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Welcome to the Big, Big World

Dear Joel

You have no - and I mean NO - idea how long we wanted and hoped for you.  My favourite, bestest nephew.  Welcome to a massive, massive, massive world.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:50 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

That Moment

Excusing myself for not having come to a decision about which country to live in - Peru or UKside? - much less to have beaten a decision out of my partner, I wonder at the guilt of not truly having decided, and disguise it with the assurance that I probably have, with the excuse that here, Europe doesn't seem real anymore.

I don't want to make, or bear responsibility for, this decision, that's for sure.  I don't want to do to F what that sudden, rash decision to emigrate did to me.  I know there's as much grey sorrow in a day here as there.  I know it's a simple switch of demons, that only other things will frustrate me.  Yet still I have to choose which life will be better?  Which life will fulfil me more?

I excused myself from the need to call the dice a long time ago, saying I wouldn't begin even to process the question till I'd been returned a month or more.

It's two months since I was Returned to South America.

I can't really see wet Britain from here.  I couldn't really see the chill Andes from there.  And do I have to decide?  Wrench myself out of now to overpredict and overcontrol the future?  Do I have my head in the sand, living in the moment?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 3:53 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

City Codes

Written a few days after landing in Hawaii, in July 2005, (my first emigrant month away from the UK).

It's the not quite knowing where the line even could be that marks you out as the outsider.  Whether to yell or just retort at the old drunk trying to pick you up in the corner store.  Whether to reject the stretch limo that turns out to be a state taxi.  Whether to wander about alone after dark when 21 hours earning jet lag have dulled your survival instincts to a repetitive, innocuously permanent twang.  Whether to scream at the four inch cockroach on your pillow, because after all, it is dead now.  Should you be standing on the streetcorner when there is no traffic, or can you jaywalk as easily as back home?  Should you smile at those old geezers in the underpass, or duck your head and get the hell out of there, like at home?  The problem is never one of not knowing the rule.  For the outsider, seeing the night fall pink, hot, and dusty scented, watching the unfamiliar flowers scatter uneven pavings through an optic filter of another culture far away from here: there is no rule.  For there are too many, too variously coded rules at play as you wander dark street, respond to lilting sing song question, browse kaleidoscope corner store.  The apprehension that they could count is your only clue as to the prehensile liberty that beckoned you here: all rules could apply, here.  Or none whatsoever.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 3:29 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Agradecer

It's weird, being poor.  The sort of, howdoyousayitness facing the benevolent assumption of 'you're probably not that much less rich than I am.' The inability of others to imagine, the teethgrit smiles at puerile tales of cutting your second annual holiday to 'economise', the trying to remember we're all of us trapped inside our own headprisons so that you can fail to hold it against them.

And the generosity.  And the angry pride, the impotence you feel at having to accept that generosity.  The grim truculence it reduces you to, when what you wanted to say was, dear god, thankyou.

I guess what I'm trying to say, well, is thankyou.

• To Ethernautrix, for sending me maps, and whole ream of moleskin diaries, and massive photography books that opened up the eyes and minds of so many serrano peruvians, even though I've never met her, emailed her, or done anything but once have a blogcrush on her back in 03.
• To Maria and Will, for sending me so many books, and CDs and letters, even though they've never met me.
• To Chrysalis, another oldtime blogreader, who's sent me a bloody ton of US magazines, based on - what?  Nothing.  Words behind glass.  A web site with a lot of complaining.
• To Karen, whose support online has always been thoughtful and questioning, who sent me a postcard of someone holding a postcard I once drew her, which helped remind me I do indeed exist.  And who sent me things, too, good things, nice things, but things which were not as important as these other gifts.
• To Jen, who has never met me, but for two years has supplied all my deodorant, tampons, reading matter, herbs and spices, dynamite Canadian cayenne, and this notebook I'm writing in now.  Such a golden soul, and I did nothing at all to deserve it.
• To Dawn, who renewed the payment on this blog when she could ill afford it herself, in return for one novel, six long months later, and who's met me three times and yet still has the patience to both feed and house me at little notice, and to be a voice of reason whenever I start freaking.
• To jatb, who has sent me at least two letters a month, without cessation, no matter what country I'm in, for more than three long years now.  And who came to my wedding in the middle of a peruvian desert on the other side of the world, at a time in her life when it cost her dearly to do so.
• To Paula, who sent me the best travelled peruvian coffee ever, who sent unannounced, and unacknowledged marmite, christmas pud, hindi reggae.
• To Looby, who's sent me cards, life affirming voicemails in the tropics, offers to stay.  To Eroica and Michelle, who had never met me, but did the same.  To Wiffle, who swallowed the likelihood I'd be an axe wielding terrorist, and sprang for my dinner in Singapore.  To waterhot, who gave me his apartment in Geneva for a week, and dragged me out to eat fine foods when I was slipping back inside myself.
• To my sister, who piece by piece, mailed me my entire wardrobe after I had emigrated with only one backpack, one battered overland parcel at a time.
• To my parents, who rescue me and support me more times than either is fair to them, or I could ever recount to you.  Who've has a lot more shit to endure than any normal child would throw.
• To the people who let me stay, without payment, and virtually without notice, in their homes in the First World, and fed me three times a day without grumbling or hesitating to foot the bill - Kay, Niall, Chris, Liz, Sue, Simon, Caroline, Jane, Fiona, John, Russell, Claas, Cathy, Dawn, Kate, Sarah, Paula, Rachael, Sue, Simon, Mum and Dad.

I'm sorry if I looked gruff and embarrassed, or too proud to say what it means to me.  I should have.  Thankyou.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:41 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Why I Didn't Blog That Weekend

I was chatting on the phone and when I heard, "so how´s things over here, have you got better weather than us?"  I didn't even think, I replied, "yeah, it's winter, but it's 25, 26 degrees, so, yeah, probably.  No, just a few earthquakes, a few avalanches, nothing to tell really."

And as I was saying it, I had the weird self-check reflex - earthquakes and avalanches, nothing to tell?  How can there be noting to say about that?  What twisted world am I adjusting to, where that's normal?

24 hours later and I was eating those words.  Remember that avalanche I said F was the other side of?  Well, he and a bunch of other guys decided to trek over it at 3am, see, and I'm worried.  I'm worried because it's been fifteen hours now, and I've heard nothing.  I'm worried because when I ask questions, the friendly helpful locals revel in the moment where they refuse to speak, refuse to even acknowledge I asked a question.  An aged in-law 1000km away is giving me advice in spanish by phone, but it's difficult to make her understand how they abruptly ignore me, give my question the wall-stare.  Ignore me, and my foreign concerns.

His phone has been dead for sixteen hours.  There's no coverage in Andean canyons.  The bus company say he never got on that bus, and I know they're lying.  It's so clear to me they're lying I can almost touch it like musty dry paper, crumple it and rip it away from the cold air between us.  It's an advantage conferred by not understanding speech, sometimes I don't know why they're lying, but I know without hesitation that they are.  They say the group who walked have arrived, no problem, they arrived yesterday.  The elderly lady on the phone tells me to pray.

I try to hide it, the panic that he's dead, that he's not ever coming back to me.  I try to carry on, blot it out.  I advise some twitchy to move tourists that it's best not to hike the avalanche, that even if they succeed, they'd be first across, when 'first across' a fresh mountain avalanche is a stupid, dangerous, frightening place to find yourself.  I try to keep my nervous fear deadened behind my eyes.  I'm pretty sure I'm not succeeding.  Nipping into to rooms to wet a pillow, shout into a mattress.  Seventeen hours, now.  Praying, crying, asking, hoping, calling, stumbling on the spanish words, crying, hoping, whispering a scream.  "Come back to me."

A dirt caked, dishevelled figure appears in the doorway.  I nearly knock him flat in the race to hold him again.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:26 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Today Girl

All through this year, we have a lot of foreigners working with us, and in a newer twist, living with us.  It's weirdly like being a foster parent to problem children.

Last night, a few choice local chauvinists were doing their bit for Peru's reputation as the most machisto country in South America by bragging on how they'd slept with some of the foreign girls who'd come here, how they were treating em mean to keep em keen, how they weren't all that interested (after months of chasing) once they had the prize, cos their other girls were still on the scene.  How they didn't even like that bitch, they just wanted to see if they could get her.

And Nice Guy J-- was lamenting what bastards they - his good mates - were, explaining how Señor X was right this moment slagging off Today Girl, a current incumbent, after spending every penny he had on tricking her into trusting him.  And doing the classic Nice Guy thing, admitting quietly that he'd really liked that last foreign girl, but she only wanted the bastard guy.  I hear it third hand, the Amazonian way - in a region with no leisure industry, the weekend is made for gossip.  (hearing this, supuestamente la Foster Mama, I swallow hard and wonder if I should say something to Today Girl, the foreigner who's definitely in all good faith falling for Señor X, and is a nice person, a genuinely nice person who doesn't deserve his shit.  Today Girl is a grown adult, and it's her life, and who the hell am I to warn someone off a Peruvian?)

So F tells Nice J-- to be nicer to her, to be kind to her, because she wants to stay, she's one of those foreigners who isn't here for a holiday fuck, who isn't all 'ewww, don't set me up with a per-ew-vian', she's not one of the 'they lurve me for my blonde hair' princesses, who actually would like to come back, who likes latin people and the latin life.
F tells J-- that not all foreigners are cold, or using you to 'get fun'.  Because, he says, look at Vanessa, she came here, and she was honest with him, she is faithful to him, she stays with him, and lives here, makes a home here, even though sometimes it makes her sad to be so far from home.  She is a good person and she was worth taking a chance for.  And maybe Today Girl could be that for him.

Then he comes home to me and lies on my shoulder and asks me to tell him the story of how I could come to this town for just three days, meet him, and decide to trust him enough to stay here, even to marry him, because he loves to hear that story.  And Nice Guy J-- spends the whole next day doing Charlie Chaplin blushes and making puppy eyes at Today Girl.

Aw.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:13 pm ~ There are shitloads - 6 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Where's Your Head At?

Longest. Break. Ever.

It was deeply weird to be back in the UK: good weird, not a cultural, spiritual weird - come on, it's where I'm from, there isn't a dislocate, and never will be.   Going back to somewhere I can make myself understood is and always will be like stepping into a warm bath.

The weird was in hoiking a foreigner not enamoured of travel with me.  Good in the sense of making things new.  Good in the sense of beginner's luck - the first upgrade of my life on a budget air long haul flight.  A cloudless day as we sped above the length of the Amazon.  A sudden chance to see Tower Bridge opening.

Not Good as in truculent, heel-digging alienation for him.  A million petty squabbles that amounted up to not going outside.  Not Good in the crazy schedule I'd set myself.  Lack of money meant a dependence on others - can I come?  Can I eat?  Can I stay?  Can I stay longer?  Can you buy me this?  That?  I was loathe to spend more than two nights anywhere so blatantly ligging, so I ended up with tension creaks from driving four to eight hours per day, and managing facetime with almost everybody  (sorry, London) - but facetime so travel-blasted that nothing I said made sense, nor could I hear the reply.

The jet lag was horrific: three days before I remembered which was the brake pedal on the car a< friend of a friend gave me.  After three years without driving any more than a week on the american side of the road ... serious.  The glorying in all the little details I'd missed so much had to be balanced against finding rice subsitutes thrice daily for a homesick Peruano.  Plus the next motorway drive.  The wild phone calls each midnight to a business in free fall that resisted remote operation were a particular hell.  He liked it, in the end (the point of the exercise being to convince him to emigrate).  He liked the Netherlands a hell of a lot more, mind.

And I'm back in the Amazon, now, fully totally preoccupied with trying to salvage the business while not letting on to the latest batch of staff that things are getting hairy.  I lost all my credit cards in the UK, don't have enough clients to give myself a contract this month, and I turned down a high paying government job that would make me insane, today.  I'm fully here, now, like the UK never existed.  Just as, in the presence of English language, hot showers, sofas, toast, food, a duvet, my little town in the Amazon never existed.

(Is that what you call present in the moment?  Or is that head in the sand?)

I brought back ryvita, a steamer, a coffee pot, a duvet, a map, a dictionary.  Not exactly a world.  I left 101 textiles nobody wanted to buy, and a family I miss even more.  The distance gave us this: the business isn't working, and it isn't a fault in design or execution, but in demand.  If we stay here, we agree to fold it; to take it to the jungle.  But that's only if we stay.

One month to decide.  In January, I collect my passport here.  Dual nationality.  This isn't a part of my life I can put into a suitcase and take with me.  I am on top of it, here: but what future will I step into?

In other news, I'm thirty eight now.  I thought life was meant to have some stabilising order by forty.  That is, I know mine wouldn't, but I sort of expected life to at least try, you know?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:26 pm ~ There are shitloads - 15 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

my senses were not in focus

I'm in the UK, and I'm too jetlagged to formulate sentences, or even answer accurately when asked my name.  So in lieu of one of my posts, I blatantly reprint a private email from an american chap I know, who was motorbiking alone around South America.  He's in Brazil right now, and is looking for a way out.  Here's his story.

PS He's right - Brazil is nothing like anywhere else in SA, mark you.

I´m Alive!!!!!!!!  I´m OK. Not harmed.
 
Many people have warned me. In fact, everyone that I have met that has traveled to or lives in Brazil has told me that Brazil is a very dangerous place. Guns, thieves, drugs are abundant in a country that has a very high poverty rate. The cost of living is by any means not cheap. It is the most expensive country in all of Central or South America. So there are many people with less, and want more. Many of which are not good people and will do anything to enrich there ways.
 
Yesterday morning, around 8:30, I left Rio, on my motorcycle. heading north towards Bahia, the coast of northern Brazil. About three hours later or 220 kilometers (150 miles) a car with a police style red light on the roof, pulled up along side of me, and pointed to the side of the road as if wanting me to pull over. So I did. That was a mistake.
 
All my senses were not in focus. I did not notice that there license plate was a normal Rio De Janeiro license plate, and wonder what a police car from Rio would be doing in another state (Brazil has 26 states just like the USA has 50) wanting me for whatever reason. I wasn´t speeding, or doing anything to warrant such a stop. But, I am in another country with different customs. so I pulled over.
 
I did notice that there red light on the top of the car was one that had an electronic cord that went inside the passenger window that would maybe hook up to the cigarret lighter. Something did not feel right. Two guys came out and asked me for my documents.  As I was try to produce them, they forcedly pulled me to there car, put a gun to me and pushed me inside.
 
There was four of them in the car. One took of on my motorcycle, and the rest of us followed in the car. We went off on to a side pave road, then a dirt road that was surrounded by sugar cane. Then, we turned on a narrow little road that went over weeds 1 meter (3 feet) high. It was obvious that no one else had been on this road in months. They were taking me were no one else would see us. I knew I was F%$ked. Is this it? Is it time to meet the maker. I  thought about jumping out of the car, but the driver had locked all the doors.
 
We came to a little clearing were another guy with a full face ski mask was waiting. He also had a motorcycle. They pulled me out of the car and forced me down on the ground, pointing there guns, demanding things in non understating words. They wanted my money. Unfortunately, I had just been to the bank before leaving Rio and loaded up with cash.
 
Fve of them, one of me, I tried to remain calm. Thinking to myself not to do anything stupid, like try to grab one of there guns. I thought about trying to make a dash in the thickness of the sugar cane, but that soon became impossible for they had bound my legs with duct tape.
 
One of the guys (the leader) just sat there next to me, as if to make sure I would not do anything foolish. The others were like children opening up Christmas presents. The ripped apart all my personal belongings, putting things they wanted into the trunk of the car (Ipods, phones, camera,) or anything else they thought they might want. The things they did not want were tossed into the shrubbery.
 
They kept trying to talk and ask questions in Brazilian Portuguese, of which I understood little. After the charade of present opening´s was over, we just sat around. By this time I did not feel that my life was being threatened any more, for if it was there wish to kill me, they would have already done that. They did not want my passport or wallet, just the money.
 
So we just sat there, waiting, for what? I had no idea. a couple of them took off and came back with some bread, cheese, and sandwich meat. They ate, and tried to get me to eat. I wasn´t hungry. If they were going to kill me, why feed me. I felt safer. After all the blind words, all I can say was `English or Espanol`. There leader also speaks a little spanish.
 
At around three o'clock, they told me I could undo the duct tape that was binding my legs. And the leader asked me if there was anything personal I wanted to keep from the pile of unwanted things they left in the shrubs. I started to look through and asked if I could keep some of my clothes. they saids yes. So I started gathering up what they did not want. And they were even kind enough to give me back my backpack. These guys aren´t so bad after all.
 
I had no clue why we were sitting around all day. They would not tell me. I thought they were just going to leave me there. So I asked them if they could give me 20 reils back (US $12.00) so I had some money to catch a bus.
 
At about 4:30 pm, as darkness approached, they put me back in the car, put a ski mask over my face so I could not see. We left. One guy on my motorcycle, another on the other and four of us in the car. Three hours later, they pulled up to the Rio bus staion, gave me 20 reils, and let me go.
 
I feel no hatred, want no revenge. These are people who will do whatever they have to impove there life. I definately do not condone there action, for it viloates all what is good, it breaks at least one of the ten comandments. But most importantely, I´m alive!!!!! I´m OK. I get to live.
 
So I have made my way back to Vera´s place in Rio who has been so helpful and understanding. Thank you Vera.
 
I am drained, I no longer crave, no desire, to see the world. I am humbled. This may change in the future. I hope it does. So my travels are coming to an end. After sleeping last night wondering how I should now direct my life. I feel like I have been led by the Good Lord from above. It´s time to return home.
 
Now I have other problems. When I entered Brazil I had to sign an agreement that I could not leave the country without my motorcycle. That is no longer possible. So I seeking the wisdom of those who could help.
 
Soon. i will walk on familar soils again.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:01 pm ~ There are shitloads - 9 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

England. Jesus.

And then, everything snowballed.

I had to move house - everything in a rusty camioneta, taking two weeks and five moves, to complete: my stuff, tenant one and stuff, tenant two and stuff, the shared stuff, the business, the rest.

That was accompanied by rabid arguments held not in my mother tongue, on a twice daily basis, until tenant two decided to live somewhere else.  Turned out what I thought was offering her a good deal was not at all perceived that way, not even when it was making a loss for me, in her favour, because a good deal for La Princesa is a deal where she lives for free.  When I realised the extent of the arrogance, it was easier, because her petulance (again, not in my mother tongue) began to make more sense.

Then: the new house had four rooms,  I wanted eight.  We had only three weeks to start middle and end this construction.  The occurrence of builders, electricians, plumbers, etc, turning up pissed as a fart is a little higher in this country - when you have money, you enjoy it.  So micro managing that construction project, while living in situ has been just a little draining.  One week till it's finished.

I can't work after the 17th, so I need to fit a month's activity into about two weeks.  Forgotten what a day off looks like.

Beyond that, it's carnival.  Of course, we have Carneval, in February, like most of the rest of South America.  But then there are two city carnivals, lasting about a week each.  They're all consuming.  They're, I mean, really, really big.  So a day is not a day, a day is suddenly going to the fiesta del barrio, because there's so much music your bedroom windows are throbbing, and there's no way you will sleep.

But there's more.  We had to interview, choose, employ new staff for the business, because as of 18th June, we'll be 15000km away.
Yep, we're going to England.

That's a big thing.

My partner has never travelled.  I mean, in Peru, yes, but outside?  Never.  It's taken me two years of solid work to get this trip to happen, and it involves leaving the still fledgling business in capable hands.  Capable hands which don't exist. 
Good point in time for two or three of the staff to try blackmail as a new career move.  Again, still unresolved, but hey, there's eight days, a lot can happen.

And then, there's going home.  I didn't mention it here, because I'm afraid to jinx it.  Like, maybe if I mention it, maybe if I even think about it, it will somehow never happen. 

Six weeks in England.  With my own car.  Fuck.  I'm more than scared.

There's more, you know.  Even more.  But - sorry - time's time right now, not a void to be filled.  I'll tell you when I can. 

England.  Jesus.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:57 pm ~ There are shitloads - 13 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Lizard Soul

Written in April.

I’m in a café.  I'm in a café because I don't want to go to work, and I don't want to go home.  There’s nowhere else I can go.  The racist stares and abuse are milder than the squalor, sarcasm and outbursts from my ‘family’ and ‘friends’.

I say ‘friends’, but that’s an appellation derived solely from their relative ability to speak more English than Peruvians can.  They’re not friends, they’re staff.

Welcome to immigration, welcome to the world uprooted, welcome to life with nowhere to hide.

God this world is lonely.  God, these people are cold.

Correction:  I am European (Not British – where’s that?  Is it in Estados Unidos?), so I am cold.  I am incapable of love or even warmth of response.  I am more honest than godfearing Peruvians, but that’s an advantage conferred by an upbringing in paradise, where there’s no poverty, no problems, we’re all awash with plenty, there’s no such thing as a gaol cell, because there’s no such thing as crime, and we’re all cold.  However, I am also a whore who will sleep with anyone (though an innocent whore, who’s probably been duped – unless of course I’m a brunette European, when I’m more likely just a sex-hungry bitch), and I’ll do anything for drugs. 

I have no maners, no sensibility of feeling, and a dark, lizard soul.  I have trillions of dollars, which I refuse to help good Peruvian folk with, purely because destiny has placed them under my foot.  I am arrogant, and I am stupid – I can’t even speak Spanish properly, when most of the warm, honest, godfearing world managed to master is by the age of two.

I have an alien constitution – I can eat things and survive dire shaman curses that would kill a good Peruvian, but I can’t dance, and I’ll never feel passion like they can.

The colour of my skin determines my soul – I will never be as they are.  I’m too fucking narrow, too fucking subhuman, too fucking other.

And I’m cold.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:04 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

He Loves Me. We Fight.

Written in February 08, in conversation with somebody who never heard the replies.

* You once said that while you were travelling the prospect of immediate security was very attractive.  What other aspects motivated you to marry?

Security in love, security in family, security in belonging somewhere.  Not: security of social status, not of economic rank, nor of social control.  I'm not a saint, these things are nice, but what attracted me is that he loves me.

I wanted to slowdown, to stay still, to make a life somewhere new.  He offered me all of these, with a liberal layering of true love on the top.  What other aspect than love need there be?

Faux naivete, of course.  It's not like I never in my life loved anyone before.  But in his arms, all feels right with the world, and if everything else doesn't fall into shape, I reasoned, either I could beat it to fit, or at worst, I'd be no worse off than in London, dating misogynists or being broken on the wheel of my job each day.
I underestimated: the isolation of moving to BumFuck, Peru, without speaking the lingo.
I underestimated: the endless daily struggle to communicate clearly in a mixed culture marriage.
I underestimated: the rootlessness, the grinding sense of Always Being In The Wrong, when I live 20,000 miles from all the things and the people who grounded me.
How often I would feel like a cornered dog, snapping frenziedly at all hands in misguided terror.

But there are bad things everywhere.  He loves me.  I have a life that brims with irritating things, but he loves me.  I haven't doubted that yet.  I wasn't running from my life, I just didn't have a life to go back to.  I wanted to stay because here is someone who really loves me.  Isn't that worth the risk?

* What aspects of the marriage are you happy with?

That I can read him better.  He'll do this, or that, and I can read it through the glass of his culture, instead of always misinterpreting, of always viewing it through the grimy dark porthole of mine.

And, I like my life here in several respects.  I work four or five hours a day, not fourteen.  I don't mind working my ass off, because I'm building something, it's my business.  I'm not a chimp in somebody else's circus.

I like that through me, he has achieved and will achieve more.  So far.  Of course, I can easily and petulantly, and self righteously fuck all that up by insisting we live in my country - but that's futuresin, I'm not guilty of it yet.

I like that we have great sex.  I like that we can laugh.

A lot of the cultural attitudes I complain of, are the selfsame things I'm happy with.  Ejemplo - the machismo, the whole madonna / whore peruvian thing - in his eyes I'm the former.  Most people I ever dated regarded me as more or less an entertainment, someone who would always eventually betray them.  With him, I'm unquestionably the good guy, and I've never been that for someone before.  The occasionally inexplicable, crazy, difficult, unpredictable and temperamental good guy, for sure - he has to live with me, how could it not be so? - but the good guy all the same.  When a movie shows tenderness, loyalty, or true faith, he will squeeze and kiss me, because that's what I represent to him, that's where I am in his heart.

And he's in it for the long haul. I was unquestionably with many of my exes because they were waiting for something better to come along.  Once I'd split, they to a man / woman, bleated to others that I was the one, that they'd been holding out for something longer - but for whatever reasons, they chose never to represent that to me.  To him, I'm not hors d'oeuvres, I'm the main course.  It feels good, to be loved like that.
It feels, too, undeserved.  (I look for cracks, see.  Seek them out.  Will them into life.)

* What aspects are you unhappy with?

The situational aspects that form the backdrop of Immigration.  Family.  Rows.  Stupidity.  How I instinctively respond with The Aggressive.  Isolation.  The way that when I speak nobody hears.  The nagging knowledge that the culture diff is wide, that he will never really understand me.  (But I've been understood, the ones who understand don't bring anything to the table but the ability to cut that much deeper when they leave.)

I'm not overawed amazed and fascinated by tourists, for example.  I don't think racism is logical and right.  I don't think all women are bitches who cheat, or control freaks, and I don't think all men should take the lead in life, or are doomed to stray.  These attitudes are commonplace here.  I want him to help me live here and be happy, and it secretly suits him if I can't speak or don't have friends.  I don't believe in the superiority of either his culture or mine, and I have so little tolerance left for listening to explanations of why germans are the master race, or south americans use their hearts more than the rest of the world.

I'm unhappy that when I speak, nobody listens.  That the skull numbing lack of opportunity or diversion here is accepted as normal.  I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy - it feels like my face forgot who I am, and lost how to smile along the way - and that he's never seen me not like this.

(Who am I kidding?  It's two years.  Here, now, this is me.  Not shadow-me.  Not américan-me.  Just me.  I lost how to smile.)

I want to have a day where not everything I do, touch, say, or look like is culturally offensive.  Where old women don't clutch their children and cross the street in case I curse them by looking at them with my alien eyesight.  I'm unhappy that I'm so often so bloody tired of this square peg status, that almost anything can ignite  my blue touchpaper, and a rage of goliath-proportions races out of me.  I'm unhappy that he responds more to rages, sulks and petulance than to me trying hard.

I'm unhappy that he thinks of white skin / blonde hair as morally better.  I'm unhappy that I've failed to squash my paranoiac suspicion that he's still looking for something.  That I can't accept the logical truth that action (not desire, not temptation) constitutes infidelity.  I'm unhappy, and I'm frustrated, and I'm cornered, and I'm angry.  And I can't understand why someone would love me like that, so I push it away.

* These problems - can they be separated from your problems in living in Amazonas?

No.  No, they can't.  I married a peruvian, and he married a european, and however individual we each claim to be, we each have to deal with that, have to accept that there are differences in the way we compute the world.

A guy here from Europe, marrying a peruvian, once said to me, "so, is that it?  If there's a difference, you just default to the peruvian way?"  By and large, I do, y'see.  I have changed almost everything I ever knew, and why?  Because I can't fight a country, and because I did choose this.
There are more differences than you could imagine, and so I have to save my strength for the fights that are important to me.  I have to decide what is more precious - my values, my perception of how one conducts oneself in an argument; or that I win?  I want to not be screamed at by in-laws.  I want to be able to visit my family.  I want liberty over the clothes I wear.  These are fights I choose to win.  My marriage, you see, is a battle, and the flag of victory is his compromise.  And why?  Because my marriage is also emigration, my marriage is the status of outsider, my marriage is the possibility of total, annihilating exile from everything I ever was or knew.

No, my marriage cannot be separated from the issues raised by living in BumFuck, Peru.  It is dominated by these things.  Sometimes it feels as though, maybe, it is these things.

Of course, in his opinion, someone has cursed us, paid three shamans to crouch in a graveyard and throw our names to the buzzards, and the only way out of it is to shapeshift at midnight into panther form to fight the evil spirits that beset us.
You think that basic difference of how we each view the world would melt away if we left this city?  No.  It's the reason we're together, and it's the thing that pulls us apart, and I've had this struggle up the yinyang since the moment that we started.
None of that will melt for lack of geography.

* But can you identify some themes?  For example, do you have financial stresses?  If so, how do you each respond to those?

Of course we have regular financial stresses, we're small business owners in a third world country.  In a bad month, I earn twenty pounds sterling.  I've been sleeping on the floor of a windowless closet in a corner of a classroom and washing out of a bucket for eighteen months now.  I try to paint it as practical, as some sort of an anti-western pura vida, but it's grinding and stressful. 
Our response is to fight, spectacularly, or to spend too much in making up.

The sheer, visible hatred of much of the city for the foreigner in their midst is a regular stress.  And, remember, in the remote sierra, a 'foreigner' is anyone from another peruvian city.  I've been barefacedly told that I qualify much as a martian species here more times than I care to count. 
Our response is to unite against the opposition.  Or sometimes relieve the stress with a spectacular row.

The fucking tourists are a regular stress.  Every single one is 'his very good friend' while they're using him, and an unanticipated disappointment when they (always) leave.  I resent wasting hours and hours building friendships that will ever be temporary, when I need a permanent confidante so badly. 
Our response is to ignore this difference, then fight spectacularly.

Can you see the pattern?  It's a pointless recitation.  He loves me.  We fight.  Spectacularly.  Welcome to Perú.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:49 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Bus from the jungle

Let’s add a little rationality.  I’m underemployed.  That’s great.  That’s what I want – enough job to feed myself, and enough time – much more time – to feed my mind well.  I have autonomy in a job that’s not difficult.  It ties me to one place, a remote place, but it’s eminently manageable, it doesn’t consume me.  I’m in Perú – as I write this, I’m travelling through jungle in the Amazonian Basin – I can travel, and easily, to places most of my friends only dream about.  The climate is temperate, the people here are temperate.  I’m not dying of frighteningly grey cold for nine months of the year, and nor am I subject to the more corrosive parts of English culture (the need to complain constantly, nor the need to absolutely define myself by stupid lifestyle details – to fit in by ostentatiously not quite fitting in).  I’m learning a new language.  How wonderful to learn a whole new language, a whole new way of being - and this is me, someone utterly shit at languages, too.  I’m learning patience, and to rid myself of arrogance, which is something extremely difficult for either a European or a South American to do.  I’m learning how to have a little pride.
I’m learning compromise – many relationships I’ve had have been with people very different in character to me, but from a similar culture.  Now, I can’t rely on any shared assumption of justice, or of Being in the Right, or of other’s opinions.  I’m alone with my own beliefs and customs, and have to pick and choose which ones are worth the battle of maintaining.  I have a family, a husband: someone who is impossible, great-hearted, selfish, loving, bad tempered, loyal, difficult, who wakes up every morning and tells me that he loves me, who is the bloody bane of my existence, and whom I love to pieces right back.  He can be obstinate, egotistic, pig-headed and stubborn, and he can also show me one of the warmest hearts I ever encountered in life.
I live in the Andes, a five hour hop from the Amazon, amidst ancient tribal ruins without number.  Whenever I remember to lift my face from the grindstone of daily living, it stuns me with its complexity and beauty.  I live in the Andes.  The fucking Andes, for god’s sakes.  Life is life, and I forget that, too much.  People come here once in a lifetime.
I live far away from magazines and TV adverts, and trying to look fashionable.  Nobody’s ever going to tell me, with the weight of cultural rejection, that I’m not good enough, here, because I’m too skinny, too old, too young, too fat.  Of course what I am is too white, too foreign, too other for them to accept, but you don’t grab at the sweeter honey without getting stung a little. 
Yo me siento la falta de mis patas, de mis libros, de los platos típicos, de mi familia.  Falta algo.  Pero no es una cosa en lo que me falto todo.  Es el Perú.  En muchas formas, vivo una vida mas rica que antes. Eso me recordaría.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:13 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Avoidance

Written in April 08

The owl on the cover of my diary winks at me, in frozen, old, Singaporean merriment. My back's to the café, the staff avoid my eye. I try to believe that the stunted, bloated, younger child of the owner, shuffling and screaming in the shop, aged somewhere between 12 and 32, is a good person.

It’s a thing I practise. It’s not fun to be ugly, you have to allow the ugly certain character defects – it was society, not instinct that put them there. But she disappoints so often – truculent sighs in place of responses, slamming goods onto the glass, eye-rolling and loud no-one-in-particular style complaints about bloody foreigners; that I have to admit defeat, the girl is ugly on the inside.

She has a crush on my partner, and, man, she could lose weight, she could dress better, but it’s going to be harder to grow two feet, convert from black hair to blonde, hazel to blue eyes, and change the colour of skin. She has a lot of stuff to be angry about. Don’t we all.

But it’s depressing, you know – why the nastiness, why the aggression, why all born of self-hate? Is that my problem, too, am I not happy here because I’m too full of self loathing to be happy, geography be damned? I don’t think so. I ask if they’ll switch the TV on. The kid ignores me and walks away. I ask another worker. Same response. Scatter.

I victimise the new girl; she knits her brow as she doesn’t listen, as she hears only skin colour and not the formation of words. As she decides before I’ve really spoken that she won’t understand me.

God, I’m tired of this mountain ignorance. I’m tired of no words, no glances, no gestures reflected, no smiles. No social connections whatsoever, when you disregard the lamers who hope two words per month could one day convert into a fuck.

And – surprise. The new girl answered me, the usual, abrupt, Peruvian “no,” but this time she gave an explanation. A stupid explanation, yes, but that it exists acknowledges that I am human. Not just invisible. Not just Despised.

It won’t last. She’ll learn.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:14 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Grillo

I found a three or four inch cricket on my bedsheets on Monday.  A grillo. It ran just like a spider with cat DNA might do, when I flicked it into the sunshine.  It ran up a drainpipe.  (isn't that a drainpipe just behind you?)

Drainpipe to another world.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:51 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

On thoughts of suicide

Written in April 2008

I spent half of my first wedding anniversary crying uncontrollably.  Only the hours where I was alone.  It wasn't related to the date, only mere all pervading isolation and sadness.

I'm sure that's not an alien concept for you.

When my husband came home and held me, asked me later what I was thinking, I was even surprised at myself, noting that my passing thoughts had been of which pillar would hold firmest if I hanged myself from it.

It's not my way to think suicidal thoughts.  And I don't feel sympathy for the suicidal thinker.  I'm sorry if it offends you, but the long distant suicide of a friend left me with the conviction that this is a dark, perverse, selfish desire, founded on a well hidden need to cause deep and lasting pain.  I am the type who would bury a suicide at the crossroads, and refuse to mourn them.  And when someone you care about has hanged themselves in an empty garage, knowing that a child will find them, knowing that they have coruscated and abandoned four children under the age of seven, knowing that their life is far from unrecognised, unappreciated, or lost in the noise of humanity, then you may stand and point a finger at me for that.

It's not in my character to be this person.  But to be so inexplicably unequal to the world as to want to lash out and hurt it, to be so beneath what is needed as to fold, defeated, into myself - that very much is in my character.  This is chemical imbalance rearing its ugly head.  This is not response, this is depression.

And I spent last week trying to tell someone that she's depressed, that she needs help, that to cut off and hide at this point only feels the best response, but would actually bury her.  Even I couldn't be so stupid as to assume the symptoms I described weren't equally symptoms of my own black dolorousness.

So, I lie there, crying, thinking about oblivion, and it occurs to me that this is the Big D again.  Hello, black dogs, my old friends.  I'd hoped them to be isolated responses in my life, to difficult circumstances, but life shows me the lie.  By repetition life shows me the lie.  Even this way of speaking, this repetitive, ruthless (not ruthless enough) self-analysis is a symptom.  The fault lies not in the stars.  The fault lies in me.

Three times I could explain it away. The knocks.  The blows of rough fate: a logical response.  Four times, now, that the black dogs have greeted me.  Four times is not reaction.  Four times is tendency, syndrome, instigation.  This is chemical depression.  This is what darkens my skies, makes me unerringly the painted victim of my own moody refusal to lift my eyes.  This is depression.  This, then, is what I am, what I probably have always tended to be.

And I cry myself to sleep, thinking about how the writing and writing and writing doesn't help.  It both magnifies and hides, and then you reread and see what a false hypocritical bitch you can be, and of course, that realisation is always helpful, isn't it.

My husband holds me, and whispers "it's okay, it's just two months till you see your family again, all your friends, they'll be so pleased to see you."  It's not even an eye-blink space of thought that dismisses him - more a supposition of assumed negative force in the world, as memory registers that it ain't that way, that, usually, they're not pleased to see me at all, and disallows the possibility of light in the world.  And I spider my mind out, above the sadness - reflecting that this ability, too, is manic - to present itself to the problem of what to do about it.  This is Perú, I can buy prozac from a pharmacist without any enquiry - but wouldn't I rather see a pysch?  Do I really want to mask my problems with a drug that will just make me go away?  The only other time I took it, it brought order to my life, by eliminating the manic energy, the hyperreal super processes, reducing my days to automaton eat-drink-sleep.  A blessed release.  The most blessed being my prompt escape from this jelly-humanity, from life as a lower-evolved being, six months later.  If I do it again, if I take the blood pills and their promises, could I escape so fast the next time?  Is it possible they aggravate this tendency?  That I'm underwater and treading here because my response is to hide behind drugs?

And my visit home: would that be easier or harder if I floated through the whole thing without feeling anything?  Would I maybe be nicer, less disappointed, easier for the folks over there?  Would the absence of the catalyst alcohol, the absence of the catalyst character, the absence of the catalyst fear, be a factor in that?

My mind, even racing, can't find a solution.  If I find a psych, I can't talk.  Sleep is a healer.  I close wet lashes, dream that I take my own five year old self on my knee, tell her that I love her.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:25 pm ~ There are shitloads - 12 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]