Finding Serenity in the Simulation

Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.

Ottessa Moshfegh

These days are longer, or perhaps the passing of time is masked with the illusion of productivity. Inherently different than that passing of time with which I have grown so accustomed in my mountain home.

And so, I am missing the familiarity, of what I am not so sure. I am missing the sounds of New York City streets. Or perhaps, I am just missing the gridded streets, the ninety-degree angles and sharp edges that had just begun to feel so soft. I am missing the way my tired body used to soften into the space between arm and abdomen. Or perhaps I am only missing the familiarity of a man who speaks my language, verbal and nonverbal. Or maybe I just miss high speed internet and making phone calls that do not drop. Today, I am not quite be sure.

I am feeling overexposed. Like to many people can see me, and I still haven’t figured out who “me” is here. Or perhaps the me here is so raw and exposed that, if they see me, it will be too much. Yesterday as Anna and I walked around in the pouring rain, no one was out. But they were all watching us, always watching us, from inside the shops, and I joked, “for once they’re yelling mvua – rain – instead of mzungu.” As if they are more startled by people in the rain than foreigners. The fall of water from the sky more noteworthy than two foreign women. And again, I still cannot seem to square this circle.

On days, or rather moments, because the very nature of this experience is the flux of moments passing, when I respond from a place of stress or annoyance or intensity, I must stop myself and remember. The smiles and greetings of school children, only yesterday, lifted my spirit. The sound of the call to prayer that is, in this moment, grating on me, once brought about the most serene awareness of just how far I was from where I came. The red earth road that, today looks dirty, disheveled and unkempt, once reminded me of the poems I wrote about this land before I arrived here.

Yesterday I walked down this red road and it began to rain, and for a moment I felt quick to annoyance and frustration. Couldn’t I just have a walk without children and bad weather and dirty ground, and then I remembered the words I wrote all those months ago, like some prophecy of this moment right in front of me:

I wonder sometimes where I will be when time has spread us like seeds, and I am a million miles away and it will rain. I will be walking down some red earthen road, and perhaps there is a baobab tree in the distance, and I feel a rain drop on the crown of my head and I think of you. I think of how the clouds opened with rain each time we were together. (Written in November 2018)

Spend enough time in Same, or maybe any place for that matter, and it begins to feel like a simulation. There’s a consistency to the place that I have come to rely on. Perhaps similar to the sharp edges of New York City streets. The sounds of chickens in the morning, and crows in the evening, the way these bugs only come out when it rains, and the smell of burning leaves and trash. The slight incline of the hill that always feels steeper after the daily dinner of rice and beans. The man at that hardware store who says his name is Justin Timberland. The women that greet us every morning for eggs and chapati. The way the light always looks the same in the garden at about six o’clock in the evening as the sun begins to fall below the horizon in the West. The young boy, Goudi, fetching supplies for chipsi mayai at the stendi, and the man who sits on the same corner selling apples every night. It is a consistency that brings about serenity in an otherwise overstimulating, overexposing experience. And I think about The Truman Show, imagine reaching the end of this little world, reaching the glass at the end of the globe containing this little town, or perhaps this little world. But the truth is, there is no beginning or end, there is no east and west. No middle. I am coming to believe we highly overcomplicate the inherent simplicity of life. We choose how we react how we feel, what we invest ourselves and our time in. We choose how to be in this world. And so, I choose to laugh at the annoyance of school children, at the dirt that will never wash off my feet, the incessant yelling of mzungu, the raw edges and vulnerable moments that bring life to this strange simulation that is my life.