Stamp Needed

I question all the time if I am a writer, it’s the thing I feel most insecure about. I have this friend, Sarah, we met in Costa Rica and became best friends. The woman’s a saint, really just a holy human. And when I here her poetry, that insecurity about my writing just creeps back up my curly spine and into my shoulders. I can’t shake it. I feel inspired by other writers I read but demolished when she shares hers and all I want to be is supportive to her.

I’ve been listening to Sherman Alexie’s War Dances on my ipod and I don’t want to ever stop listening to his voice. His stories are like a running sentence, voice traveling over Himalaya peeks and humbly climbing down on the page onto the insecure road and I’m on my bike and I’m on the spring water corridor listening, smiling at the pavement, at the insecure road in front of me. I want to be good at writing but I’m afraid to say that.

I am afraid at how good my brain is at protecting me from my own pain. Sometimes while doing yoga I will get flashes of memories, moments I haven’t thought about since they’ve happened.  Last Tuesday in yoga class we did the kind of twists that make you think your nose is running because the sweat squeezes out from the creases in your tensed forehead and takes a nosedive down your face splashing on to the matt below. I went from thinking about the internal heat that was conjured in my body to that 52-hour bus ride it took to get from Dehli to Katmandu. The only white person on the ‘tourist bus’, I was amused by the whole situation, giddy stupid for an adventure. I didn’t know any better. Besides I thought, I have books! The holy gospel of Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things. Books are only distractions though, especially the most sacred ones.

We stopped at the border steps distance; India to Nepal. It still looked and smelled like India. Dry arid land, golden flashing sunbeams made the dust particles from bicycle rickshaws and horses shimmer in the street. Out the window I see the dust twisting around each other finally resting on overly packed storefronts merchandise. We parked on the road before the towering rock archway that said in Hindi and English, “Indian border ends”. An Indian policeman with a mustache and a black club came to take money, look at passports, and glare. The group of three men in the back of the bus near me hid their money wads. I knew they had had conversations about my bare feet that became exposed in the aisle when I had tried to sleep vertical on top of my backpack. The bus driver wasn’t drunk yet but was smiling at me like he was. He pointed toward a cement house on the other side of the arch. I had to get my visa still. The process wasn’t long and soon my passport was stamped and stickered; I was calm and patient because…because I was in Nepal I guess. I smiled at the guard with his machine gun at his side as I was leaving and he gestured at my nose ring giving me his sign of satisfaction. The only sincere complement I have ever gotten about it.

Ben, at this moment I knew I would like Nepal.

I hope you do too.