and praying and eating and smoking and praying. The houses and huts all boarded and covered with old iron and cardboard, held up with bamboo poles and breeze blocks. The driver fished around by his feet and found the windscreen wiper, lent out the window and cleared away the rain. Through a crack in the window, I watched the mountains going by outside and remember thinking it was just like an old Japanese silk painting and for a while I felt like I was in another time, a stranger in a strange land. And then later, glimpsing all those private little beat-up roadside Fellahin goings-on of people’s lives, as though it were a movie, rather than those people simply living through another day of life: kids smoking, little girls carrying their baby sisters, who will soon do the same and later also make love forlornly and helplessly, not knowing any other way since we’re all really looking for the same little thing down here on this sad brown earth together. And so I ask myself why I bother thinking about it all the time and worrying about nothing at all like a hungry ghost, and don't just finally settle down with a tender little brown-skinned kind-hearted woman of my own, and have steaks out on the porch while the whole family sits around quietly making silly jokes to pass the time, wearing rags and giggling and pointing and jumping up when they see a white boy going by peering out the window, crammed into the rusty little van, as though I’m a scene in some strange movie for them, and not living through my own dream of trivial thoughts, engrossed in their lives and taking in every detail and sound and sad-eyed young men there waiting for food or nothing or the love of his life, as I go by strange in the night just doing the same. I get so alone sometimes that it all just makes sense. And when you see all those sad-eyed young men - with fire in their eyes when a young girl sashays past, thinking the love they hear about in songs on the radio will set them free - you know that actually we are all chained to it forever irrevocably, and will die before we let ourselves learn to understand it. So, better to just let it all go by, and walk along with something like indifference, and not worry too much or chase after it anymore, not die from too much love, from not enough love, from carrying around these tombstones in my eyes, from worrying about our petty little hang-ups and cravings. Better, of course, to just let it all go and take things as they come and not worry about love anymore as everything will happen in its own time and, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway as it’s all just a passing dream we will never fully understand. Around the equator, with blue eyes, a bit of money and good manners, you can have one hell of a weekend. Just stand by the bar for half an hour and wait.... and.... lordylord...!
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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