Unspoken Excuses

Lhasa and provincial turmoil continues. People expect massive retaliation. A news blackout, ghettos, death and more exiles streaming away, remembering. Suffering.

Here, the woman studying, holding the paper on the metro was amazing and sad, at the same time.

How it was her eternal, endless source of concern, how her Eastern far village distant eyebrows thick and black like furrows in frozen fields narrowed when she opened the paper to read the numbers.

She knew how to count and read. She was about forty with two kids and an unemployed husband. She worked as a cleaner and the man observing her was hidden behind dark glasses, old silent whispers - he could tell her immediate destiny was there, spit out by a bank machine after a teller pressed a series of buttons on a keyboard labelled "distractions" and "debits."

She hoped, by folding the single sheet into thirds it would change the numbers, the stone cold reality but it didn't work that way. She looked at it. She folded it. She opened it and looked at it again. She kept repeating the folding and staring, folding and staring.

Once, when she unfolded it her eyes dropped into a swimming ocean where letters and numerals intermarried, forming new spoken and written languages filled with word-pictures and the longer she stared, the deeper her heart and mind realized how futile her effort had been was. Everything before and after her life was on that single piece of paper.