Green Walls Lit in the Night

At the point when part of me knew our relationship would be over soon, we were living in a country governed by its military. We lived on the top floor of a hotel. Our room had been built on the roof and was surrounded by roof on three sides, becalmed in tiles. 

There were rolling brownouts in this city. When the restaurant lights went out, the staff heated the bottoms of candles and fixed them to the backs of empty chairs. The cook moved in the dark to the glow of embers and the waiters would suddenly appear in brilliant white shirtfronts, stepping into the ring of candlelight around our table. 

In this city trucks thundered by on the street carrying teak logs. The trucks were so heavy their wheels cracked the pavement. The appetite for teak could not be satisfied by the last of the teak forests being harvested up north. The city contained many old buildings that had been made of teak when it was plentiful. So people dismantled the buildings and shipped their walls and floorboards abroad. 

Night after night I sat on the roof as inside he watched news of the war. The air was damp and hot, a treetop of glossy leaves near where I stationed my chair beginning to flower. Here and there, from under the door at my back, the muffled strains of the BBC World Service theme song broke the silence of curfew, the road deserted. We each observed what we could. For him, it was drone strikes, casualties, changes in market shares. As for me, I needed to be outside. I watched as the house across the street was taken apart. I never saw anyone working on the house, only the steps of its dissolution. The lights hung around the insides of the house bathed what remained of its structure—just floor supports and center joists, by the time I left—in an end-of-days glow, as if this were the kind of house where we’d all find ourselves at one time or another, near the vanishing point of our lives. 

Later I learned about a river monster who pulls people into the water. If you meet one, bow. The creature will bow back, spilling the water from the bowl it carries on its head, and it will return to the river for more. I could never forget this bowing and emptying, these bowls filling and emptying again, in an endless sequence of absence and possibility. A space will always be filled by something, even if it’s not what you expect.