Fourloves's travel blogs:
|
|
  | |  |
A moment
Entry 81 of 115 | show all | print this entry |
We sit upstairs in a small lobby, it is midnight. The foot-square cream tiles are cracked, and I look at them through a hobbit-like Chinese entryway - a huge circular hole in what may have once been a diving wall, edged with cheap mahogany-imitation panelling. We are three stangers in a foreign land, people from a more western world of tshirts and internet, of late night pub socializing. It is lonely here, listening to the Get Up kids on my laptop, watching the world go by in slow motion, trying to cry, but finding the same dust in my tearducts as have been there for eight months. We are all... I am two metres away from them, through the entryway. He sits to my left, unaware that I am keenly conscious of him, considering his presence. A handsome guy in his early twenties, he is happy and hopeful about life. He looks like a Curtis or a Luc, tall, skinny, wearing those rectangular, black, medium-framed glasses that everyone is reverting to these days, reading a new book. It looks factual, maybe history or the state of politics in his disillusioningly unreal country, and he feigns interest somehow, retaining his healthy, happy outward glow about him, as though he has something to go home to - a wife, girlfriend, family, something more meaningful that all of this. He has taken off his new running shoes - they are under the wicker chair, his white legs crossed, one ankle on top of his thigh, bare feet enjoying their freedom in the stuffy hostel air. She is Portuguese - sits hacking away on the clunky free-internet terminal, talking to potentially transient friends on MSN, that most uncreative of all internet utilities, used by people who know no better. She is to the right of the room, one meter directly in front of the happy-but-knowing boy. She types with one cigarette dangling nonchalantly between two fingers in her limp left hand. A trail of smoke floats up straight - laminar - with small whimsical-but-self-assured turns and curves from the tiny drafts in the room. The smoke snakes its way up to the roof, pouring itself onto and around the poorly wired fluorescent tube. The yellow light casts back on her bare shoulders, harshly and badly colouring her healthy tan - one of a girl here more to party than to learn anything about the country. Yet, she has an air about her, one of a tired girl, one who is almost a witty and wise woman, someone who has been tossed about by life - she perhaps has the knowing. Exit again backwards through the entryway, turn from the cliché oriental poster of bamboo shoots, back into the room where a tall white, lanky person types away on a black hunk of foldable plastic, consumed by life once again, an empty green bottle of piss-poor beer to the side, on the pearl-inlaid coffee-table. Life passes him by once again, and he finishes his short description of a surreal moment. It ends wistfully but uncomfortably, an icon of what is to come.
|
|
If you like this entry, search for other entries by fourloves, from China or try a new search. |
| |
Back to Entry - Back to Home
|
2 votes 
