Should I Be Doing Something?

The gap in my gut weighs something. It’s a dense condensation of experience, a churning, a forge where sense of self is perpetually fashioned, dismembered, stitched. It is the arena where meaning, purpose, passion, and resignation wrestle; a vacuum that, like an 8-year-old at Xmas, forgets the presents as quickly as they're unwrapped. It’d be good if I could write letters to the past, (un)fill my gut so that it’s not there anymore, that hunger, that nausea, that pacing around the room, thinking about what book to read next, or who to call, but not really wanting to do either because neither really matter or something, so just pacing.

There was a guy lying belly-down on the sidewalk, the right side of his face flush with pavement, staring way beyond his cup of little change. One of his legs and both hands were missing. They—the guy and the cup—lay motionlessly, waiting for change, together. His gut silently screamed at the busy and important pedestrians stepping around them, he and his cup; his screams made us feel ashamed for laughing with all of our body parts beautifully connected together, for walking, sometimes unhappily, for making the sidewalk that holds his face, chopped up body, and cup so dirty. The sidewalk was very dirty.

The appropriate supplicatory performance of the wai is physically impossible without two hands with two palms and ten fingers to place together, fingers elongated, pointing upwards and brought directly in front of one’s chest, nose or forehead, depending on how fervently one wishes to to supplicate. But without hands, palms, and fingers, this—among other basic daily performances salutary to life in Thailand or elsewhere—is impossible. Unlike the guy on the sidewalk, I have all my fingers, palms, and hands, and I use them to work for a magazine about coffee, tea, and ice cream, somehow.