Thoughts at 6.17 PM
It’s always the Goddamn same.
The same smell. The same faces. The same downcast eyes.
The smell is what always gets me. The thick, heady butter being churlish smell. It curls around the air, heady, and there’s a brief recollection of the same smell in a small slum in Katmandu. Out on rooftops, wafting from dangerous terrain below, where children with matted blonde hair run around naked screaming “Bon, bon!”, their genitals happily flailing with the wind.
The custodians, the same.
The tanned, leather hide skin. The sprinkling of curly hair on the forearms, not full and thick, that which reminds me of home, but sparse patches of hair that look pasted on. I hate that. The same cheap, semi-precious stones adoring thick, thick fingers. Flesh escaping the grasp of the ring’s diameter, too much flesh. Always such a contrast to what you see later.
(I am always hard pressed to imagine these fingers stroking a woman’s thigh, going in pursuit of any ecstasy. Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be imagining any of this).
The paunches, stretching the surface of the uniforms. Pants caught between thighs too thick to walk. The sweat, the trickle. Mauve stained lips, years of smoking those Lucky Strikes, and a gravel tinged voice, phlegm caught at the back of the throat. Coffee.
And then he talks about his work, the pains, the driving in the rain on swollen country roads, gaping in the middle. Earth rushing into water, looking as milky as tea, and he says but one thing, “Ranjau sepanjang jalan, Michelle.”
And I think, maybe we aren’t all so different.
