In my country it’s Autumn now. The heavy warmth of the summer air turns fresh and crisp and the ground feels more solid underfoot. The mornings are sharp and silent and in the bronze evenings the veld grass releases cardamom-scented sighs. With each day there is a quietly unfolding sense of sleep, of the coming of winter.
In Thailand the seasons are changing too. Each day is steamy with passing showers, the sky thick with the hot breath of the coming monsoon. In the quickly darkening evenings the street stalls release the scent of cardamom into the night.
I once heard about a study conducted on forest crabs that would move to higher ground at certain times of day. The study concluded that they were following the far-off tide of the ocean, which they tracked rather mystically by the moon. Being in a foreign country is a bit like being a crab in a forest. You follow a tide that no longer reaches you.
In the same way I can sense the stillness of Autumn creeping into me. The other day I was browsing winter clothes online. I keep posting pictures of dead leaves I took years ago. A season changing far away is also making its changes within me.
When you’re alone in a foreign land whose language you don’t speak, it’s a bit like being a ghost haunting another person’s house. You get to watch their comings and goings, and sometimes they seem to sense you, or see you, but you are only the passing specter of a strange and different place where now the leaves are turning heavy with gold and falling to the ground.
As gloomy as this may sound it is the very specter-like quality that I will miss, this ability to see without being seen: to note with cutting immediacy the thousand passing moments of unknowable lives; the hopeful insecure glance of lovers, the reverent pity of the young for their old, the fearful love of the old for their young, the dead smiles of sellers and buyers, the clandestine folding hands of gossipers; and those cloudbursts of kindness between strangers.
bangkokbird 