The Unruliness of Strange

In my travels I have found all the laws we think we are governed by do not hold water in my cupped palms. They are tiny silver chains that slip through fingers. The law of reason stumbles drunk in the street. That of phase change bends solid at the waist and vaporizes. To say it simply (which I rarely do): everything moves differently abroad. 

Time is a circuitous slipstream. Yesterday is a photo where I passed a distant night in a hammock on the Rio Amazona and tomorrow already came and went on an overnight train to Bangkok. I can see a month away but not next week. I prefer it this way, though it must not be the same for the smoldering one who just now drove past me on a motorbike because she took off yesterday and is long gone. We are all here to measure the comings and the goings as we please.

Language is a thick kneed stranger sitting next to you on an airplane. The jaw hangs heavy against trials of proper grammar. Worlds of words do intertwine here where elbows crook as dance partners in a square. The graceful tumble of Spanish or the thick pita bread dough of Israeli accent, and the daring snoring French men and the gracious inflections on a Thai tongue that darts like a quicksilver fish. Can I be fed, will you walk with me, remember how it was and leave me alone here. We are all trying to say the same thing. 

Habits fall away, along with the swagger of familiarity. Home is the last place you recognized a semblance of your past life. Economy is measured in the lightness of your backpack. I fill long spaces of the day without words and without silence. Perhaps you can not understand this. Perhaps you already do the same. The law of gravity is hanging from the rafters asking you to climb. Heat from the pungency of papaya to stop the sweat cold. You must walk farther to stop the swell in the false structure of your ankle joints; your skeleton is a story. We are all here to witness.

Lose yourself and the laws you once thought governed your being. Find the world and find the truth: the only law is limitless.