i land here, in and out of my element.

i replace myself and the world here seems not right.

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i slip in, i choose a gap, i think of reading de Certeau on the verandah of french colonial house as the afternoon rain rolled in.

i recall feeling alive. this is the difference. animated, animated, at the edge of my fingertips and covering me - life. 

in seventy nights, plus 70 nights, what will remain what will remain. 

sometimes things happen and nothing is as it was before. everything has changed. i end and begin at once in a new land.

Tuesday the 6^th September. KL airport. 

Now, I have left. It is always amazing to me how simple that transaction is and how huge it feels on the inside. Body relocate. Sensate relocate. On Saturday night I slept under white net to the sound of wind across fields and small creatures of the night. Today I am drowning in the noise of others.

In the early morning air I woke and left. On the skyline groups of people exercise at Olympic stadium, I see a yellow jumper saying have a fun bumper rabbit day motor past me, the world floods in and I try to take it in, as much as I can. It is always the last moments of things I wish to savour…always the last breath, the smallest capture of fine things to put in storage.  [ULTIMA vez].

I watch an interview on the plane with a writer. She says it is like that. When things become impossible, just beyond or behind you with a slight that you miss them already. The beauty is in the impossibility of that slighted moment of realising.

‘She’ also says loss and absence are the same thing, and loss and love.

I had my fortune told in a Khmer rice bar, by Ilah the Israeli, who learnt to read cards in Thailand. [It was a Sunday night. He laid the cards out on a red cloth, placed diagonally across table. He spoke in a tone not unlike a fortune-teller in a movie. It is his natural way, a bit shifty and gentle. He sees he sees].

I walked in a temple overgrown with magical trees.

I cried for the filthy feet bodie’s hands hair and eyes housing a particular pain that look at me.

I laughed at the ridiculousness of dance and questioned my intentions.

I watched children work in a garbage dump, a brick factory, a coconut corner.

I saw the details every day, and tried to make a list in my mind of it all: to see and to remember, to see and to remember.

I watched myself watching.

It is in the fingerless gloves on bikes, pyjamas in the daytime with high heels, small man perched on edge of moto seat: like a bird on an egg, balancing on the edge with huge load behind.

I watched some cows and observed people eating organs in soup.

I drank coffee with ice and sweet milk and walked through the building, a slum.

I trapsed in the rain more than once and again, and raced through a storm into black sky.

I did not eat spiders, I did not eat ants, I did not eat black duck foetus egg but I did buy a one dollar pink raincoat.

I slept on a hard and unbalanced bed, I walked into history, I saw Angkor in every turn and listened to funeral songs and wedding songs and songs for the ice cream man churn across sky. I considered how silk worms work and thread is made, and how people weave and sing and fix til it can be fixed no more. I fascinated at my daily drinking in, and wondered what it must be like to wake each day inside a house with no air that opens onto a street with no air. I watched people at an embassy desperately plea to be heard, and a girl sell her services in early afternoon light, at the foot of stair, leading up to Buddha.

I watched as Buddha – his eyes, his heart, his praying people, filters through it all. And then I watched as that became an excuse. I watched the rich pretend it was not happening and the government not care. And I saw people dance and learn and evolve. And I saw their voices take shape, find wings, and set off.

And now, it remains there and I am here; between then and now and heading for a tomorrow in a different land.

What is the lesson?

The weight of it all?

How much does a life weigh?

How do we, responsibly, bare witness to it all?

What will my response be and how long will it take to land?

What is the song for tonight? It is an important choice, a song for end and beginning to end.

I feel already that I have not been here and there and there.

I rode a white horse around the world.

I found freedom and speech and bits of discarded writing. I found corrupted politicians eating off the loss of a people. I found a woman with one long brown glove and pink pyjamas who made me food and gave it to me in a small white container.

And –

Lately I saved myself. It was a big fall but I have pulled myself clear. It is that kind of song. Songs of despair and vulgarity and pitch perfect arrival in the world. It is the song that Pov sang at the end of our work. It is that song that summed it, as they say, up.

Later –

We all sit on couch and laugh and chat. It is brilliant, in the most simple way.

This burning world.

What did you see sings Bob and what did you hear?

Maybe, she says, I will write my own song.

This hot earth. Underrepresented people. Thin white lines. So very very thin. Everything is collapsing dear.

At 6am I was in the early air of morning, amongst the street. 6pm and I am  - gone - drowning in other people’s noise. Sudden disjuncture. 

What remains my dear?