It was nine at night and I was sitting cross-legged on the tile floor drawing my stuffed frog and my stuffed monkey hanging magnetically on the metal doorknob and I was hungry, but more than that, I was just acutely missing having access to giant grocery stores and restaurants from all over the world. I was missing the diversity of Boulder (I know, I know: !!!!!!, but it's true, despite the fact that Boulder is the least diverse place ever) and Nick came padding up the stairs holding a bowl full of stir-fried spiced brown rice, broccoli, carrots, and tempeh with a little side scoop of cheesy mashed potatoes. We were fighting, so he handed it to me silently and retreated. I took a forkful of something without even looking - everything's the same, so why differentiate? - and as the mashed potatoes hit my tongue, the flavor flooded, hit, and spread with such intensity that I started bawling my eyes out.
Sometimes when I'm hit with something that strong I simply freeze and my surroundings completely fade. I was sitting on a hard floor in Jayapura, halfway around the world from everything I'm used to and up until now have taken for granted, with storm clouds surrounding me, holding a brown pencil and a green pencil and a bowl of mashed potatoes, and crying, but my brain was reeling so intensely that I felt like I was in a black hole.
My stomach grumbled a long, low note of protest, shell-shocked from the complete unfamiliarity, but it was overruled immediately and almost on autopilot I kept dipping in my fork until my senses were drenched (as was my lap, from my tears) and my plate was empty, and if anyone had been looking... but nobody had been.
In my black hole I thought back to that afternoon, when I, finally, caved to pressure and bought a bar of Swiss dark chocolate with cashews. I unwrapped it right there in the street, the inner wrapping gold, like a Golden Ticket (Willy Wonka) and took a bite, and my mind became, suddenly, confused halves of one whole. My eyes were sending my mind images of a torn street with holes and open sewers and a crowd of brightly colored umbrellas protecting the lighter-skinned women from the sun (light skin is unbelievably prized here, to a ridiculous degree - it's nearly impossible to find a simple bar of soap that isn't called 'White Beauty' or doesn't have the byline '... with whitening papaya extracts!) and machines tearing chunks out of towering jungled cliffs and markets with falling down roofs and everyone dripping, dripping, dripping with sweat - and my mouth was sending images of heaven. I didn't cry - it, for some reason, was nowhere near as intense as cheesy mashed potatoes - but it was still a surreal experience.
I'm sorry, I'm losing my train of writing. I had everything written out in different (better) form in my notebook at home, and then I left my notebook at home. It's difficult to reproduce a feeling like that in words at any time, but especially at a time when it's not even close. I ate oatmeal for breakfast. I'm eating rice and vegetables for lunch. I weigh much less than I should. I will probably weigh still less in the future. Blah, blah, blah. But we have a motorcycle now, and if we can stop fighting long enough to agree on a place to go, we can go anywhere we want. And if we can go anywhere we want, that means I can sit on Black Sands beach again, letting the ocean kick my ass and forgetting everything else.
