January 6, 2012. It's my cafe now, my flat, my patients. Tiny specks of water filled the windshield this morning, the air is cold and heavy, and my pants are thin and jade, my socks thick and wool. I eat pomegranates brought to me in plastic bags, sitting in a quiet apartment, curled on a couch staring at a dark television set. The cracks obscured by threads of incense twirling, draping the air in detailed tendrils, the smell filling empty space. I drink soup, listen to wordless electronic music, trancing and beating the time past.
I miss home less. Maybe I forget more, having found my sanctuaries elsewhere. American pop music plays on the speakers here, in the chain coffee shop. I recognize none. The music sounds corny and cheery and fabricated from some hollow place.
I try to imagine college, with designer bracelets and designer clothes and groomed people and essays and textbooks, and hot dorms and cold dorms and sororities and rush and living in America.
Where will I fall, when the cliche pieces topple from the Himalayas into the little town of Charlottesville, from the dirty traffic whizzing three inches from my elbow. From the wide and wise sky of Africa, from the tomb standing for thousands of years watching the birth of an overpopulated nation building tiny fires at her base, into buildings of brick and columns, into art studios with track lighting, into manicured lawns.
Where will I land?
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