traveling story

hi

in october, when the days in new york were still gold and long, going back to india seemed like the bravest thing i could do.

i found air india quite nice despite taking the shittiest flights possible. two layovers, nearly thirty hours of transit. i wanted to see if i could do it. seeing if i could do it would make me denser and more human, i thought. the flights were half full, of people who were going home. what is the end of a war besides going home? that is a quote from a book i haven’t read and cannot name. when turbulence hit over the ocean nobody cried out. everyone stayed hushed and seated. the quieter we got, the more the plane seemed to shake in the sky. i thought about praying at one point, but i didn’t know what i would ask for. i tend to never ask for anything, since i figure i will get what is coming.

i had picked the north of india because I had wanted those hills and that clean cold air. i had picked a hotel that looked like a place for evil women to hide out and detox after they make a lot of dirty money in the western cities. something like this. by the time i arrived i felt small and dirty and frightened. wished that someone could drag my bag down the unfinished road. cows standing still, illuminated by the street lights. big cow eyes watching me drag my bag.

inside the hotel, a stammer over language differences, a room change, a key difficulty, and then a deep and jilted sleep.

he glided past me in the morning. i was lounging in a chair shaped like an egg, shades on listening to lana. breakfast too good, too rich and heavy. dirty still as a result of not understanding the fancy shower. too many shops and alley ways and too many options outside, too many river rides and hikes and arts and crafts and yoga workshops and massages. something about this gliding of his felt personal. something so steady in it, so still and assured, like a ship breaking through ice. it was as though everyone in the breakfast patio looked towards him and took courage. something about his clothes too, the way they flowed. his tattoo above his eyebrow said “bullshit.” i knew it was only a matter of time.

he asked if i wanted tea.

“what?” i said, taking my headphones out, although i had fully heard him. i often need more time to understand, and buy it with my confusion.

“do you want tea?” he said.

“what does your tattoo mean?” i asked over the tea. “it means nothing.” he said, smiling. his teeth were broken. “everything is bullshit.”

“do you want to go to yoga with me?” i asked. “it starts in twenty minutes.”

we lurched there on his bike. he drove like crazy. i held onto the backseat. i refused to touch him.

“you drive like crazy.” i said into the dust.

“what?” he said, fully turning around. i turned his bullshit face back to the road.

the teacher waited for others to come but they didn’t. then he twisted us into unfathomable shapes.

something about the prayer that the body naturally holds. when you hit the ancient tried and true shape and it feels like a poem.

“i’m leaving for nepal tomorrow,” i told him after yoga, at dinner. “i’m meeting my cult group there.”

“how are you going?” he asked.

“driver,” i said.

“my visa is almost up. i’ll come with you.” he said. “i’ll keep you safe.”

i might need you at the border, i thought. i might need you in general, to garnish my misery. and yes being alone with a driver is no bueno for me. or at least that was the world i had chosen. because i am always in my dream logic, it seems. veering away from normalcy, nodding into the most bifurcated and extreme roles. sleeping into danger. when did everything get so serious?

“i want you to try this app,” i said, sliding my phone towards him. i want to know if we are worth each other’s time. these busy precious lives. your time and mine. coming, going. future glimmering on the horizon if we even make it there. octopi live for just three years, you know. they explode their eggs and then they die.

maybe that is the best way to meet though. when the point at which our paths cross is nowhere.

“what is this?” he said, typing in his name and birthday. this app is called mirror.

“it’s something girls like,” i told him. something girls like, he repeated.

i considered the data. born in the tiger year, scorpio sun with a heavy moon. libra rising chameleon. a six path like mine. an eleven life like mine. so he must be lost here. here without reason, swallowed by the nicety of it all. nothing to do with his special time but kill it somewhere pretty. he might have money that he doesn’t understand. obviously we were never different. i let this shape around our reality, and felt our time tilt into a pinhole.

the joke was that we had no destination. that night we ran barefoot around our respective rooms. i went through his things. he threw t-shirts at me.

“take them.” he said. “i don’t want them. i don’t care.”

he told me he was sick in the head. mine too, my eleven head said. he had been a refugee, and then he had started a company. i held his head and took the sick out of it.

it was too exact to feel sexual. too precise for us to fuss. it has taken me a while to understand the ways that i can be close to a man. how i can trust him and believe in him and that doesn’t mean that we are promised.

two eleven six sick cancer moons who decided on each other and crossed the border. they barely spoke the same language. sixes indulging in six rare hours. tatted on his feet, too.

in border patrol i told him that others were waiting for me. academic others, from my group, who have looked after me since the end of my childhood. who would carry my bags and whisk me into their structure.

“where will you go?” i asked him.

“don’t worry about me. i’m an adult.” he said.

“don’t worry about me baby. you owe nothing.”

that was strange. because usually they tell me how much i owe them. how they do everything for me. and how helpless and weak i am without them. how i was born with a debt to pay.

so i was chewing on that, him saying that, and then he was gone. just like that, and he was gone. i want to say that he vanished. i looked out for him in the lobby, in the parking lot, ushered into my group activities.

he was gone.

i had to remind myself that i had wanted it like that.

• completely fiction & based on the flow of “ellis island and other stories” by mark helprin