Greed is Good - Ice Girl

Chapter 9.

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and an insatiable appetite for diverse languages, customs and cultures lived in jungles and forests. Others preferred living in remote mountains. 

  Jingle, jangle, jungle. Using natural materials they created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and tools like looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played in extended families learning life lessons. 

  One day a boat filled with white men sailed down the river of darkness to a village deep in the jungle. They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people didn't understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared the people. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

  Every day more white people came down the river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their historical evolution on other continents.

  Their mantra was, cheap people, cheap labor, cheap raw material, cheap goods, cheap markets and much Profit.

  We are civilized and you are savages, said the white men. We have religion. It is called Greed & Wealth. We are on a mission from the great chief. We control fire. We control time. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want. The village gave them hospitality and shelter and friendship. The white men were greedy. They took control of the village, the people and the jungle. 

  Every day the white men marched slaves deep into the jungle singing, we control nature. We shall overcome. They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided and conquered, one against the other. History had taught them well. They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every useful raw material. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

Lao rice cakes.

  One night a village shaman said, to survive we walk to a new jungle.

  We are here to go.

  Eighty Chinese university students applauded. They cried, Tell us another.

  Ok, I said. Maybe you will see a connection. In Turkey divorce is seen as a failure. It’s a schizophrenic country where women know their role and stay in it. A place where mothers control and manipulate their daughter’s behavior, attitudes and imaginary freedom with a heavy dictatorial hand called love. Chains of love are heavier than the gravity of thinking.

  One Turkish woman I knew was different. She confided in me in Ankara. I listened. After seven months of marriage she’d decided to leave her husband and filed divorce papers.

  “I feel so much better,” she said. She had a lot to say. She’d believed her husband in the beginning.

  “He lied to me. He courted me with sweet words and I thought, or believed I thought or thought I believed he had an open mind but I was disappointed because he wasn’t honest...so after some time measured in weeks then months I saw his, how do you say, irresponsibility, how he wouldn't contribute his heart to me, to our relationship and then, when I tried to talk to him he was closed to me, he shut down emotionally and I was working and trying to keep the flat up and work on our relationship but I saw it was difficult, then really, really impossible to live with everything in my brain and heart. Now, when he saw my action to end the marriage he was filled with remorse and regret and apologies. But it’s too late. I told him to move out. He returned to his mama. He tries to bother me every day in his childlike whining way but it’s over. I can handle it. I am strong and know what I want in my life. My family is very supportive of my decision.”

  “In China it’s always about saving face,” I said. “Appearances. In Anatolia, it’s about your self-respect, growth and personal dignity. Some grow, some die day by day.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I am not living the lie anymore.”

  “Now your heart is calm. You’re taking responsible for your life. I am happy for you.”

  “It’s tough,” she said, “living here where women are beautiful and sad with synchronicity. They’ve fashioned these well-defined skin-tight PERSONA masks out of loss, hopelessness, confusion, and serious misguided misunderstood maligned relationship blues using tears wrapped in self-pity, shame, guilt and silence. Millions of us wait for an arranged marriage at a fake bus stop to deter male Alzheimer patients from wandering off.

  “Here,” ordered the Byzantium Great Father Authority Figure disguised as a religious or political fundamentalist zealot, “accept this man, this stranger into your heart of hearts and give us many poor deprived children. He bought you. Produce more.”

  A gravedigger blessed their union. Dearly beloved, an unpleasant global fact is unregulated population, no medicine or education and lack of job opportunities.

 That could never happen here, said a female Chinese student. I was born to pay for my parent’s sins.

  Yeah, yeah, said another. My mother was appointed to have me. Eighty student robots applauded.

  Yes, and one more thing ladies, said Leo. After graduating, while living at home and trying to find a job along with six million recent college graduates, if you consider marriage you can forget the A men; the ones with cash, car, career, credit cards and condo. They are taken. You’ll have to settle for B or C quality.

  A feminine sigh ran through the room and jumped out a 10^th floor window. Goodbye cruel world.

  I’ll kill myself first, said one girl. It’s an honorable alternative to facing family shame and humiliation.

*

In the Under Story, fire from burning bamboo, coconut leaves and plastic garbage in world jungles circled its veins through a heart’s four clamoring chambers. Smoky love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rising to the Canopy emerging through the Emergent. Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws took wing.

*

  Monsoons arrived. Ice Girl played her unpublished symphony for children under 100.

  Shaman: Monsoon’s intention is to clean air, turn dusty red rutted ragged roads into quagmires and provide essential moisture to roots below the surface of appearances.

What you don’t see is fascinating.

Unpleasant facts on life’s road of eternal suffering are more plentiful than 14.7 million forced abortions in China, universal health care, education or clean drinking water.

Twelve million stateless humans live on Earth.

17,000 children die of starvation every day.

Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Land Mines - Ice Girl

  “Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

  She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

  The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

  It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

  It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines.

Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

  It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

 Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a Banlung shaman.

  Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Ice Girl in Banlung

  It’s fucking hysterical.

  Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodian animist jungle languages.

  Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.

 How long have you been here, said Rita a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.

  All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.

  Ok, she said cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation and form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity and evolution of humans in this total phenomena? My name is Rita.

  Good to meet you. I’m Leo the Lionhearted. Yes, if you slow down. How is life here?

  I work, I breed, I get slaughtered. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and destiny are two sides of the same coin.  Janus.

Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. She smiled. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies. They are same word. I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath a whisper.

Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice with a rising sound on the k sounding like a meaning I understand without internal meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? Many people have conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok? Ok?

 Ok. Address the very low literacy rate.

  Hello, literacy rate, how are you, she said.

  I am well and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. I know my English is not grammatically correct but I know my English is fluent. The more I see the less I know.

  Well said, said Ice Girl. Someone said literacy means reading and writing.

  I doubt it, said Literacy, Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, shelter, clothing and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth. It’s the last thing that dies.

  Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold. I love myth, fiction, truth and inventing stories.

 I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. Poor people see education and school as a waste of time and money.

Education and medicine are expensive.

 I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate direct sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence in the big picture. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge fast. Spoken words float around looking for a character, like plot.

 Too many people talk out their stories. Lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills and rejuvenates magic and mystery. Ghost stories.

 World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.

 Here’s my secret. I look for a literary agent. Someone said they help writers. I sent one a query. One wrote me a letter. I will share it with you later. I write at night. During the day I’m busy with school and selling ice. If they ask me I will send them a manuscript. Maybe they will love it. Maybe they’ll find a publisher with a big marketing budget and the rest is history as they say. If not I’ll be independent and publish it myself. Ice is my life and I will never give it up. Besides writing, laughing, loving and living, it’s my life.

  Wow, that’s lovely, said Leo.

  Yes, she said, I follow my bliss. If it’s not in your heart, it’s not in your head. I’ll tell you about the agent later.

  A man arrived on a broken motorcycle. She gave him a blue plastic bag of ice. He gave her Real currency.

  Sure. I follow my blisters, laughed Leo.

  Where are you staying, she asked.

  I don’t have a home. I live in small houses along the road. For now I sleep at Future Bright.

  I know it. The woman owner smiles and lies at the same time.

 What’s the difference between hearing and listening, Leo asked?.

98% are asleep with their eyes open, she said. They don’t know and don’t care. It’s endemic.  They look without understanding. The remaining 2% are dead and long gone.

She opened her notebook. She spilled red ink on white paper. Red is a lucky color of wealth and prosperity. Living in a red dust town brings everyone good luck.

  Tell me about your visionary skills, said Leo.

  I am ahead of the future. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I connect the dots forward. I practice detached discernment. My job is to pay attention to direct immediate experience, get it down and make sense of it later.

People here live in a perpetual disconnect. They are talking monkeys looking for a place to happen. They can’t focus. Their attention span is ZERO. Like Year 0 in 1975 before I was born. No attention span? No problem.

  How about your town, asked Leo.

 Red dust roads in Banlung are paved with blue Zircon and Black Opals (nill) reflecting Ratanakiri, or “Gem Mountain.” Rich city women wear blue Zircon, gold necklaces, rings, bracelets, sparkle bling. Rural women do not wear this wealth.

Married women wear red bead strings. They fashion yellow, red, blue, green, glittering plastic bangles on necks and wrists.

  Here it’s about food and honoring Earth spirits. Animists believe taking stones harms the spirits, creating an imbalance in the natural order of things.

  Thanks for Life Lesson #3, said Leo. I’m going to have a look-see. See you later.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Friends Without a Border

After a year in Mandalay you facilitated English and personal courage at the Lao Friend's Hospital for Children in Luang Prabang, Laos for six months, June-December.

The hospital, a non-profit NGO based in New York, opened in 2015.

All medical equipment and medicines are donated.

Patients are low income Lao and H'mong. Many have traveled a long way in pickup trucks to try and save someone they love. The hospital treats 50-80 children a day.

Malnutrition, thalassemia, fractures, burns, rashes, infections and childhood illness are common.

Treatment, medicine and Out Reach community care is free.

Lao with money go to the Provincial Hospital next door. There, a old man relative pushes an empty wheelchair across a parking lot. Water floats on the surface of the ornate circular broken water fountain. National hammer and sickle flags hang limp. Families camp out under trees on straw mats with bags, bedding, an unplugged fan and bamboo rice baskets. Trash litters the ground.

White clouds dance with forested mountains under a blue sky in a landscape painting.

Eighty local staff at LFHC.

They call you "teacher."

You call staff "teacher."

They are surprised.

No "teacher" calls them "teacher."

You smile. You are the teacher and I am the student.

You are health care professionals. You know your job. You are learning more about your job. You know more about medicine than I do.

You are a team. You are the future of Laos.

I am here to help you. Simple English is good. My English is getting better.

You are responsible for your learning.

You smile.

You speak slowly and clearly. Pro-nun-ci-a-tion. Diction. Articulation. Intonation.

How now brown cow?

Sound by sound.

Language chunks.

"I need help," are three important English words.

Talk, share, learn and teach your partner. If you can teach it you know it.

They are doctors, nurses, lab and X-Ray techs, administration, infection control housekeepers, physical therapists, maintenance, outreach staff, anesthesiologists, and patient intake receptionists.

Together you do general and medical English. You laugh, dance, sing "I love to color," and practice meditation.

I am breathing in. I am breathing out.

Calm, relaxed heart-mind.

Beginners to  advanced practice the four skills, speaking, writing, reading and listening. I don't understand a thing please repeat.

They create vocabulary notebooks and mind maps by topics: medical equipment, illnesses, blood basics, body parts, internal organs, bones, muscles, senses, daily activities, home/furniture, adverbs of frequency, prepositions, directions, family, food, sports, free time activities, weather, time, travel, and dreams.

Staff consistency attending English classes is a challenge. Work schedules take priority.

An operating theatre and neonatal unit recently opened. Staff are busy with medical training.

The in-patient department has twenty beds. Emergency has five beds.

Foreign volunteer health care professionals come for two-four weeks. They share their specialist expertise. They return to England, Australia and beyond wild.

The hospital is in a village twenty minutes from town. The College of Science and Health is nearby.

Outside the entrance gate along a dusty road people sell grilled meat, fish, rice, fruits and vegetables to patient's families, staff, and students.

It's a 125cc motorcycle culture.

At LFHC families have lockers for food and personal belongings in a large community area outside reception. There are toilets and showers.

They use a large outdoor kitchen for cooking. They chop kindling and stoke fires for rice. They eat, sleep and talk while their children receive care.

Every Thursday the nutritionist, visa coordinator and head of infection control prepare healthy meals for the families.

Young H'mong mothers nurse babies.

Families watch comedies or nutrition education films on a large plasma screen.

People sleep on benches.

Dogs rummage through trash.

A family sitting on straw mats eats from shared bowls.

A mother holding her infant studies mirrored reflections.

A father supports a pole with an IV drip bag for his son.

Kids play games on a cell phone.

A housekeeper mops a tile floor.

A security guard dozes near pink, yellow and white orchids hanging from bamboo.

A happy girl with a bandaged leg rolls her wheelchair into the sun.

Curious eyes study a smiling stranger passing through.

He came, he helped, he left.

Friends Without A Border. https://fwab.org/

Mai

Her back to a silent world, a beautiful deaf mute dancer in Cambodia scrubs foreign laundry. Her becoming is loneliness, heartbreak and joyful silence.

Her silence is her freedom.

She wrote her story in a spiral notebook. I dreamed a deaf mute woman is married to a literary butcher. She hates him. I am she.

My life is a tedious slave labor laundry-washing job. A hall of mirrors faces me. I am beautiful. I speak-sign love laugh, sing, and dance.

Spoiled whining children and adults run around screaming. I can’t hear them. It’s a blessing.

I read lips pleading I want food. I want clean drinking water. I want love. I want education. I want medicine. I want a chance. I want a little luck.

The Children’s Hospital down the street has twenty-two beds in one room. They are filled with infants wearing air hoses in their nose. They suffer from pneumonia and tuberculosis. A parent holds a tiny hand. The infant mortality rate here is a tragedy.

I.C.U. has five beds. They are occupied.

400 mothers cradling kids wait to see a nurse. She dispenses free generic orange pills.

Life is a killer. Life is a generic placebo.

Mothers are happy to get something, anything. They have no knowledge about modern medicine. One effective blue pill costs $1.00. Parents need fifteen. $15.00 is a fortune. Out of the quest-ion. Rice comes first. Parents accept free ineffective orange pills. Parents need a lucky miracle.

How much does a miracle cost?

Life is a $1 blue pill, said a mother.

Mothers are hopeful. They wait in silence after riding on the back of motorcycles from remote villages. Everyone there had an answer for the child’s sickness. Babbling female genocide survivors sang remedies. Men pounded drums. Relatives and monks prayed and burned incense. A shaman dancing with death smeared chicken blood over a tiny chest. A healer waved smoking banana leaves over a child running a fever.

400 mothers wait forever to see a nurse to get an orange pill. Mothers know the answer to what is life quest-ion. A pill payer prayer, blind luck.

May your short sweet life dance be lighter, faster, cleaner than cool autumn winds caressing ebony’s laugh.

I am an unfinished symphony. I live with visual touch holding a small spinal kiss. Feathers caress my skin. Shivers inside skin love this sensation. Everything is sensation-intuition in my quiet world. A lotus blossoming from mud opens a purple petal. 

My love is voiceless and tenacious. I am passion releasing tension and lust trust. Gentle. Respect. Dignity. Grace. Luminous. Pure. My silent joy is a breath. I inhale suffering and exhale love. 

He comes to me in the heat of the day. I welcome him with my dark eyes gesturing a fingertip on lips...quiet. We share the present. My passion is deep and strong. My language - a smile, brown eyes, calloused hands, worn fingers and rolling sounds whisper: 

time

relationships

secrets

fear

family

passion

laughter

a heart

I dream traditional ignorant silence kills others. Truth is a powerful weapon.

People are afraid of truth. When I express truth I don’t have to remember what I said. I sign-say what others are afraid to express. My secret lover and I share the same frequency.

I am an anarchist, a linguistic magician. Speaking, living and realizing truth entails risk. If you want to do amazing things you must take amazing risks and suffer greatly.

Daring is not fatal. I am truth incarnate.

I am an objective mirror free of dust.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh. Fingers on my lips. I am secretly engaged to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family. He works for an NGO here. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and unconscious rescuer. Fat chance.

I come from a poor rural village. I was the last of eleven children. I am 28. I came here with my sister, 32. She got pregnant by a married Kiwi. She had a daughter named Moaning Lisa. She pretends to be married. It’s all show here. He sends her a monthly handout, pays the electricity.

She set up a hair salon business in a 1,001 year-old tourist temple town. It fell through. Salons are a dime a dozen. Thousands of uneducated poor girls from distant provinces can’t/don’t read. They cut. Do their nails. Digit phones. Staring at mirrors is their fate. Some moonlight as beer girls and hostesses. Where is Mr. ATM? Who’s going to save me wearing gloss in the dead of night masking eternal hopelessness.

Unspoken quest-ions, broken lives and starvation seek short-term financial solace.

My sister put me to work with a niece washing clothes. In reality I am a happy slave. I have my sister, niece, food and a safe place to sleep. I make some money. An Australian girl gave me a scooter. I dress nice.

My sister started selling massage service. If I meet a good man - more rare than verbal speech - I maybe let him touch me trusting he’ll take care of me. Short term.

I need help.

Massage has no emotional connection. Touch and go. I have the power to say NO. I have a 5th degree black belt.

I’ve killed more men with silence than you can imagine.

I tell aggressive idiots they can get laid somewhere else. Go find a beer girl. Flash your cash honey.

I do all the washing, ironing and massages. I make small tips. My sister pockets the money. She sits around admiring herself in mirrors, playing with Lisa and talking rubbish on her cell.

I am a voiceless voice of quiet resignation.

Shhh. I have a secret lover while Thorny is in OZ. I am easy going with a willingness to share my honest emotions. No commitment is a concrete-abstraction. My passion is immediate visual truth. My eyes are sensory awareness.

I see voices.

I am a voiceless one quivering lips and tenacious touch with my secret lover. He taught me a Tibetan mantra:

I would rather be a tiger for one day

Than a sheep for a thousand years

My sexual joy is shy. I dance tactile tenderness with silent breath.

My lover comes to me in the heat of the day. He is kind. I welcome him with smiling eyes, gesturing a finger on lips, shhh. My unfinished symphony lives with visual touch holding his kiss on my spine. I do this because I love it. It is my heart-mind fate.

He brings me luck. You can’t see it, measure it or hold it.

I say it I hear it I feel it I got it I know it.

My passion is deep and strong. My unlimited languages speak eyes, smiles and hands. Gestures create us in space. Gestures use me.

My speech voice is missing. I make rolling guttural sounds expressing metaphors, similes, intonations, frequencies, meaning, sensation, time, space, ideas, dreams, relationships, secrets, traditional family values, gratitude, health, wonder, contentment, passion, and joy.

By the time I learned the alphabet it was late in life toward primordial dusk. It was late in the moment before then and now.

I am a long now.

It was late in the whisper of silent air singing from the trash collector’s plastic bottle. Pulling his rolling cart filled with cardboard his muscular rhythm stirs somnolent red dust on broken stones. The majority of people here exist on less than $1 a day.

Rich land, poor people, greedy corrupt politicians.

I see, said a blind girl playing a cello in a demined cemetery. You can’t step in the same river twice.

Possibilities and probabilities, chance and coincidence flutter from my finger fragments like butterflies. Unknown mysterious sensations fling from signing hands. Fingers and hands are language wings. Blossom being.

My lover visualizes me in brown toned tropical worlds. He imagines I join a hearing impaired community, get an education and a real life. He’s a dreamer.

I jump ahead in my story. It won’t happen. I am a slave.

He realizes my movements say I was born to dance.

My gratitude is stillness.

There is a big difference between sitting still and doing nothing.

The hardest thing to do in life is to do nothing with intention as it takes the most out of you as a person mentally and physically.

Some people say nothing exists. I do nothing everyday.

I smell roses. I swallow fresh orange juice. I engage my senses in direct, immediate, raw, emotional experience.

He cannot save me from my destiny. He can only allow the process to flow. My existence is a long flow state.

One day he brought me apples, oranges and mangoes. We spoke with non-speech. He sees our passion is a glimmer of emotional security in the long now. Inside my deep-eyed mischief strangers comfort each other without discrimination.

I am a singularity.

Sensing passion we decipher riddles forecasting speechless tongues. We accept mindfulness with gratitude in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom’s fear carves a niche in my soul.

Dance saves me.

He is a Lone Wolf with a DNA variant comprehending my inherent instinctive intuitive needs.

It’s a blessing to understand another human being without words.

I hang laundry near the street. Memory’s lie is tempered by talking monkeys. Two boys harvest trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber. The other twirling a walking stick used for prodding garbage carries a plastic bag. Papa’s got a brand new bag.

Local people mill around. Milling around is an art form. They exist with a pure innocent childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent Buddhist nature. They’ve suppressed their ego. Ease god out.

Others voice imaginary alien freedom ideas. I am Other. I live in my heart-mind luminous universe.

A sofa with a roof on wheels towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 8th century Angkor temples. They are the look and leave people. They are too busy passing through life to feel anything.

Eternity a young handicapped man wearing his new skin-tight artificial plastic left leg and foot shuffles through dust. He walks home. It is everywhere and nowhere. You can’t go home again.

My lover-friend was away for six weeks. He brought me pineapples, a yellow mango and passion fruit. Washing clothes in my silent world, my hair tinted golden hued, I felt ebullient. He touched my spine. Soft, I turned, smiling.

My silent world and calm joy are disguised potentials. We share a silent clear intention. Our private time contains no fear. It is a gentle soft and slow passion. My awareness is trust and authenticity.

I remember everything.

I paint my nails a shade of red-pink. My old thin brown fingers are tired after a day scrubbing clothes. My infinite silent no voice is all. He watches my intense angelic face focus on cuticles. One-by-one. My heart understands his sense of eternal loss in exile, a form of suffering.

He cannot save me.

I sign: I hate the French spies next door. He and his fat wife run a restaurant. He spies for Thorny. They are creeps. Before he left Thorny gave me money to stop doing massage. I agreed. The spies keep an eye on me.

In my silence only my voice is missing.

I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.

Silence is all.

I am one with everything. A singularity.

I am a stream-winner.

All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.

I live inside a net of light.

I live in a world of forms.

Everything floats away in a floating world.

Mu. Nothing.

Maya. Illusion.

Attachment is suffering. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, texture and blind love feeling hope, regret, loss and spiritual death and rebirth as a pure being?

Did suffering invent our genocide in a utopian fantasy?

I witness many sad lost blank faces. Strangers eat their face. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.

I never hear laughter as I pass through with my Dream Sweeper Machine.

What does laughter sound like?

Synesthesia.

What color is sound? What does it taste like? Is it sweet and sour?

Facts and truth have nothing in common.

Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.

I am a stone cold Apsara dancer, a dancing revolutionary evolutionary soul.

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall inside Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire creating new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

I dance to escape the tyranny of life.

My dance expresses life. I’ve danced all my short sweet existence.

The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisper dance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots dancing below the surface of appearances in burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. 

Dance is motivated by emotional expression. Dance is about itself. Dance is a free playful existence. Life is a silent dance.

My spirit is destined for obscure happiness. Dancing my existence I welcome intention and intuition by communicating with gestures. My beauty. Symmetry. I am a formless form in a world of forms. Skin textures are perfect. Complete. My life is pure essence. Radiant. I dance with energy and freedom.

I am free. Clear. Pure. Luminous.

When you dance you are connected to the Source. I am the Source, the vast self.

My lack of speech and hearing is a blessing. I am grateful.

My body is my instrument.

I am a golden sprite, a fairy maiden. I am a young, innocent, shy, ferocious wild tiger. My claws feel this intensity. I dance with death deferred.

My needs are met on every level of being. It is sensual, playful.

I gesture to him. Go upstairs. Shhh.

I lock the door. We are safe. I am safe. I take off my clothes. My dance flows. My childlike love caresses air. It is the stillness of dance my free form.

Touch me. Nibble my ear lobes. Kiss my neck. Use your tongue. Ask me without words if I want it gentle, medium or hard.

I lie down. Hold me. Breathe deep. Exhale eighteen inches out. Deep space. Empty your mind.

Give me a full body massage. Start with my feet. They are erogenous zones of pleasure. Touch pressure points on my souls. My brain is an erogenous zone. Work up my calves massaging lower back along the spine expanding out across muscles and shoulders. My neck muscles are tight from doing laundry. Knead tension out. I’ll tell you how it feels with gestures of pleasure.

Listen and feel my body. Hear my breath exhaling sensation. Roll me over. Let your tongue do the talking. Stimulate me slow and easy. I feel your tongue caress ear lobes and neck down across breasts. Caress aroused purple nipples. Move south to my belly. Clear the department of the forest before tonguing my little button and labia rose. It’s highly sensitive. Slow. This is a powerful erogenous spot. Explore my blood filled flowers. Tongue lips deeper. Inhale my fragrance.

Feel my response as I move with you. Dance with me. Explore my mysterious cave with a slow moving tongue. Feel my response. Sense my breathing. If it’s fast and shallow I’m excited. I press your face deeper into my forest getting what I need.

My body is your teacher.

Relaxed, he signs asking what I dream about. My imagination, perception and sensation means scrubbing cloth, wringing out water, hanging cloth on hangers, ironing cloth, folding cloth, bagging cloth, weighing cloth, handing cloth to strangers, accepting money, smiling and dreaming of freedom.

I dream dance.

He traces my forehead, breasts and jealous thighs. He dreams I have a real life with real opportunities.

Courage. Self-esteem. Dignity. Authenticity.

He takes me far away to a beach. I see silent crashing blue white waves. Feeling hot sun on my face I run into blue/green/white water shouting The Sea! The Sea!

A long white cotton dress feels invisible on my skin. I am brown and content. I feel free. He memorizes my small brown hands, heart, head and lifelines. They are heavy deep real and calloused from laundry. He is gentle with me.

I am a hungry animal. I release my repressed sexual energy. I trust him. I give myself to him.

I am a slave. He cannot save me. This is an unpleasant fact.

Edging my skin realizing sensations I feel safe and protected. I curl into his arms.

Without words I say my family is poor. There is no chance for us. He’s been in country long enough to know how my culture works.

My father is seventy-three and ill. I have many aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and abandoned relatives. When they see a white face they smell money. They beg for money with fake reasons. They play their woe is me sympathy card. They are traditional and narrow-minded. They suffer from ignorance, envy and jealousy and want.

Desire, greed and survival is their master. I told them Thorny is my benefactor. Thorny thinks I was abused as a child. He found a doctor in Phony Baloney to assess my condition. They said it was too late to do anything to help me. My life is more silent laundry.

Thorny talked to my father using an interpreter. Thorny asked specifics - was she abused? Father said I wasn’t abused. Was she hit in the head as a child? Did she suffer from a head injury? No, no, no, my father said. He said something happened to me when I was two. I think they are afraid of Thorny and don’t want to tell him the truth. He flew home for three months. He plans to come back and get paperwork so I can leave and join his family in OZ. Fat chance.

My luck ran out.

I don’t hold my breath. I dance.

I exhale my dancing quest. I showed my lover some documents and he’s happy for me. If it’s possible, he signed. He knows my father has to approve any relationship with Thorny depending on cash amount. Marriage is a big maybe like my sister did. She was smart, played her guilt card, hooked the Kiwi and got pregnant. He paid.

If my family agrees they determine a pre-paid wedding dollar amount, say $3 grand. There’s a pre-nuptial waiting period, filing papers. Pay greasy greedy officials. The government requires foreigners to prove they make $2,500 a month. Everyone has a hand out. A wedding party will cost $200-$5,000 to impress friends with our social status. Big deal.

My father is afraid to lose me. He will say no. My lazy sister needs a slave. This is my fate. I am happy. It’s all I’ve known and will know.

My life dance is ambiguity, acceptance, independent detachment and creative imagination.

Dance is isolated yet cooperating and independent. I believe in the magic of dance.

When you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.

What do I see? I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, language in space. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth. Then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos is next, a combination of a circle and line where male and female energies interact. This istransformation.

After chaos is the lyrical. A leap. A release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

I’ll dance until I die.

What is life?

Dance.

The Language Company