Trips By Sam

          Fear has stayed many moons with her children: Anger, Hate, and Despair.   At first I welcomed them eagerly, greeted their call with a door flung open, filling my emptiness with their presence that has since lost its luster.   Anger and Hate are unruly, unkempt Irish twins, magnifying the other’s energy in an inexhaustible loop.   When Anger gets wiled up, Hate flares too.   They hold screaming contests, roughhouse through my sacred spaces, though I am the only one who hurts.   Despair, on the other hand, is quiet enough, but she fills the place with palpable sadness.   It permeates the air, the stench of burnt toast lingering like the guests I wish would leave.   They’ve overstayed their welcome, and yet I won’t ask them to go, preferring their drama and destruction to my loneliness.             Fear provides company and seemingly reassuring conversations...

            According to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac , fish and guests begin to smell after three days.   When I visited my friend’s village however, I learned that guests (that is, I ) begin to smell after only two.   On the last morning of my stay, Santos’s mother kindly asked us to bathe.   I hadn’t showered for 48 hours, back in the lukewarm water of my city apartment, and a cold shower in the mountain chill was as unappealing as a suntala (orange) after Colgate.   Santos had a solution.   Ten minutes later he deposited a 5 gallon bucket in the bathroom, and filled it with steaming water from the largest kettle I’d ever seen, blackened from a life suspended above flames.   I stripped the kurta and MC hammer pants his mother had lent, slickened with sweat and accumulated urine droplets from the past two days, and proceeded to dump pitchers of tepid water over my body, oddly naked ...