Where am I going?
It’s not that I’m lost, but I need to visit the question.
Between the cocoa techno party and bushwhacking up the mountains, I must have made that decision. In the end, it’s always a decision that is the answer.
I’m going to walk with this person from a European world down an endless road, we’re going to feel a connection, but we’ll both notice an impasse. I’ll wait for the right moment, and it’ll never come. I’ll notice that this is the only moment, and wake up in a mood again. All my answers are decisions.
Impossible to predict the future, or the weather in a mountain town. But I do know that it will rain. And I know that I want to stay here for the moment, around Pisac. I asked and was given what I needed, a dozen new souls that lead me to a hundred more. It means nothing without trust, so I work to have faith in that these relations I am forming are exactly as they are meant to be.
My landlady is a pleasant person, I’m thankful for that. Fast internet, kitchen to myself, I’ll live in this apartment for at least a month. It feels like fun, like work in the good sense of the word, because I feel like I’m being productive. But I shouldn’t fool myself, I need to do work to be useful. I was an upstanding citizen in Thailand due to the fact that I provided something to people. What am I offering to those around me now?
The man from Oz gave me all the ingredients to start up my own kefir, then we had a crash course on how to grow it. He made milk from beans the other day, the man’s a wizard. He’s likely just saved me from giardiasis as well. He’s moving on soon, and our friend from Brazil is on his way forward as well, to Arequipa and the majesty of Misti. I am becoming used to meeting people, more equipped for it, but when they leave, there is always a melancholic demon that stands next to me, or over my shoes, holding me in place as it smokes a phantom cigarette, gazing over a Himalayan range that is also the sadness of a plastic bedroom somewhere in a blistered Piedmont suburbia. Soon, perhaps in this approaching third encounter with Wachuma, I will finally fashion a seat for my heartbroken demon at the High Table.
I am not with the medicine, or perhaps I am, in that she is with me. There is a vibration in my arm, where the tattoo settles into my soul, that permanent commitment, I vowed to never forget the faces that God revealed to me. Wachuma is inside that contemplative part of me, perched somewhere in the forehead, and it speaks even now: “This attendant will not be of the order of Custodians. You are…” My heart burns, I am pausing, my throat wells up. “You are going to gain a protector.”
A sword.
Avatar of the warrior. Decisive, active, the fire in your heart is…
A constant, like the one who stands before Katenjunga with splitting lips and a heart that longs to be wanted. A new soul within the old, stoking the fire with deadwood.