I've been thinking about whitening soap. Louise’s boyfriend gesturing at her face with its undissolved sunscreen, saying ‘Bagus, bagus.’ The shoe salesman trying to stroke the tiny hairs on my arm: ‘Bagus.’ Rambutan – deep red hair-fruit – the seller choosing the two most withered stalks and assuring me: ‘Bagus – limabelas ribu.’ Here, any arm hair on a woman shows that she satisfies her lovers. People want to touch it. People think I am exotic and wild. People think I am unworthy of respect. People think things that I am unable to put into words because my words are wasted and racing, trapped inside my head, pounding to come out. Pounding to come out, but coming out changed; coming out as the definition of a relative clause and how to express ability. My mind is rotting.

And my language center is beginning to transform; Spanish and Indonesian are starting to melt together. Tidak ada gente que bisa habla español, pues, puedo decirles que saya bicara eso. When Indonesians march up to me now and I am trying to relax and they start asking me the usual list of questions – where do you come from? where do you live? can I come to your house? do you want an Indonesian boyfriend? – I pretend I speak Spanish, and do, rapidly. They have never heard Spanish – when would they have? – and they don’t know how to follow up. Can bules be from Spanish-speaking countries? They don’t think so, but they don’t want to venture a possibly incorrect declaration.

This is all nothing, though, without someone to break it down with. Where have all my articulate friends gone? That’s right, I left them all behind, choosing instead to jet off halfway around the world seeking… something… and I took – who could I have taken?! and I took someone who would be just as contented with his mouth and his brain sewn shut, gardening among the cassava. This is not an insult. Believe me, it isn’t. But I… here is an excerpt:

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I said this: “Make sure you have a lot of fun with your pickaxes for me. I’ll be dreaming about sushi.”

I said this last night, before I knew what I would dream about, but I did dream about sushi: mostly spider rolls, fresh toro, and seaweed salad. I held onto these things, especially, in my mind, because he wants to be a farmer, and farmers grow potatoes and vegetables. You can’t make sushi with potatoes and vegetables. Not even if you’re a Japanese farmer, which he… it’s fuzzy and uncertain, what type of farmer he wants to be, but genetics predispose him towards not being a Japanese one.

“Tell him,” he said last night, indicating the Papuan farmer in our driveway, “that I want to be a farmer. Tell him that being a farmer is my dream. Tell him…”

She was already translating, eliciting the vague, yet impatient smile the man wears when he already understands something in English, but is still working it out, or working out a reply. “Yes, yes,” he nodded, but what else could he say? He comes from a place where, if you are not a farmer, you do not eat. Dreaming about being a farmer, to him, is like dreaming about knowing how to fart.

“We’ll tear up the driveway with pickaxes tomorrow, expose the soil,” he says, eliciting... you know what it elicited. You read it already.

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What could this be like alone? I spend my mornings imagining. And reality keeps happening:
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“Cassava. Fields of it! Cashew trees! Red dust! I wonder if it is paint?”
He spits on a crumbling rust-colored rock in his hand. “Hold still,” he says. “Roll up your sleeve.” Spits and smears. Scribbling in ochre on my upper arm. I turn brown; finally, two square inches of my skin are sufficiently Indonesian.
“Maybe if you do my whole body, I’ll be able to walk the streets in peace,” I suggest, half-joking; mostly joking, really. “Let’s draw designs on each other.”
“I’m getting tired, actually,” he says.
“Do you want to take some home?”
“Not really.”
“………..”
“………..”
“Would you make Zen paintings with it?”
“It’s too colorful. But maybe… yeah, maybe.”
Maybe.

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Like I said, reality keeps happening, and I’m too far behind. For the first time in my life I don’t know what I think about how I feel, and I especially don’t know how I feel about my change in thinking.