She sat between the flourescent swaths of mosquito netting in front of her Samsung radio listening to the chuckling African DJ on radio UNTAET spin zouk and reggae. Hungry and immobile. Those 1 am walks through the sterile aisles of her neighborhood supermarket looking for beer or milk would never be so normal.
Staying in does not mean watching a movie on TV here or calling home or old friends, or cooking a meal to save for the week. It means staring at the last unread novel on the bookshelf and wondering whether to read it or save it for later. It means eating peanut butter or more likely not eating. Maybe sweeping the dirt off of the white tiled floor. Or playing that same bossa-jazz CD over and over. Mostly it means just thinking, thinking the same thoughts that should make her cry more than they do.
As she does every time she “stays in,” skipping dinner or social interaction, she wonders why she lives in this place at this time in her life. She wonders why she does not call anybody to go dancing with. There is some aspect of self-imposed exile to her life in Timor, magnified on these pathetic nights in her cinderblock room.
When was she rejected? Was it once in particular, or over and over subtly so many times she lost any belief in trust and in love, the supposed motives for her “work” in Timor? And please, why does she refer to herself in the third person, cynical of her own strength or right to write about herself?
I am so untested, yet so tired. So forgiving to mankind, but not to men. I realize that I’m lucky to have been distracted during that desperate period of adolescence where everything burns with impatience. Where if I felt the same isolation, and hopelessness that I do now, I would be tempted to kill myself. But that’s too late, I’m apathetic, too dominated by simmering resignation to sadness.
And so three months become six, six become nine. And I set myself an artificial deadline to leave this place, one as artificial as its independence, a divine geopolitical fluke.
posted by JG at 2/09/2002 11:48:00 AM 
