like dew to the pasture

Now I see, I mean really see, why people are deathly afraid of being alone. To be alone is to spend time with yourself, to live with this self, to get to know this self.

Solitude flings open that proverbial Johari’s window no one else could access. It could be a terrifying thing uncovering what’s inside that forbidden, foreboding window. You become intimately acquianted with the delicate neurotic workings of your mind. You hear its cogs turning; you are confronted with the rattling discovery — they’re not as well-oiled as you’ve always thought or believed (Aha!)

The walls here are thin,wafer-thin. I can hear the obese girl (but not morbidly so) as she attempts to turn, ever so slowly, so as not to make the bed creak. In room 234 someone is reciting the Vagina Monologues to herself in hushed tones (so no one hears, or so she hoped). Across the hall there’s an Indian nurse lighting her incense (I hear the matchsticks flick), and I am quite incensed (the reek seeps thru my door). Further down the other end of this eerie old floor, a woman is weeping. I wonder about her secret sorrows..then remember she’s a mental health patient from neighbor Hutt Hospital.  What demons tormented her? Or was it only this sullen, sinister hostel with its cavernous corridors, its compact compartmented rooms (isolated prison cells), its wafer-thin walls, that drove her to the brink?

Such muted sounds carrying over, this overheard tin lamp and its sallow yellow light, my normalizing clutter, my own breathing. Would my sanity be as friable? I am hyperaware of my equilibrium, how precarious it could be. I am near convinced this gray structure, this 5-storey 50 year-old shell might’ve been designed specifically to unhinge the psyche, down to the last rickety beam. How many others stopped short (or didn’t) of hurling themselves out (there’s always the square exit, seductive,convenient) to escape this asphyxiating space, to flee from the unhinging?

Already the hairs on my forearm are turning priapic; already I could feel the core of me fragmenting, in this room where the air is stale with my presence. If I don’t get out, get sunlight, I will drown in this room, choked by this self.

So tomorrow then. Tomorrow I will kick my legs hard and surface.    I will pounce on some fellow loner, engage in some inane human interaction.

We will talk about the weather. 

Friends: 0

Prospective Crumpet: Zilch

Cash-Flow: Nil

Sense of Direction: Kaput

Foot bunion:  3

Western Union: 1 (where the hell is it?!)

It is near evening and I walk this foreign streetpath with nary a friend, without a cent to my name. The cold bites. I am not used to this nippy air, not used to walking along deserted streets with immaculately manicured lawns lined by beguiling begonias. All I hear is the steady click-clocking of boots (mine, Guangdong-made).   I exhale and watch my breath as the 7degrees C forms it into little streams of foggy white. I pretend I’m a chugging Hogwarts train toot-tooting along in a leisurely pace headed to, uhm, no place in particular. One has to entertain oneself to survive a day like this.

I know no one here and no one here knows me. It could be that I don’t exist! It’s a curious sensation, the feeling of no-oneness. So this is how it’s like to be a ghost. No wonder those creepies get a kick out of haunting the living — to be a ghost is remarkably unsettling.  To float like gossamer through Windy Willy is unsettling.

It would be dark soon. If this Casper don’t find her bearings quick she could end up pretty literally dead. The word bereft tails me, trying to insinuate itself. I refuse to have it tagging along, I stomp it down with all the violence my synthetic sole could muster. I think of all the familiar faces back home. 4,672 miles north-west from here are people who knew me and know I am alive. This moment they are thinking of me, missing me, praying for me, wishing me to be safe and happy. 4,672 miles notwithstanding, I feel the wave of their collective karmic energies lift and sustain me.

I draw strength from this love.

I am bone and flesh and indomitable spirit and I exist.

I will  master this strange land.

(but first, gotta find bloody Pilmuir Street)