The long journey is over, I am safe and sound in Laos, and things are very different than I planned but I didn’t make many plans to begin with so I guess it doesn’t matter.
I’m sitting in my wooden house, listening to the rain pebble-pound on my tin roof, knowing that same rain is sliding off the eaves and dumping all over my open-air downstairs living area, where it will arrange itself in a long, irregular rectangle along my kitchen wall. I know that tomorrow I will go downstairs and use my broom to sweep the water out into a thinner layer, one more conducive to drying and less conducive to breeding mosquitoes.
I don’t want dengue. The mosquito net draped over my bed and curling white around my pillows says the same thing- I don’t want dengue.
There is a kitten in my lap that I didn’t plan on having, but things like petulant meows radiating from rain soaked bushes in the middle of tropical thunderstorms happen here, so now there is a kitten in my lap and that is that.
The neighborhood dogs are barking all around as they do every day when I walk to work and every night when I go to bed. This follows me as I drift off to sleep until the roosters take over in the morning, crowing in stereo. The intensity of sound is a function of the fact that my walls are basically particle board nestled together in a way that isn’t particularly concerned with being airtight; I can glance up and see a long ribbon of night between the wall and the pillar in the corner doing its part to hold up my house.
In the corner a web waves in the breeze from the air conditioner, and a spider slides down on a long ta-da! of a single thread to, I imagine, get a better view of what he made. At least one of us feels good about ourselves right now.
post-break up, literally jealous of a spider, wtf
A gecko of a shocking size I have only seen in Laos studs that same wall, saying gecko over and over again. Its flat, stony looking body is raised in a topographic stamp against the badly painted white, casting craggy shadows. I think of the gecko, the spider, and the mosquitoes dangling in the air around me and remind myself to make food chains for my science class. Oh, yes, I am teaching science again this year, which makes two schools back to back in which I have taught a random science class in addition to English. Bill Nye, onward!
Inside my thicker inner walls, but mostly in the attic above my head, creatures of indeterminate nature and number romp and roll and live out a rowdy, nocturnal existence. I haven’t seen them yet, and I’m still undecided as to whether that is comforting or disconcerting. Right now, I can shrug it off as rats, but in the back of my brain, in the middle of the night when I hear them whipping through the walls and scritching with undefined claws, I conjure up random absurd and terrifying things that could be much worse.
The kitten in my lap was justified as a preventative measure against whatever is up there in the attic, but she greets the noises by looking up at me, with a shiny wide baby eyed stare, for assurance that everything is okay.
I don’t think I can count on her.
I can’t really say everything is okay, but I can say usually things are fine in the end, so we’ll say everything is probably on its way to fine.
And now, Laos. And now, just me.
Originally published September 30th, 2013 on Blogger, a week after Bobby left. We had moved to Laos a month prior from Albania. Seven years on, I feel compelled to say he is one of my best friends now, and for that I am grateful. But clearly, a week after the breakup, in a new country, I wasn’t feeling so great or grateful about anything.
