Thursday, March 23, 2017

Drink Water From Cups

Sitting in a peaceful Vietnamese vegan restaurant, named All Chay,
there is a massive plant spilling from a pretty printed pot, that hoists a chubby Buddha that makes me think about life.
It makes me feel calm having that plant in the center of the room, at the center of all things.
I see Kenz trying to figure out the precise wording to a complicated text.
I hear strangers murmur amongst themselves in a lively fashion.
And here I am.
Listening to the delicate clinking of silverware and smelling incense and glorious fresh food
and I'm wondering about life.
I'm wondering why I am here and not so many other places.
Yet, through the string of many thoughts, I feel content here, thankful and free.
But now something has changed.
Kenz has come back upset and tells me she needs to make a call.
I don't know what to tell her, but she's gone.
I stare at the room, at the lights and the smell that is visually around me.
She comes back and it's wrong. The phone is wrong, her face, the way my heart suddenly swells in anger.
I don't understand people.
The strangers no longer murmur, they shout. They scream and squeal and drool vituperative words from their pointed lips.
I'm angry.
I slosh our pho soups in a paper bowl and hastily we dash through the doors, myself struggling to keep up. She walks so fast and I can tell her hands are shaking.
Clumsily I fall behind and spill the murky broth on the car floor and desperately dash back into the restaurant to fix it.
I come back and she's talking and while she's talking I'm scrubbing and scrubbing pitifully trying to fix it, but with every lilt, every hesitation in her voice I stop. I scrub. I pretend not to be searching for the little voice inside the phone, but the scrubbing keeps stopping and I keep going.
I listen.
I scrub once I know I've listened too long and my heart swells again, a tumultuous rage of waves.
The soup still sits on the floor even after I've scrubbed it; there's no way to fix this.
There's no way I can.
She jingles her keys in the space of silence and I sit here typing away when I should and shouldn't be listening.
I should care.
I do care.
I care too much and I want to remember this moment because somehow, somewhere within me, I am told this is right and I will learn from this night.
Everything, every last drop and pile and niche of my life right now feels so strange and so exquisitely designed, pulling me somewhere else.
For some reason, I sense the poet Rumi, near me now, beckoning me with the wisdom of all the universe, yet here I am occupying my body and soul in a little red car, trying to be better.
Trying and as always failing.
As I am,
as all things are--
an effort.
-k.p.
8:26pm Tuesday
March 21, 2017