Rendezvous
18 June 04 : 10.36 PM
I walked by the dirty road that laid under the train tracks that was held up by concrete pillars furbished by repetitive posters and bright red spraycan paint of words I didn't understand. I hear the disharmonious noise of the city, but they sounded like hoarse, rusty wind. Vehicles, more vehicles and whathaveyou. I walked the speed of the cars travelling on the congested road, and thought to myself, this is the city you murder and run away to.
As I walked, the exhaust slapped on my face and made my eyes water as though something bad happened. I thought about that morning when I went to the temple with the four-faced god, holding the joss sticks between my damp palms, not praying because I didn't know how to or what to say but still hoping they can be answered. I knelt in front of the gilded statue adorned with flower garlands and felt my eyes tearing so bad from the smoke that emitted from the ignited joss sticks.
I walked the filthy streets of Bangkok seeing beggars with their tattered clothes and outstretched arms and busy traffic policemen and shaddy men at dark corners and even shaddier inns at darker corners. In a thick jacket with nothing underneath and long jeans, I felt cold. I had my arms wrapped round my chest, but I still felt cold. In the tropic city where it hasn't rained since I've arrived, I felt colder than ever.
To ease this coldness I felt, I soaked in the hottest bathwater the hotel room offered, for all three nights I was there. With each night the shower got longer. Instead of allowing the faucet, with water sluicing out white and vigourously, I switched to using the shower head, which was more tamed and came out in a smaller quantity. The bath was hot, hot enough to leave a scalding feel for several seconds until it settled into a gratifying feel, but still wasn't hot enough to warm me up.
I took the shower head and left it, with the spraying hot water, on my neck where it was more sensitive. But occasionally, I would place it between my pelvic bone, sorta right below my navel. I would stare at the ceiling above searching for any ghostly encrypted signs, the way it always happen in Hong Kong horror films.
When it was time to sleep, I would crawl between the sheets and turn on the television to some channel that was playing foreign music videos or CNN with the soothing voice of the anchorperson somehow comforting me. It was much better than listening to the sounds that came from 25 levels below me, of car horns and accelerating motorbikes just hours before dawn. Outside my window, the sky with no stars and no movement, only complementing the silence accentuated by the television sounds that I wasn't playing attention to.
I left behind the hotel paper that I wrote this screwed up story of a perfect little girl who finds love where she wanted it to be. This is a story where everyone is beautiful and bold and says all the right things and feels all the desired emotions. Also the story where the wasted girl finds her parents by instinct and is loved.
I left the stories behind because of how plastic they sounded and I was never going to believe in that no matter how many times I prayed to the idols or how many times the smoke sear my eyes.
There is nothing to believe in. Not even you.