The Wanderer

    I have trouble sleeping at nights. Sometimes, I'll get up and go to the porch outside. It's peaceful at these times. The only thing I hear is crickets and the occasional truck that clips down the highway. I imagine what these trucks are carrying; perhaps resources from the jungle that have to make their way to Phnom Penh in the early morning. Maybe I'll take a book--I'm reading To Kill A Mockingbird--but last night it was simply too dark to summon Boo Radley into my imagination. Not a person is awake. The Khmer people go to bed at 8:00 and get up at 4:00 to tend the fields. So, at these times , there's a thick hush that abounds in Pursat. Not even the town drunk is pacing about. Even he is asleep.
      The space between dusk and dawn is a time of serenity, when people move slowly, as if the first stars in the sky require one to decelerate. As the chirping crickets and scolding geckos begin their hum, a willful paralysis enters the villages and cities, making its way through the bedrooms, beckoning those who are slow to slow down. Movement finally halts, and a national rest sets in, only to be broken when the sun, once again, begins its journey up the sky.
Time finally stops, fading away like an eyelid that flutters and finally closes.
      Foreigners are immune to this force of nature, but many choose to accept its call. Humans aren't simply creatures of habit. Some things are inherent. A person is born with a sense of time, and they carry this with them wherever they go. There will always be a certain resistance to this rhythm, a piece of something that lingers within.
Thus begins the wanderer's journey.
       The wanderer in the night is alienated from time. Like a single snapshot, nothing changes. Every detail, every star in the sky, every ripple in the pond, solidifies its existence. The wanderer knows these things like a person knows a photo after the thousandth viewing: the crook of a smile of the angle of the light. It's a knowledge that the swiftness of  time could never reveal.
The alienation, the loneliness of the wanderer, feels as placid as the time that refuses to pass.

Maybe this will be the Cambodia I choose to remember, a time when there was no time, those nights when I wandered lonely as a cloud.