There are very few things I find more satisfying than post-night-out McDonald’s. Couldn’t be more content with myself as I saunter into the apartment, bacon cheeseburger in hand. 

Time for every unnecessary Thing in my head to get out…run along, Things. 

Because of the thick, pervasive humidity, and because I’m reading The God of Small Things, I’ve been thinking a lot about India, and about how lucky (blessed) I was that the strangers I met were for the most part incredibly gracious people. I want to remember a particular incident during the beginning of my travels, so I’m going to write it down here. During those two months, there was nothing that could have guaranteed my complete safety, and putting myself in certain situations I could have, at the very least, been cheated and at the very worst, been in danger. All of us who wound up in the village of Boothgarh shared similar stories about being helped by strangers. That’s not to say that we didn’t encounter people whose hearts were ill with sleaze and exploitation, because we most certainly did, it’s just that I for one would have broken down in Delhi if it wasn’t for one man.

I had hailed a cab outside of the Delhi airport, completely alone in another country for the first time in my life, brimming with paranoia. I had held onto a cell-phone, its battery life drained from the 18-hour flight, pretending to speak to someone on the other end, thinking to myself that if my driver knew someone in Canada knew exactly where I was headed, he wouldn’t be as tempted to kidnap me. I settled payment for my hotel room with the manager, who I was convinced had been trying to cheat me because I had heard another foreign couple talking about the price of their room to be less than what mine cost. The manager could sense that I didn’t trust him, and it left a bad taste in his mouth, but eventually I think he just figured me to be another Crazy Tourist. I couldn’t even face the idea of going anywhere outside of my room when I heard a knock on the door: it was the manager holding out a phone to me, trying to explain that my mother was on the other end, that she wanted to talk to me, and that I could take as much time as I needed to assure her (and myself) that I was okay. He tried to offer me food, water, anything to make me feel better, and I appreciated the gesture but I politely refused and instead shut the door and fell asleep curled up into a ball, crying to myself, wondering What I had Gotten Myself Into. 

The next day I took a quick walk to the train station. Delhi seemed impossibly full of people. There were homeless squatters covering every inch of ground in the train station and I felt myself getting dizzy with loss—loss of my sense of place, my sanity, my self-assurance, not to mention the fact that I was actually physically lost. There was no way of getting to Chandigarh by train as far as I could see, and a random boy who had asked me where I was trying to go had confirmed this to me. Desperation shot up through my stomach, nestling into tears that had welled up behind my eyes. For a split-second I actually lost all capability to resolve, and I thought that I was Trapped Forever and Bound to Die. He told me to follow him to Where I Needed to Go so I did, thinking I had no other option, and he put me in front of a man who told me that the only way I could get to Chandigarh was by plane and that it would cost three times as much as I had thought it would cost me to leave Delhi. I told him I had very little money and that I had to think about it.

I couldn’t reach my mother so I sat in this man’s office for an hour calling her every 5 minutes, armed only with anxiety, and gradually he came to see how absolutely terrified I was, and gradually he came to find lower and lower plane ticket prices. I could tell that he was trying to get me out for as little as possible without losing profit entirely. When I calmed down and realized the safety that came with being on a plane beat out however cheap any other method of getting to Chandigarh may have been, I paid for a flight. My flight, however, wasn’t for another 2 hours, so the man let me store my luggage in his office (which he locked as some sort of physical signal to me that my things would be okay, like a zookeeper placing meat in front of a lion and then backing away with his hands up). He explained that he needed to check on a small hotel that he ran (along with his travel agency), and that it would probably be best if I went with him. His travel agency was the size of a closet and at the time, I wasn’t about to stay there surrounded by 5 men who seemed to be hungry in various ways, so I hopped onto his bike, waited at the hotel for him to see to his business, attempted to decipher a Hindi newspaper, refused food offered to me because I looked Sad and Unnerved, and in no matter of time, I was taken back to his travel agency and put onto a rickshaw that was to take me to the airport. He assured me that I was going to be okay, let me know that if I was ever in Delhi his hotel was right around the corner, and paid for my ride to the airport. He genuinely seemed concerned for my safety, and whether or not he had gone above and beyond what was necessary, he became the first stranger I trusted in India. Whether or not I would have ended up on a plane in any case, this single experience of kindness pushed me to challenge my fears and to see India for what it was and not for what I was expecting it to be. 

Well that was just an all-around great day. 

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being, 
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.  

I love this apartment but if the window in my room is kept open (as it needs to be or I’d suffocate in the heat) I can hear a pin drop outside. It sounds as if I’ve suddenly moved my bed onto a crosswalk. Trucks sound like they’re swerving towards me. There is no silence and there is no stillness. Just as I lull myself into an almost soundless sleep some would-be innocent rolling wheels, or an animal rummaging through garbage echo into the limbo. Any morsel of quietness is so easily shattered and impossible to pocket. Sleep comes at a serendipitous meeting between fatigue and fading business. At least all of the sounds get me up in the morning!

What kind of name is Phillip Phillips? OH WELL, NEW CRUSH ON THIS CUTIE. 

This morning as I walked along the lake shore, 
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.  

No lust, no slam of the door—
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always standing on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap.