Posts Tagged ‘Nepal Trip’
Around the World in Seven Years
Picture a zit-faced sixteen year-old landing on the famous stretch of the JFK airport: mouth agape, wide-eyed and tired from the cross-Atlantic voyage; laden with a carnival full of luggage, his thick hair bristling at the sting of the late Fall chill of the East Coast; barely managing to keep up with the whizzing blurs of airport signs, announcements, electronic message boards; heavy, dragging commuters and busy, irritable multi-taskers; lazy limos and impatient custom officers — all of them converging into the sort of noisome, bored and alive impersonality that only America can epitomize.
Now this once sixteen but still zit-face, a little wiser but more wayward Tibetan boy from Kathmandu will be completing one round trip around the world. His eyes are tired from arguing that they rest, joints aching with the fervour of indignant nerves, mind strangely removed from the actualities — inert and impassive as a team of researchers behind a wall of plexiglass observing a chimp fiddling with a rubik’s cube. No one is quite sure what the experiment is about, but they’re fairly certain that it is at least amusing, and someone else is paying for their time anyways.
The hour draws nearer, closing in with the blunt insistence of time — the mechanics of forward-motion progressing duly and which in this particular case will peculiarly revisit a once-life, a once-neighbourhood, and once-memories.
Drained with caffeine; numb with anticipation.
A round trip, an infinite samsara and a straight line meeting inexplicably inside the perpetually filled and emptied tank of memories and age. A story awaits on the other side — nervous and coy. And she insists on taking pictures.
