June 15, 2007

Sitting in the darkness, of an apartment that is large and strange in so many ways, and yet it is familiar. It is beginning to come to the wee hours of the night, and yet there is an impulse to finally begin my story. And so it begins, in this strange city, with its crazy motions and in this house, which is the blackness to my once starch white way of life.

How do you even begin to explain black and white? Two colors, yet an example of what they really are. They are not just opposites, but they play off one another. They contrast and repel, and will turn your heart into a rotten piece of flesh, without strength to overcome it.

And here I am in Ecuador, drinking Bacardi and coke at 2:30 in the morning as though I am an alcoholic. My heart is not in my work. A volunteer I am, a volunteer I am not. I have no motivation to put my heart into my work. I am numb from the pills they gave me before I left. The pills I wanted to satisfy my once-again parched mind and body and soul.

I am in this strange place: Ecuador. Guayaquil. The beautiful beaches. The strangeness is my consolidation. My danger is my adrenaline. I am free here. Free to drink and play and to give what I want to whom I want.

I chief down my cigarettes like a sophisticated European. I am just a girl. Now I am a drunken girl, with relationship problems. I crave this family setting. I need isolation. I need to write. I need to read. I need to do something uncomplicated, yet it is all complicated. Decisions are thrown at me and I am tired of making them. Sleep is sweet, and to drink frees me of my own pensive desires. My only desire is to live and to write and to observe this strange city and these girls that soak up soley my love.

Who am I? I have nothing to give. I am needy myself.

And here I am to volunteer. Is this a joke? And then there is pressure to stay and to return and to do this and that. Once again I want to pick up and go. I am tired of the worrying about danger, and for being chastised for being to friendly. What is right? What is wrong? It varies from culture to culture, and yet my freedom here is shortly lived.

Write a book, they tell me. I am trying. This is only the beginning. Write a book of my story. My "Gringa Loca" story. Here it is, and I hate it. All it is is memoirs of heaven and of hell. One life, one girl, one worthless girl. One girl who is looked upon as famous and pretty and amazing because I am different here. And when I return, I am once again just a girl. A crazy girl. With anxiety and depression and what is the use? What difference do I make?

Complications always find the complicated. Alcohol finds the alcoholic. Pills find the addicted. Cigarettes find the feening. Weaknesses always find the weak. Why?

As I smoke my Marlboro cigarettes, I stare at the smoke in the sky. The way the smoke streams upwards, sometimes to the left, and at others to the right. The crazy curves of the smoke, and then it fades away. So many times I wish it were me. Curving one way and then the other... only to fade away into nonexistence. Only a stench, a fragrance that to some is sweet and to others, bitter. To float up into the sky and out of the hemisphere only to be renewed into oxygen by some plant or tree in a new place... rejuvenation.