it seems like every day now, something happens that brings home to me, with a stomach-churning pang, how much i will miss nepal.
i'm the unofficial additional roomie in the house across the road, popping over unannounced to charge my computer from their inverter, a luxury. fortunately, none of the various people who have lived here over the last year and half seem to have a problem with showing up home to find me sitting in their living room. c and i are there now, scrolling through my phone to send a mass text to gauge the social temperature for the night. probably only about a third of the numbers in my phone are people who are still here. i don't know why i haven't erased the outdated ones, and say as much to c, who has been here even longer than i.
"yeah," she says, "my phone's like a graveyard for old friends as well."
except they don't feel dead or gone to me, no matter how bad i've been about keeping in touch.
when my parents were here, my dad came along to our local bar to hear a friend's band play. it's one of the first places i ever went out in nepal, but a year a half later, it's like an extension of my living room, my personal nepali cheers. it is seedy, smoky, and dark, with layer upon layer of markered graffiti on the yellow walls; i am convinced i will never find any bar that i like as much, no matter where i go. a huge group of friends has gamely shown up to have a beer and chat to my dad. i, almost greedily, watch their faces and let their conversations wash around me. i am warmed by quiet pleasure. what remarkable, smart, funny people i know, and have known, here. my memory fills in the images of all of the people who aren't here now, who left a month or six months or a year ago, sitting around with us, as if they left yesterday. i wish i could introduce my parents to them, as well, but they'll have to rely on stories, unpaired with faces.
we've had a great afternoon, despite the rain. we grilled for my roomie's birthday, and people came in and out all afternoon and evening to eat and drink and talk. i took one last set of pictures of the birthday boy and a close friend of his, who was leaving to go back to australia, and later marveled at the open love on their faces as i scrolled through the photos. by this point, it's gotten dark, and i'm having a side conversation with another friend. he's in a long-distance, cross-cultural relationship, and it is understandably hard. i tell him, although i'm single, i think i know how he feels. i have been lucky enough to have many, many people i love, from college, from childhood, from nepal. they're scattered all over the world now, but i still feel connected to them. it is an exhausting blessing, i say. in my (rare) quiet moments, when i think about them, the connections soothe me, but i also feel as if i'm pouring love through those connections, beginning with me in kathmandu, end emptying in america, australia, spain, england, india, south africa. you sometimes wonder if the supply is unending, or if you'll get to the bottom of the well and wonder just what's left of you.
later that night, people are clearing out. one of my close friends comes over and squeezes me, hard. his cologne is familiar and overwhelming.
"if you don't keep in touch with me, i'm going to come find you," he says. "and take care of yourself. i won't be around to"
i'm surprised. he is a notoriously unsentimental person. it's one of the reasons we get along. "whatever," i say gruffly, "i'm leaving in two months, not tomorrow."
"maybe," he says, "but here, two months is tomorrow."
"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.
i don't think it's possible to forget the mountain.
i'm the unofficial additional roomie in the house across the road, popping over unannounced to charge my computer from their inverter, a luxury. fortunately, none of the various people who have lived here over the last year and half seem to have a problem with showing up home to find me sitting in their living room. c and i are there now, scrolling through my phone to send a mass text to gauge the social temperature for the night. probably only about a third of the numbers in my phone are people who are still here. i don't know why i haven't erased the outdated ones, and say as much to c, who has been here even longer than i.
"yeah," she says, "my phone's like a graveyard for old friends as well."
except they don't feel dead or gone to me, no matter how bad i've been about keeping in touch.
~
when my parents were here, my dad came along to our local bar to hear a friend's band play. it's one of the first places i ever went out in nepal, but a year a half later, it's like an extension of my living room, my personal nepali cheers. it is seedy, smoky, and dark, with layer upon layer of markered graffiti on the yellow walls; i am convinced i will never find any bar that i like as much, no matter where i go. a huge group of friends has gamely shown up to have a beer and chat to my dad. i, almost greedily, watch their faces and let their conversations wash around me. i am warmed by quiet pleasure. what remarkable, smart, funny people i know, and have known, here. my memory fills in the images of all of the people who aren't here now, who left a month or six months or a year ago, sitting around with us, as if they left yesterday. i wish i could introduce my parents to them, as well, but they'll have to rely on stories, unpaired with faces.
~
we've had a great afternoon, despite the rain. we grilled for my roomie's birthday, and people came in and out all afternoon and evening to eat and drink and talk. i took one last set of pictures of the birthday boy and a close friend of his, who was leaving to go back to australia, and later marveled at the open love on their faces as i scrolled through the photos. by this point, it's gotten dark, and i'm having a side conversation with another friend. he's in a long-distance, cross-cultural relationship, and it is understandably hard. i tell him, although i'm single, i think i know how he feels. i have been lucky enough to have many, many people i love, from college, from childhood, from nepal. they're scattered all over the world now, but i still feel connected to them. it is an exhausting blessing, i say. in my (rare) quiet moments, when i think about them, the connections soothe me, but i also feel as if i'm pouring love through those connections, beginning with me in kathmandu, end emptying in america, australia, spain, england, india, south africa. you sometimes wonder if the supply is unending, or if you'll get to the bottom of the well and wonder just what's left of you.
later that night, people are clearing out. one of my close friends comes over and squeezes me, hard. his cologne is familiar and overwhelming.
"if you don't keep in touch with me, i'm going to come find you," he says. "and take care of yourself. i won't be around to"
i'm surprised. he is a notoriously unsentimental person. it's one of the reasons we get along. "whatever," i say gruffly, "i'm leaving in two months, not tomorrow."
"maybe," he says, "but here, two months is tomorrow."
~
it's not just the people, i find.
wrestling with my landlord's puppy; smelling the chicken roasting in the kebab shop on the corner; passing the rather startled looking woman's face painted on the sign for the "hair saloon" down the street; cheerfully arguing with cab drivers; making plans to get tea with the owner of the grocery store; the ease of buying veggies on my way home from work; clucking over the unseasonal rain, but seeing the mountain peaks emerge in the distance as the winter pollution is cleared from the air.
all of these things and a million more overwhelm me with a sudden, dazzling, bewildering feeling of love on a daily basis. maybe it's that this is the first place i've lived for long enough, outside of the pre-existing structures of family or university, to feel like a home i've made for myself. it is, as much as my hometown or my college years, such a large part of who i am, partly because i'm so young.
but this sense of love and homecoming i feel in kathmandu is inextricably tied to longing for the other homes i've had. while i sit and drink tea at the cafe, just in front of the ganesh statue, the sun hits me a certain way or some song comes on, and i'm suddenly yanked away. i'm tossing my deli-juice soaked apron off at the end of work and heading to the beach on the cape; i'm lying with friends in the courtyard of our residential college, our textbooks still closed as we stare up at the may blossoms against brown stone and iron of the gothic architecture.
the paradox of such simultaneous embededness and dislocation is dizzying.
~
before i left for nepal, i read a poem about kathmandu that a childhood friend's mother had given me. that's nice, i thought. the book stayed on my shelf when i moved here.
she recently ran into my parents, a small town inevitability, and, learning that my time here was drawing to a close, sent me the poem again via email. this time i read it twice. once to myself, and once to my then roommate, who was leaving the next day for the states. after, we sat together on the porch, quietly, listening to the dogs bark, and, i imagine, feeling the levels in the well fall, and rise, and fall again.
~
SESTINA: HERE IN KATMANDU
Donald Justice (1925-2004)
We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,
As formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.
It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absense of snow.
Clear days, from the valley,
One looks up at the mountain.
What else is there to do?
Prayer wheels, flowers!
Let the flowers
Fade, the prayer wheels run down.
What have they to do
With us who have stood atop the snow
Atop the mountain,
Flags seen from the valley?
It might be possible to live in the valley,
To bury oneself among flowers,
If one could forget the mountain,
How, never once looking down,
Stiff, blinded with snow,
One knew what to do.
Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,
Especially when to the valley
That wind which means snow
Elsewhere, but here means flowers,
Comes down,
As soon it must, from the mountain.
Donald Justice (1925-2004)
We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,
As formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.
It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absense of snow.
Clear days, from the valley,
One looks up at the mountain.
What else is there to do?
Prayer wheels, flowers!
Let the flowers
Fade, the prayer wheels run down.
What have they to do
With us who have stood atop the snow
Atop the mountain,
Flags seen from the valley?
It might be possible to live in the valley,
To bury oneself among flowers,
If one could forget the mountain,
How, never once looking down,
Stiff, blinded with snow,
One knew what to do.
Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,
Especially when to the valley
That wind which means snow
Elsewhere, but here means flowers,
Comes down,
As soon it must, from the mountain.
"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.
i don't think it's possible to forget the mountain.
A gorgeous piece, Mol.
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