There will be no floating away

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.

It’s hot here.

And not just hot. It’s not like any heat I’ve ever known. It’s hot.

Obnoxiously, unbearably, lethally hot.  

The air is tangibly humid. Each breath is like taking a deep breath submerged in a lukewarm bath and your lungs fill with liquid.  The humidity clings to your face like spider webs and doesn’t ever go away. You’re constantly glistening in a universally unflattering sheen of your own sticky sweat. And no matter how many showers you take (don’t forget to keep your mouth tightly closed or you might get cholera) you’ll never feel clean or cool or refreshed.

But for everyone who lives here, it’s just a part of life. Slightly smaller than Iowa, but with a population of 180 million hot, sweaty, sticky people, Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest countries.

There’s no AC-equipped oasis to escape to, because it’s just as hot inside as it is outside, if not hotter.

But in a place like this, the heat is the least of this country’s problems.

It’s unbelievably polluted, the water is dangerous to drink, the sewer system is virtually nonexistent, the government is disgustingly corrupt and cardboard shantytowns cling precariously from the sides of dirty storefronts—housing thousands of people who literally have nothing and nothing to live for.

The electricity goes out every few hours or so, it just happened (thanks autosave!) because the infrastructure is shot to hell. Electricity isn’t quite as pressing a matter, comparatively. When you don’t know if or when your next meal is coming, it doesn’t really matter if the lights go out for a few hours.

The country is plagued with endless problems…but none of these marginal things actually meant anything once I started talking to the people. I had, for so long, been tearfully preaching to anyone who would listen about how horrible and corrupt the countries are in South Asia all summer before I actually got here, I would climb up onto my soap box and wail on about the sex trafficking tragedies in Nepal and the disgustingly corrupt government in Bangladesh…like I knew something…but I don’t know anything.

At all.

There was a man I met in Bahrain when I had a stopover there on my way here, I don’t even remember his name.

 I don’t even think I asked.  I wish I had asked.

He is always smiling, but the weary, dead look in his eyes makes it clear that his smile isn’t quite genuine, the quietness in his tired voice, and the lag in his step…it doesn’t take much to realize that something inside of him has been broken for a while.

He worked as a waiter in the café I was eating in and he told me about his life while bringing me glasses of water and taking away my plate.

He told me wistfully about the wife and kids in Bangladesh he has, and how far away they are from him because he has to work 10 hour shifts every day in Bahrain (a Middle Eastern kingdom on an island that is 5 hours away by plane).

He sends the money he makes back to home them, but keeps some to pay for his housing in a 3 bedroom apartment with 3 men per bedroom. There are nine men total in his apartment.

He works every single day, 10 hours a day, only to go home to sleep and come back in the morning to work.

That is all his life is.

 He sees his family once every two years because that’s all the vacation time he’s allowed.

He sees his family once every two years.

All he does for two years is wait to go home, and every single day until those two years end, he waits and he works and he survives until he can see his family. And once he is home, he spends each day dreading coming back. This is his schedule, over and over and over and over…

That is his life, and that’s all his life will ever be.

His children hardly recognize him, he says to me jokingly. But the bitter pain masked by the candor is searingly apparent. We both know that it’s not a joke. And at that moment, something breaks, and it all becomes painfully real.

He doesn’t get to talk to anyone because the people who eat where he works don’t really treat him as an equal, just someone who is there to clean up. He doesn’t talk to people at his apartment because he’s either sleeping, working or eating. His life is just a day in-day out, mundane, series of events, completely lonely, with no one to talk to, with hours of waiting on people, and nothing to live for but the distant reunion with his family—that is until he has to come back.

All he does is work and wait and that’s all he will do until he can’t anymore. As I finished my meal and left, he asked when I was leaving and if I would see him again. That was the moment when I realized just how lonely he was...and I realized that I may have been one of the only people to ever have an actual conversation with him in who knows how long. And more than anything he’d said before, this was what made me so sad…his hope that I might be back for dinner. That he might have a friend for a few more hours.

And I sat and cried because of this. Outside, the planes were taking off and landing and taking off again and I was sadder than I think I’ve ever been. I was sad for this man who only had his waiter’s uniform and his bleak life, I was sad for every moment he would miss watching his children grow up, I was sad for the children who wouldn’t know their father, for the wife who spends years waiting to see her husband, sad for the inevitably millions of people just like him. And I was sad for myself, sad for something I had lost.

When I got here, I met a girl named Lucky. She can’t be more than 14 years old; even though she fervently assures me she’s 18. She’s young, but the dark hollowness framing her black eyes tells me that she’s older than any child should ever have to be. I asked her how old she was when she started working, but she doesn’t even remember. She doesn’t really remember….that’s how long it’s been.

 I asked her what her whole name was, and she told me she didn’t know. She just knows that all she has been called her whole life is “Lucky.” I asked her if she went to school, and she said she did when she was very young back when she didn’t really understand anything. She was sweeping and I asked her if she did this every day. She said yes, she did this every day, but she didn’t really feel like doing it anymore. I asked her why and she said it was because she missed home. She wanted to go home but she wasn’t allowed because I had come and they needed the extra help. I asked, “Are you mad at me? Because I’m the reason you had to stay?” She laughed and said of course not, how could it be my fault?!

But it was a forced laugh, and her smile didn’t quite meet her eyes as she assured me she didn’t blame me. She can barely read, but she uses context clues to make out what the newspaper says. Anyone who speaks to her for five minutes would realize just how brilliant she is. She doesn’t forget anything she is told to do, and memorizes strings of numbers without having to be told more than twice. And I know that if she had the opportunities I had, that she would be so much more brilliant than I could ever be. The injustice settled in my stomach like a cold brick as I spoke to her. I asked her about her brother and sister and mother and father, and her village at home and whether she missed it…and as she told me just how very much she missed them all she could no longer meet my eyes and towards the end of the conversation she sped out of the room, saying she had work to do. I know she didn’t have work to do, I know she was crying, because I saw her wipe her eyes as she left, and I heard her crying quietly in the crawl space she sleeps in through the wall.

                                                                                                                                                                                            

The most painful thing for me, I guess, is that it’s not just one person, it’s never just one person—it’s not just Lucky or the man in Bahrain. It’s millions of people. It’s the receptionist from Manila who hasn’t seen her children in 5 years. It’s the hotel maid from India who is trying to raise enough money for her daughter to get married. It’s all the young girls who are taken from their villages to cook and clean for people who pay them nearly nothing. It’s all the young girls who are taken from their villages to do much worse than cook and clean. It’s everyone who works so hard and gives up so much, to the point that it nearly kills them, who sacrifice their lives to ensure that the people they love don’t have to do the same one day.

And each of these millions of people, each of them is somebody’s son or daughter, and they each have a family, and they are each individuals. Once you realize that the statistic is comprised of individuals, you become overwhelmed with the significance of the numbers…

I don’t really know anything about anything, I’m beginning to realize.

Because this is real.

It’s not a book, and it’s not a movie. It’s not facts I learned from journals or the CIA World Factbook or National Geographic articles…it’s real, living, breathing people.

And the brokenness of it all has never hit me quite like this…

…but now that it has, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself anymore.

But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning.

There will be no floating away.

Quarter-life Crisis

One of my favorite sounds is rain outside of my window at night.
And not the pussy bitch drizzle kind, what a tease.

Real rain, pounding, slamming, thunderous, lightning, apocalyptic storms of rain. Sinners in the hands of an angry God, rain. Build an ark, rain.
The kind of rain that means something.
Like it's trying to tell you something in the middle of the night, the meaning of life or how to divide by zero or what God looks like or where Amelia Earhart actually is or something crazy and unknowable like that.
That kind of rain.
It's gorgeous.

It's perfect.

And if I didn't have the flu or if I didn't have any inhibitions, I would go out there and stand in it and get soaked and the rain could pound on me and melt away everything I don't like about myself and every fear I have and every worry and every weakness and everything that makes me angry and vulnerable and broken and everything I'm not sure of and everything that's ever hurt me would wash away and flow through me and over me and out of me and go away down down down through the drains and into the streams and into the ocean where they would get lost forever and never come back.

Like a baptism.
Like a catharsis. A rebirth. Something.
And then I would come out fresh and clean and new.
Like metamorphosis. Like a butterfly.
No, but not a butterfly though. Butterflies are fleeting and fragile and pretty and they alight on things and sip nectar and don’t last.

I want this to last. I want it to be like metamorphic rock, where I go in and then the pressure and heat swells all around me until I can't take it and I writhe around twist and fold in on myself and swell and almost explode and I have to change and melt into something completely new, and scrubbed raw, ripped out of my old skin, and so aware and ready and sure of herself, and stronger, and harder, and better than I was before.
Lately, for some reason, I've been looking for change. Not more for change, rather to change.  Change within me, to become a better person I guess.

Ever since 2011 started, I’ve been working harder, planning my life down to the hour, week by week, figuring things out, making goals, drinking 8 glasses of water a day, eating healthy, studying more and harder (studying, at all really), taking the stairs, exercising, volunteering, getting things done, keeping busy, and all that.

I’ve been scheduling my life to graduate a year early with either a triple major, single minor, or a double major double minor, English/Pols and Spanish/Arabic or just triple in the three and minor in Arabic. I’ve dedicated this summer to researching child welfare in third world countries and next summer to a study abroad in Morocco and an intensive Arabic learning semester there, too. At some point I want to do something in Latin America or Oxford, I want to do an internship, I want to do Teach For America after I graduate from UGA, before I go to law school. I need to get a job at some point, to pay for all of the stuff I do.

I want to do so much, but, the scariest part is…I don’t quite know why. On some level, I’m aware that doing things, doing stuff, having stuff, will benefit me in the future, I know being accomplished with all these things on my resume will get me somewhere, eventually. Everything I want to do is something I love, yes. But I don’t know…the terrifying part is, do I do anything because I want to? Or because I want to impress the world and society and be a part of the system?
Does free will even exist?

Do I want to go to law school? Or did I choose that because I want success in my life? Do I even want success or do I just want to prove myself to everyone around me? Do I want to play success, act it, or do I actually want it? Do I really want to help people, or do I just know I should? Am I a good person at all? What is a good person anyway?

When you’re young, like me, you have a million dreams and you want to be somebody, and you want to be rich, and you want to be famous, and you want to show up everyone who doubted you growing up, and everyone who was ever mean to you, everyone who ever made you feel small, every college or job that rejected you, you want to make up for every failure you ever had by proving to everyone that you can be incredible. And then you grow up, and life happens, and you settle, and nothing really amazing happens in your life, but no one really cares because no one’s really hot shit either. And then everyone is in the same mediocre boat for forever. And then you die, and no one gives two squirts of piss about who you were.

Basically, I have no effing idea what I want right now. What I want from life is to be happy, to look back and have had a million happy experiences, I want to be loved and love and do what I love.
I’ll figure out what it all means I guess, along the way. Maybe life is the experience. Maybe you’re supposed to live it in order to figure it out, instead of living it because you figured it out.
Maybe you have to let it wash over you and accept the shape it takes and let it flow through you.

I don’t know anything at all, I’m beginning to realize.

When the wind picks up and leaves and sticks and dust blow all around me and  I can’t see or breathe, that’s when I realize that I don’t matter at all.

We'll never feel bad anymore

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,

it is still a beautiful world.

All anyone ever wants is to be happy. Whenever I'm sad, I read "Desiderata," and I breathe. 

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Let's get rich and buy our parents' homes in the south of France.

I want to talk to you about life. It’s just too difficult to be alive, isn’t it, and try to function? There are all these people to deal with. I tried to buy a can of tuna fish in the supermarket, and there was this person standing right in front of where I wanted to reach out to get the tuna fish, and I waited a while, to see if they’d move, and they didn’t—they were looking at tuna fish too, but they were taking a real long time on it, reading the ingredients on each can like they were a book, a pretty boring book if you ask me, but nobody has; so I waited a long while, and they didn’t move, and I couldn’t get to the tuna fish cans; and I thought about asking them to move, but then they seemed so stupid not to have sensed that I needed to get by them that I had this awful fear that it would do no good, no good at all, to ask them, they’d probably say something like, “We’ll move when we’re goddamn ready you nagging bitch” and then what would I do? And so then I started to cry out of frustration, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, and still, even though I was softly sobbing, this stupid person didn’t grasp that I needed to get by them, and so I reached over with my fist, and I brought it down real hard on his head and screamed: “Would you kindly move asshole!!!”

And the person fell to the ground, and looked totally startled, and some child nearby started to cry, and I was still crying, and I couldn’t imagine making use of the tuna fish now anyway, and so I shouted at the child to stop crying—I mean, it was drawing too much attention to me—and I ran out of the supermarket, and I thought, I’ll take a taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I need to be surrounded with culture right now, not tuna fish.

Laughing Wild.

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

It's just one of those disgusting days. 

Actually, today was the most gorgeous a day has been all year.

The breeze, the sun, the sky, the lazing students sprawled on blankets across the lawns...it was beautiful today.

Outside, anyway. 

Inside, I was feeling pretty busted.

You know that feeling where you want something or you need something, desperately, and you don’t know what it is and you don’t know where to get it or how or why? Like you have this enormous gaping void and it is screaming to be filled…but you have no idea how to go about doing that?

 I don't know. Sometimes you’re so scared. And, you know that kind of sick, feverish, sweaty, scared where you're scared and you don't know why or what to do or how...And the worst kind of scared is when you aren't sure exactly why you feel the way you feel. 

Or maybe you do know exactly why and you don't want to know.  

And it just sucks. It just sucks. Balls.

Because here you are just trying to live your life: trying to go to your classes on time and not swallow your gum and smile and call your mom each night and separate your whites and darks and take the stairs and all that, and you're just trying to follow the recipe for being okay and more or less content…and out of nowhere life is just like,"Hey screw you, kid. Let me throw a wrench at your face.”

Or something. 

And sometimes, it's like how I felt today, and that wrench? The one that slaps the taste out of your  mouth?  That wrench is just a feeling. Foreboding, ominous, exhausting, sad, inadequate, lonely. One of those killers. (Inadequate always gets me, nothing is worse than not being enough for someone…If you need that for future revenge, feel free, reader-friend of mine.)

And sometimes that wrench might be some major shit that happens as tends to happen in life.

And sometimes it's goodbyes and heartbreaks. 

And whatever. But it's always something. 

It's always something.

And sometimes it feels like I'm just living from one something to the next. And my life is just a series of somethings with breaks in between. And those breaks involve a lot of eating.

They tell you not to cry over spilt milk, and that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and that you tried your best and that’s what matters, and that there’s a plan, and that heaven is a much more wonderful  place than earth ever was, that you’ll see them again some day and that it’s not goodbye, only see you later, that time heals everything…

And while your crumpled up on the floor, in fetal position, sobbing, in a yellow-green, foul, acrid, puddle of souring milk, wanting that one fish, the only one that wants nothing to do with you, wishing you did better than your best because you know you could have done better, hating the plan, hating this earth, yearning for later and still waiting…you realize…

Sometimes…sometimes spilt milk is just really, really sad.

It’s sad and it’s messy and it’s cold and it’s wet and it's everywhere and it’s everything and it’s life. It’s life and sometimes you have to cry about it. You have to cry really hard about it, sob, scream, punch the wall, about it…you have to do all of these things, but then you have to realize that no matter what you feel like, you will survive. 

You have to survive. You can fail and fail and fail, an infinite amount of times, but you’ll always come out breathing, maybe barely, but still breathing. 

Some failure in life is inevitable. You can’t live your life without failing at something, unless you live so carefully and quietly and pathetically that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you failed at life. Pardon my slang. It actually works here, though. (My middle name is pun. No it’s not, but it is double entendre.) 

Failure means you can come out stronger, smarter, better, harder and that you are a survivor. Life is so hard, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and you have to cry over the spilt milk sometimes, but you know what? Someone will wipe it up. And it’ll be ok. You’ll make mistakes, but things always work out. Things are always going to be ok.

Everything will be ok…in the end.

If it’s not ok, it’s not the end. 

You’ll make mistakes, and voila! Laissez faire, life will fix them in due course.

And for any other mistake you make, just say Voldemort killed your parents. Unbeatable excuse. 

Life. It’s all anyone has. It’s all we have. You can say it’s hard, but compared to what?

 And everyone has these "somethings" they deal with. These effing struggles, man. They hit you like a sack of bricks right in the stomach and you try to catch them and handle them and push the weight off, but sometimes it's too much and it happens to everyone. And it sucks for everyone. You just have to smile because what else can you do?

Because you know? You just have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you crazy.

Because when you lose your smile, you lose your footing.

Because if you take it too seriously, you'll start living in your struggles and you’ll isolate yourself because you’ll think yours are worse than anyone else’s. 

When you’re struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it’s just as hard as what you’re going through.

So what if you didn’t sleep last night or you had too much stress or your life sucks?

Tough shit, cowboy, no one slept last night, everyone had too much stress. 

There’s no escape.

There’s no excuse.

Suck it up and be nice. 

Some people might be annoying or obnoxious or rude or conceited or arrogant or stupid, but you suck, too. Everyone has flaws and the best way to live your life is to accept that fact and focus on the good things about people or you won’t survive this world. Trust. There’s a reason for the way they are and there are reasons for the way you are. Everyone has a story.

There’s not a single person in this world you couldn’t love if you knew their story.

I believe that. I believe it hard. 

I also believe in hope. I believe in a happy ending for everyone. 

I believe that what you want now, might not be what you need, but at the end of it all, what you have will be perfect for you in every way and your millisecond on this universe won’t be a millisecond at all, rather it will stretch on forever, like an ocean of time, it’ll happen all at once, and it’ll be too much, and not enough and everything you ever wanted and everything you never wanted and you’ll be so blissfully, incredibly, happy for the rest of eternity. 

That'll happen, when it happens, but for now,

I’m here. I'm ok. 

I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.

And everything’s changing.

I'm afraid of what that may mean.

Yes

Mia: Don't you hate that?
Vincent: What?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don't know. That's a good question.
Mia: That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.

The Mean Reds

Everyone always talks about this really big hawk they see in front of my dorm and I’ve never seen it. I’ve waited and  waited and waited, and this morning I saw it, and I immediately felt so sad. I have no idea why.

Then I thought, boy, isn’t that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

I just wanted to cry and I was wishing I was invisible. Outside, the wind was freezing and the hawk was circling, and I was infinitely sad, sad down to my bones. I was sad for  everyone else who was sad, and for all of the people who were too scared to follow their dreams, sad for the hawk, and sad for myself, for something I had lost. 

"Listen...you know those days when you get the mean reds?" --Holly.
"The mean reds? You mean like the blues?" --Fred (Paul).
"No... the blues are because you're getting fat or because it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?" --Holly.
"Sure." --Fred (Paul).
"When I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away." --Holly.