I saw a trickster

No need to cling

to things

floating frog.

Naitō Jōsō

“For Sam, distance means nothing.”

This is what Dessie, a former coworker, once told me after hearing that I walk 40 minutes during my lunch break to a faraway supermarket and back. Indeed, I loved traversing on foot in both wild and urban settings. Alone with my thoughts and the scenery.

Today was one of those long, lone-walk days. I had to leave a flash drive with 30 photos to be developed. I needed them for a gift, a collage I was preparing for a friend. I somehow skewed my decision to go not to a close photo studio, not a studio known for its speedy service, but to the well-known photo studio and copier store in my old neighborhood, the one I left about five years ago.

The studio seemed like a time capsule, identical to what I remembered from my childhood. I went there to have my school picture taken or to make those small photos needed for school cards, bus cards, and my parents’ wallets, or for the spaces between glass slide windows of old cupboards. I remember going to the photo studio and standing before the big flash lambs and behind a white screen. I remember how my mother or grandmother would tell me, “Smile, Sammy,” to which I would give the typical child’s smile – teethy and somewhat stressed. Now, decades later, I was there again and wanted some photos developed by the end of the week. I still received a green-gray paper slip with my order information, but they didn’t have a post terminal, and I couldn’t prepay for the photos. When this mundane chore was done, I went out to meet with a most entrancing hour.

“You should drink 3 liters of water daily, or six water bottles, or 10 cups, 100 sips, God knows how many drops.”

I did this diligently, as it was the fashion of my day. I could not act like a Bedouin. However, I did drink a lot in the office and now felt discomfort walking from the office to the copier store and then on to the yoga studio, which was 30 minutes away on foot. I needed to pee, but there was no public toilet along my route. I was instinctively ashamed of entering restaurants or cafes to use the restroom, and I have always been, but I do not know why. The only thing I could consider was to pee in a secluded place outside. Some corner hidden by a shrub or tree where I could answer nature’s calling secretly and quickly. This then was my primary focus and drive. I scarcely felt the overfilled and heavy backpack that tormented my shoulders ‒ a MacBook Pro that felt like a lead slate, my yoga outfit, a book to read on the subway, a one-liter glass water bottle, and other ballasts, all pulling me down. My muscles and joints had no choice but to pull up all this weight unwillingly. Yet, finding the proper bush was much more captivating than any other bodily discomfort.

This was around 6 PM, and people were returning from work; the streets were buzzing. Not just the streets but also backyards, small inter-block paths, and neighborhood dirt trails all had at least one good citizen traversing them. And when you need to pee, one stranger is a crowd. As I said, this was my old neighborhood. I knew all the streets and secret paths by heart and actively searched for a place of seclusion, but for a while, I was denied.

This was on February 27th, a day before the calendar spring. It was a winter-spring’s evening. The prolonged shadows were glowing, and light seemed to rise from the ground like fumes rather than descend from the heavens. And I need not tell you that all vegetation was as naked as it could be, a brown maze of branches, not offering the least amount of shelter or intimacy. In the glow of the last day of winter and the first day of spring, the world seemed naked before me, indifferently and even baldly naked, yet I did not dare show myself to it.

The urge left me briefly, as it often does in such conditions. Then, my mind finally came to the location of my body. I was on my streets and playgrounds, those I had known since birth—those I had watched with my memoryless eyes once as a baby strapped in a stroller. There were at least four people I knew who lived nearby. Four doorbells I could ring to check on my friends. As children, we used to ring our doorbells without warning and ask, in a polite yet somewhat apologetic voice, if our friend was home and if they could come out to play. Later, we used to ring stationary phones with spring-like wires, then cell phones; now, we text each other.

Not just friends. My brother lived here, just a few blocks away, on the first floor, in the spacious apartment where we were both raised. Now this was home to my younger brother, his wife, and their child. We used to share everything; we lived there with our parents. Now, he was living there with his family, and I dared not call him. He was tired and busy, the apartment was messy, and he was ashamed to show it to me. He needed to spend time with his wife and give earnest attention to his kid. How could I ring the doorbell of such a home? It was not my home, not anymore.

We would sooner or later have inheritance issues to sort out, but for now, this did not concern me in the least. All I knew was that my birth home and birth streets were foreign, lonesome, and detached. Like I had opened somebody else’s wardrobe, no garment belonged to me. If I were to tell this to Peter, he would, of course, deny it and say that I should have called, but I knew it was better that I didn’t. Is this nostalgia or regret? I am 33 years of age, still relatively young, and not accustomed to these dusty, papery feelings.

I knew not what I felt, only that it was significant — a serenity-sorrow compound, where the two opposing poles of feelings pulled at the two ends, canceling each other out, leaving a small void in my heart. Wasn’t there something tragic about not being able, by my hurt conviction, of course, to go and see my brother? Was it adulthood, was it the day and age, or the pace of the day? What did set us apart? The only sufficient answer I could fathom was that nothing did. I was struggling and had given up trying to open an unlocked door. Yet I could not feel strongly about it; neither grief, nor anger, nor sadness could be fashioned by my mixed feelings. Even confusion could not cut it; I merely observed a self-made conundrum, as life is a conundrum to entertain and entrance the Self. 

Then the urge came back, and I had to pee. I thought of an old, abandoned underground garage. The road that led to it was walled and very hidden; it was practically a public toilet for bums and crackheads and confused shamestriken persons like myself. So, I went there as the night enclosed all around. When I reached the place, it was even more disgusting than I remembered. I had to carefully step around many artifacts left from people’s past urges. As I peed, my head was sticking above the garage wall, and I could see well the side parking lot, the street, and the blocks. I suppose I was still as visible as the bright evening, half-hidden in that desolate place.

Then, when I emerged with content that seemed to trump my inherent shame and disgust, I locked eyes with the eve sky. A green-blue space that looked at me with a living vibration. Housing a few early stars that glittered beautifully. This was a thing that pulled understanding out of dreams. Watching it, I knew that I was the one who had first left home. I initiated the process long before I physically left. I started moving away from my grade school and high school. From the university as well, that other island of stopped time, where I spent a good eight years of my life, only to leave it. It took a 30-minute walk from home to reach the faculty, which I did so often that I could no longer recall any particular details. I left a polygon where I walked, played, planned, suffered, rejoiced, and forgot so many things — leaving it long before I left.   

As if my nostalgia was just a reminder that I first became detached from my old neighborhood. I never really clung to it, to begin with, and the flow gently with each season pulled my existence closer to the midstream, enthralling me more strongly and further away from the little pool where I was born; I did not notice how it drew me away.

Who was stirring the surface of the pool? Who was playing with the flow while the floating debris, the lazy frogs, and the duckweed trembled and moved about, seemingly unbothered by the movement? As if a trickster was hidden in the high grass, throwing stones at the water and watching how perfect circles sweep its fabric. Indeed, the stirring, the glowing eve, the urges, the nostalgia, and the effort to make a bigger deal out of it —all of this was coming from somewhere. Somewhere close, yet strangely detached. I was watching the microlayer on the water surface. Once I learned that microorganisms live in it, water bugs skim on top of it, mosquito larvae latch under it, and plants float by it. The trickster threw another pebble, and all, for a moment, seemed distorted. Then again, it made perfect sense; this is the most inner, fundamental cycle of our existence. Things being senseless, then making sense.

After my yoga, I got on the phone with my brother Peter, and we talked for a good 15 minutes. Then I drove to the suburb where I now lived. It was a 40-minute drive from the yoga studio, where I left my car in the morning, but the distance meant nothing. It was night when I came home. As I entered the common yard of my small block, I noticed something moving in the darkness. I bent down and saw a small green toad lazily shuffling on the moist ground. Indeed, spring was coming.