December 21st, 2023
Smelling of salt, I sauntered back to the cabin. The lane coiled around the trees and up the steep face of the hill like an asphalt viper.
In each step I felt the inner strap of my Birkenstock chafe against my left foot. I knew that I could not walk this far.
But, he had pleaded me, with doleful eyes. I could not help myself. I cherished his insistence.
In six months, I had met more people than I had in the entire thirty one years of my life. You could blame the reticent and insular village I grew up in. The twice weekly public transport service that the government had introduced for the pensioners had not encouraged anyone to visit the blinding lights of the city.
There were new encounters, of course, but they were always friends of friends. Or friends of friends of friends. You had to move carefully in such environments. And I did not trust myself enough to navigate that sinewed mass of considerations with the requisite deftness.
Sometimes, I felt like the only thing I could express was “yes” or “no”. The gravity of speech came down to deciding which. And in each instance that I was confronted with a grey rainbow of maybes, I was too ignorant to the details to ever understand the wry smiles, careful looks, and subtle turns of the body that so obviously painted that rainbow for the other listeners.
My heart beat heavily. My knees groaned.
The bottle of water that he had placed in my hand, he did not let go of. I tried to wrestle it from him. I thought at first it was some aberrance of coordination. But he looked at me cheekily, and I pulled harder. I laughed, and placed two hands on it. His bicep flexed, as he held it with one hand. His feet were planted still as I twisted and turned around the bottle, trying to unlock it from his grasp.
We would chase each other across the beach. He would steal my things. He slapped me, for no good reason. Once, I accidentally punched him too hard. He moaned as if I had knocked him unconscious. Now my nickname, when I was too sure of myself, was “domestic abuser”. He laughed at my guilty looks. And then hugged me.
It seemed like four minutes, but we had had enough conversations to sculpt out every nook, cranny, and crevice of our lives for each other. Or at least, that is what my Bacardi-soaked brain had thought. By Tuesday, we would be complete strangers to each other. The next person I was with would wipe away that memory. He would be thousands of miles away.
I don’t know why he wanted to sleep there. He would get bitten to death, by more than mosquitos. Some local would find him and steal his things. “I don’t care”, he said. “What use are forty guilders anyway.”
I knew, from the first night, that I could not sleep next to him. It made me hallucinate about the other worlds I had been. The other libraries of memory, feeling, and experience I had leafed through the volumes of. The universe I wanted to participate in was the one that overlapped meagrely with the others. I wanted a headache that would last eight to twelve hours.
I lay later in my bed, sweating. No air con, no lights after six, no WiFi after eight. No food or shops, or drinking water. When the sun set, it carried with it beneath the horizon all the amenities which I had binged on for three decades.
I had stolen a cigarette from him. It was too strong, and I coughed. He was luring me into his bad habits. My mouth was dry.
I washed the salt from the crevices our swim together had left it in. And I hung up my clothes, in the alley behind, hearing the cicadas no longer.