Red River Valley

(Inspired by the song, Red River Valley, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXldBhzVjvc )
The air of the coffee house was choked with the song came out of the speakers hid above the ceiling. There seem to be something nauseating and gloomy in the air too. I don’t know how they can play such a depressing song in this rainy atmosphere. Indeed, the song was a plagiarized version of a song, Listen to the Radio by Don William. You would know how it is awful if you were sitting in this coffee house. The original sound is a very great one but when you plagiarize and turn it into another language and put some sort of musical effects, it turns into a crap. It simply lacks the authenticity. But as far as I know, most of the people like that plagiarized version. But I don't know if they have listened to Don Williams'. Maybe they prefer this song as a translation of the Listen to the Radio. But the lyrics in the plagiarized version are very different from that of Listen to the Radio. The chorus is something like "I want to come to you if I have wings". As if there's no other mode of transportation. A classic lie of male as he tries to lure his female partner, I would say. I mean, you can come whether you have wings or not, right? There’s no need to exaggerate.

What's more, the taste of coffee is awful. When we were about to order, the waitress said the coffee machine was broken. We did not think much and order some 'creamy coffee' as it is said so in the menu cards. Then we find that it is actually an instant coffee with condense milk. Anyway, we are here to talk and I don't care the coffee. She also doesn't care the coffee, she says.

"When is that?" I ask her.

"I booked an air ticket for tomorrow. I still need to get things done. I haven’t packed yet and I am a bit excited."

"Yeah, I know what it feels. You are not the only one. "

“Yeah, I just feel upset to check everything and make sure they are ready.”

While waiting for the order, she reaches my hand and grasps my hand. I think she has small fingers compared to her body or her face. When she grasps my hand, I somehow feel funny to look at our hands because her small-sized fingers make my own gigantic.

I am looking at the back covers of the books I have just bought from the bookshop. Two novels and a book of Big Bang theory.  She is not talking or looking at me. She is staring at the children through the glass wall of the coffee house. Children are running and chasing each other while their parents are shopping at the supermarket.

“I want to run,” she says, leaning her head on my shoulder.

“Hmm…. It’s fun, eh? It will be more fun if they run away. From their parents. Or from something or someone.”

She give me a nod. The song being played in the coffee shop is something about having wings and the children are running. Although I neither like the children or the song, there are a lot of factors that encourage one to run away.

I feel her breath on my sleeve, I feel sleepy, order arrives, a woman comes and passes us and locates herself in a chair, another song follows after the current song finishes, people walk along outside of the coffee shop, she looks at me, I look at her, we smile and we reach to each other hands. She buries her head more into my shoulders and I put my hand on her shoulder and fondle her hair.

She has that sort of nostalgic smell that makes me look back to the past. I want to think about who I am and what I have been through as I am inhaling her smell, her sweetness. I just want to close my eyes while I am thinking about everything and everyone in the past. It takes a couple of minutes before I open my eyes. I see her watching me. I don't know when she has switched her eyes from the children to me and how long she has been watching me. I want to kiss her. A kiss will make me feel less sleepy. But PDA is highly restricted here even when you are sitting at a corner of a stupid coffee house with your girlfriend.

“Your hair is soft and you are beautiful. There’s a connection between them, I am sure.”
She turns up her head to me with a smile. A woman who came in earlier is looking at us as if we are criminals. I don’t want to make anything to draw more attention from that woman. She seems very old-fashioned and we cannot know if she comes to us and lecture how to behave well as a couple.
I drop the coffee cup back to saucer and say,

“Sometimes you don't need to run away. You just disappear. Do you know some people just vanish into thin air?”

“No, I don’t know. How come?”

 “There are some kinds of people who just disappeared.  To nowhere.  They are born to disappear.  This kind of people. I know one poet in Mandalay who took a walk before the dinner, maybe he might have kissed his wife before he left for a walk, and he never came back to his wife and his family. His wife is always waiting.”

"Oh, that's just sad. What has happened to him?"

"I don't know. Just think of it. You are here. And I am here too. But we won't be here tomorrow. We left for somewhere. But in the poet's case, he left for nowhere. All the time normal people like us are somewhere but we can occupy just one single spot in the universe. You sit in that chair – just one spot. And I occupy one spot. Only one. And then you will disappear and go to one another spot. So will I. But some people reach the place of nowhere and they are considered missing. Never coming back."

“Never?”

“Yes, never.”

She squints on me. She squints when she needs to think for a long time or when she likes something.

The only thing I enjoy doing when she is squinting is looking for the hidden smiles on her face until she speaks,

“What kind of people are missing?”

“I don’t know. There are people who went shopping for Christmas and never come back. And some people were sleeping at their home and they disappeared with the rise of the sun. We will probably go missing after coming out of this coffee house. Our parents will report the police but they will never find us."

"Where do we go?"

"There might be an abyss at the end of meadow. It is a place for all the missing people. Perhaps, we will meet with Vaginia Woolf , Ambrose Bierce and Abbie Hoffman.”

"There might be some chances only one of us will disappear soon. How would you feel when I disappear in such a way?" I ask her. She tilts her head to me as she is thinking for the answer. She has the sort of body heat that can connect to other people. Warmth and heat from her are radiated to my body.

It takes her a couple of seconds to respond. I stare around the coffee house waiting for her reply. The woman who has been looking to us with suspicious eyes finally gets down to reading alone. Maybe she has found the book more interesting than watching a young couple. I sneak a look at the cover of the book she is reading. I have never heard of the writer or the name of the book.

 “I will cry for sure. I don't like the feeling of being left. It's like listening to a song with the highest volume the speakers can bare and it ends up abruptly. There is a silence without a hint. Without any foreshadow. There are silence in your ears and nothing more. You will hear the song from within but that's not real. ”

"You are lovely," I say. Then the next moment I find my lips pressing against hers. There is a cough from the woman after we are kissing for five seconds. Neither of us wants to stop but we sit back and try to hide the awkwardness. I take a quick glance at the woman who is monitoring on us as if she is a guardian of no-kiss-on-earth.

“Perhaps, we can assure ourselves we haven’t disappeared until now because that woman’s eyes are always on us."

She takes a glance over the woman. She agrees with me and giggles silently. And then she gives me a kind of look that I can’t explain whether she is going to smile or cry.

"Yes, you are right. She's like that."

She makes the face of the woman, and I laugh at it.

“I want to kiss you more,” I tell her.

“Let’s go outside of this creepy place,” she gets up squeezing my fingers.

As we leave the coffee house, there are some gray clouds in the sky. There are not many people and cars on the road. It is cool to walk through the breeze.

“Let’s pretend we are missing people,” she continues, “no one sees us, right?”

“Yeah, no one really sees us. Hey can you see me?” I shout to the people walking on the opposite sidewalk. None of them can hear us or bother to respond my faint shout.

“Look, no one is aware of us. Which means they can’t see us, now,” I tell her, laughing.

“We will go somewhere and kiss,” she says to me. “Behind that tree,” she points at the big tree.

My hands are around her neck, my lips almost touch to hers and we stay in this position for five minutes. And then we sit together on the ground and I hum,

“Joan was quizzical; studied pataphysical
Science in the home.
Late nights all alone with a test tube.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.”

She smiles at the song and sings,

“Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine,
Calls her on the phone.
"Can I take you out to the pictures,
Joa, oa, oa, oan?"

“Hey, am I singing it in the right way?” she tilts her head from side to side as she is singing. She makes her lips in O-shape as she is singing. I cannot forget her smell, I think to myself.

“Yeah, you are. It’s a great song. It’s funny,” I tell her.

“And it’s sad,” she adds.

“Funny and sad it is.” I conclude.

She rummages in her bag and take out her iPod. She gives me a bud of ear phone and plugs one into her ear. There are birds making funny noises on the tree. But we are abducted from this world as we are listening to the song until the sense of eternity has clashed with the beeping of the reality.

I get up early and sit on my head. I cannot see the sunlight in my room. Maybe it’s too early for the sun to rise. My house is located under the path air planes fly. It roars for five seconds when an air plane is flying above my head. I wonder if she is in that air plane. Maybe I should run to the top of the hill and wave to her. I should shout to her how much I love her. Or I should shout to her how often I love her.

But if I get out of my room, some people will find that I am not ‘missing’. When you are not missing, you have to do something. You should go to school or you should work and be a part of GDP. I just want to sit and read some books. And I will read those books again when I have finished. With the music on the speakers.

Imagination

I am not very sure of the existence of the things
In a real life
Because there always seem to be
A difference and a distance between two things
And I don’t have the right mind
To measure them
Or technically, I don’t have the right working mechanism
In the left hemisphere of my brain
I mean, I was really feeling the distance was shrinking
At 10 meter per breath
When she was running away from me
Or when she asked me to break up in a de-facto way
And her email in my inbox was still intact
I told her we are not different and we are beautiful
Equally beautiful creatures                
Except the fact that I have more chronic depression than she does
And she had charming lips whenever I told her jokes
I’ve been asking myself why can’t we keep the happiest time
With each other
When even the most ignorant government in the world is trying to make love
With the ethnic armed forces
Out of my imagination,
Life becomes bumpier than the road before my house
And riskier than playing a computer game for fourteen successive hours
I sort of hate to say life is a journey and blah blah blah
You know, I can just plug cotton buds in my ears and sleep
While these motherfuckers are huddling together
On the Newsfeed of my Facebook account
Having the competition of la personne la plus réussie dans le monde
I seem to discover that the people who I could talk to in my imagination
Become loathsome and horrible spiders that seem to crawl up to me from my legs
And suck all my brain like zombies
Unlike their counterparts in my imagination
Everything are so real
The reality of bullets only kill real victims
And the real cars bump into real men and they die a real death
And their real women moan for their real men for the real accidents
I see no point to accept the reality
When I can afford to dwell in the imagination zone of my own
In a real life, I do not dwell in

The problem of having a mechanical sweetheart

The enduring clench of prosaic and aching office ours had finally paid off when the clock had ticked to five. His mind was released from the iron chains of begrudging duties. He rose from the desk which imprisoned him for a day to set the trip home. 

The crowd at the bus station almost scared him. He cursed his boss who did not arrange anything for the staff to commute to and from work. The company he worked for was on a tight budget. He saw a couple who hold each other tightly at the back corner of the bus station. He wondered if they would straight go to bed after they got home. He smirked at the thought. They will have sex, he almost told himself. 

When the bus came, they all competed to get into a bus which was already cramped with tiring workers. The bus stopped a couple of steps away from them. There was a mini race when people who previously waited for the bus ran to the bus with all their effort, their lunch boxes swinging in the air. The award was an early arrival home. They all wanted to dissolve in their solace where they would scrub everything that had, during the office hours, stained their mind and soul in the bathroom of their houses, they would listen to their children’s stories at school, and they would occupy the chair for breadwinner at the top of the dining table briefing a speech about who should conduct a particular way of life and indulging in the thought that they can channel all the anger and frustration attained at work into the least powerful of their family members.

As he saved a good spot to stand with his hands grasping the handle dangling above his head, he eyed the bus station where he had been. The couple was still standing. The guy even placed his hand on the girl’s waist. This hand would be crawling up to her breast in a minute, he thought. That’s what always happens in the porn movies.  After loading the sea of people from the station (and there are losers in the race who have to wait for another bus), the bus left the couple, and losers of the race who had to wait for another bus. 

His eyes roamed the crowd for beautiful girls whose brief visual entertainment would take him away to the imagined world of his own. But he could not. Everyone was looking horrible and exhausted having sold their time to their demanding bosses. He tried to disconnect himself from the intruding shriek asking for the fare charges and the chaotic sounds of the road as well as the bus.  

He jumped out of the bus when the bus stopped at the bus station a couple of yards away from his home. He would have to walk home.

It had been his dream to settle with a loving family in a grand house since he was a teenager. It failed like all the other dreams he had dreamed. Nobody would dream to be a normal clerk with the salary barely enough to support himself. 

“This is the problem of dreams,” he always said to himself when he thought about it. “They never seem to come to me even though I am waiting like hell. Dreams are just like bitches.”

He had no luxury except the set of TV and DVD on which he watched porn movies while masturbating.

He jumped off the bus knowing that his exhausted legs could not carry the body of obese fleshes which are benefactors of the night hawker and vendor. Sometimes the juvenile cook inside him seemed to rise from the ashes of indolence but the longing for sound sleep to recharge himself for tomorrow always took over the idea for the self-made meal. As a voracious eater, he never failed to soothe his mouth and tongue with the colorful street cuisine. 

His semi-educated mind would fly through the warnings of cancer for a micro second but he never find the relation between the blood-red sauce and colorful sausages, warm sweet soups of Daw Aye Cho, which was a match for pork sticks and stir-fried rice noodles with the news about cancer. He would not think he would be counted as one in the figures of the Burmese population that have cancers.  

After he had managed to balance his obese body on the stool before the vendor’s four-wheel cart, the warm dinner was served while the street at the back of him was roaring. He, too, was roaring with hunger. There were only about three spoons of stir-fried rice noodle with two pork chops left. It was then when he observed the environment. Daw Aye Cho was in the chores of chopping pork and vegetables, and stirring rice noodles. Nothing on her was worth observing. He took great attention at the young woman talking on the phone. He was sitting next to her. He was giving mental sketches to the phone conversation the young woman was having.

“I don’t give a shit. All these guys are born for me. Even this world.”

What the heck is this young lady, he thought. What kinds of people, if not her biological children, are born for her?

“Oh, yeah, I will meet you but just know that I hate you.”

He could not make a mental comment on it so he kept on listening while eating everything from the bowl before him. The young woman went to three yards away and was crying in the dark. When he finished his bowl, the young woman came to her place and talked on phone again. 

“I don’t give a shit. All these guys are born for me. Even this world.”

How can this girl repeat the same words? Was she calling the same person or the other one? He has emptied his bowl. Neither his stomach nor his wallet could not afford to have another bowl of stir-fried rice noodles or pork chops. So he was drinking green tea which was free of charge in order to listen to the phone conversation. 

The young woman continued, 

“Oh, yeah, I will meet you but just know that I love you.” 

 Then the girl left the seat again and was crying in the dark. After five successive cups of green tea, he reasoned he should give his seat to one of the people who were waiting to sit. A couple of steps away from Daw Aye Cho’s shop, he saw the young woman who was previously crying in the dark. She was still sobbing.

“Hello, can we talk for a while?”

He checked if the girl was on her phone. No, she was looking at him. And he saw her faint smile, some parts of which were revealed by the patches of lamp light on her face. 

“Oh, yeah?”

“I am sorry I was crying,” the girl said. She was walking to him and her smile became clearer.  

He thought to himself. What should he say? “Sorry” is the word he hate most because he had nothing to reply when people say sorry. People were crazy. He heard his co-workers said sorry when he was sacked from his previous job. He heard sorry when his parents have passed away. He heard sorry when he went to the food shop and what he ordered was not available. Now the girl said ‘sorry’. Why did all of them keep on saying this word unless they had committed a crime about it?

“It’s okay. Everyone is feeling sad,” he replied. He thought this is the most appropriate reply.

“Thank you for your understanding. I am really sorry. I should not cry beside you.”

He did not know what to say this time. So he was just staring at her, observing how the waves of sob which was rooted in her lung shook her little body until she continued the conversation. 

“I was really sad, you know. I was fed up with the kinds of things that came to people like us – almost every month.”

Again he had no idea what the young woman was talking about. Having scratched his head for a moment, he asked,

“Do you mean you are having period?”

One of her hands was holding her head as if in support. Maybe she was having headache. She tied back her hair and said, 

“No, I am not talking about having period. I am talking about the kind of thing that comes to us regardless of gender, race or faith, you know.”

He nodded as she was talking. He felt that he was on the line divided between the understanding and not understanding. It happened to him all the time. When he was in school, he felt the same. He was on the line between the understanding and not understanding when his teacher taught him Geometry. His brain had to process for an hour or so to adapt to the learning of new things. The process blurs his consciousness. He did not know what was going on. He just wanted to float in the process making himself a lifeless one like a block of wood while his sub-conscious parts work themselves out. Like a mathematics teacher, the girl would not be patient enough to wait for a meaningful reply. So he had to reply something whether he understood what the girl said.

 “You must be hurting yourself.”

He did not know why he said this. All he knew is he had to reply and it seemed to him that the sentence was poised to go out for a long time.   

“I sure am. I hurt myself a lot. Also I hurt other people. Shall we go to some place to talk? Wait, do you have some time to talk?” the girl asked.

There were thousands of thoughts rushing out before giving the girl an emphatic nod within mere two seconds. What will she tell me? Will it be a chance for me to have the first relationship in my life? No, she’s way too beautiful and young. But what if I try and there’s some luck? Everything is …..

She stepped forward and led him to a tea shop which opened all night. They sat at one corner and ordered two bottles of lemonade juice. The fresh sour taste of lemonade helped him break down the fats he had previously eaten. 

“Thank you very much. I needed a hug. My name is May Thaw by the way.”

“Never mind. Actually you just recovered by yourself.”

“No, you pointed out I am hurting myself, which is very helpful.”

Her phone rang again when they were having a conversation. She went to somewhere to answer the phone. He was counting the time in order to know how many minutes the telephone conversation took. 

“I am sorry. I must leave. Here is my name card if you want to contact me. Thank you for your time. You are very kind.” 

The girl told all the words in a haste and ran into the dark. He told his name but he did not think she would remember it when she woke up the next day. He was left with the smiles in the tea shop, his eyes on the imagined footsteps of the girl on the plat form. 

When he got back home, he wanted to go to the bed without even taking a bath. Lying on his sleeve, he found that the scent of the girl seemed to linger around him. Before he finished inhaling all the scent, he was dropped in the realm of sleeping. 

He was greeted by the cacophony of the alarm clock in the morning. He took all his obese body to the bathroom. When he got out of the bathroom, the splashes of water and mint of the toothpaste had changed him into a dutiful worker who only thought about his work.

He had been in this job for more than fifteen years, the equivalent of raising a baby until she reached adolescence. The photo showing him in a funny black gown was hung on the wall beside the clock as if to remind him that he was a man of intellect when he wanted to know the time.

“A man of intellect two decades ago”, he murmured. 

When he reached his office, he lent all his thought to the tasks, his mind was put into a hibernation mood. All for work. That was five thirty when he and his fellow staff were released to their normal life. What made the world a bit more romantic is the envelope laid on each of their desk. Inside was the price for their labor – the salary. Everyone was smiling as if they did not know the salary had to meet with all the expenses of their dependents and themselves in the coming month. Happiness would linger for more than a week when they knew that there was a bonus awarded by their boss who greeted them all and said the business was booming. 

One of the coworkers who was sitting next to him whispered.

“He will have another mistress and invest more in real estate with the lion’s share.”

The other one added,

 “Sure, dude. He will be having so much fun. We don’ even own a house. Our life always suck!”

He smiled. He wanted to tell his co-workers his life was worse than theirs. He didn’t even have a wife. Their conversation had shifted to what they would do with the bonus money and one suggested, 

“ I am going to my baby girls tonight. Wanna go with me?”

All the people in the conversation were eager to go but it took a while for him to say ‘yes’. One part of him wanted to explore what baby girls were and how they were beautiful. But one part of his mind was reluctant for moral reasons.  

With the taxi’s door slamming, the fresh cashes were jumped from their pocket to the smiling taxi driver. While he was calculating how it would cost to have fun with the baby girls, his co-worker ran up the stairs like a man who returned his own house.

The place had a different-world aura. The light was dim and alluring to the guests. He plopped down in a chair and his co-worker went to talk with the guy behind the desk. Then he came back to him and said,

“I am going to relax in a massage room. My room is next to you. I am in room number 8 and your room number is 7. Let’s go.”

“Hold on. Where’s the other people?”

“What?”

“The people from our office.”

“They are all having a paradise in each room. Let’s go meet with chicks.”

He found that, despite 40 years he had lived, his young heart was jumping ceaselessly. He stole a look on his co-worker to investigate as if he heard his pounding heartbeat who disappeared into one room.

He went into the room number 7. There was a girl perching on one side of the bed. He approached her but the girl seemed indistinct. She neither looked at him nor looked away from him. She was very relaxed as though she was the only person in the room. Her relaxed look made him excited.

Her eyes moved on him when he sat on the bed.

“I charge my customer 20,000 Kyats for one penetration. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes, yes.”

 He opened his wallet and counted his money. Only when he was in the middle of counting, he realized he was acting this stupidly. The girl bit her lip to control herself from laughing.

“Okay. That’s good. I want the money before serving you.”

He gave four 5000 Kyat bills. The girl put them in her sling bag and gave him a smile. I give her the money, she gave me a smile now and she will open her legs for me. She’s like a jukebox, he thought to himself. She started taking her clothes and lied on her bed.

Standing with a hard-on, Win Naing was hoping the girl would come to him and give him fellatio like a porn star as a warm-up. But she was just staring at him so he asked her to give him fellatio.

“No, I won’t use my mouth. There is only a traditional sexual practice involved in the charge. If you want to do it, the price will go as much as 50,000 Kyats. Give me another 30,000 Kyats.”

The first thing he imagined was how he would have to survive the month with minus 50,000 Kyats  at the beginning. Finally the temptation was concealed by the insight to the future. He penetrated her without resolving to reaching his wallet again. It was not as good and smooth as he thought. She did not hug him tightly, she did not moan, he did not have a chance to kiss her (this is another thing that doesn’t include in the charge) and both of them did not laugh. 

She took a nap when it was done. He left the room in order to avoid the feeling of guilt he was suffering from. He went back home without looking for his co-workers. He went straight home without entering into Daw Aye Cho’s food shop. Without cursing his boss.

In the morning, he left his home for work as usual. Only after he had secured a seat on the bus, he realized that it was a Sunday. He took off from the bus and retraced the opposite direction he had come. Then he remember the girl who gave him her name card. He wanted to call the girl. Maybe they would eat in Daw Aye Cho’s food shop and told each other their stories. He stood up in the middle of the walking crowd on the pavement to look for her name card. People had to pass him. 

After a few minutes, he came back to Daw Aye Cho’s food. There were only one girl in jeans and apparently, she was not feeling sad. If she was feeling sad, he would be able to borrow her his shoulder to cry on this time. While waiting for his order, he blamed himself,

“I am stupid at keeping things. That’s why I was never promoted in my work.”

When his order came, he focused on the taste of the food until a thought popped up in his mind. He had to start keeping an eye on spending money.       

 Photo courtesy of Willem de Kooning's Woman I, http://www.flickr.com/photos/hisgett/4693619185/

The Questions

The street lamps emit shadows of unwavering breath
With chaos of the running metals
coming back home
But we are way too far
Out from boundary of night,
Out from gravity of light,
As if sleeping on the trash
We die a real death

Like a two-year-old who catches a black cat out of curiosity
Everyone could give other person's death a bother of two minutes
Who else you are to think you are successful?

What could be the ingredients of life
which pour down the relentless days
right on the lazy cars of heavy traffic
painkillers in doctor’s prescription
and walking dead praying for democracy?

How could you enjoy humanly heaven
when you like being masturbated
by the prostitutes of religious bigotry?

Wary of questions
I used to meditate
in the painful forest
that has gone to a bank account now

I want to go home
and on the way home
the tires would never fail to screech
as they are kissing with the road

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The Words

It’d be at best if we could swallow

Everything down with a morning coffee

Or last night shower

I wanted to live

In the time zone

No historians born or no politicians born

Perhaps no built-in duty of adulation

 To uninvited gods so far as we write, read and sing

I gulp the coffee down

And bounce back to my shell

Before all sense of poetry dies itself naturally

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11:30, 7:00

The rain of darkness is cascading down to me
I still live in the world I am afraid to live
When the language of us flies like a bubble over these married hills,
The messengers of her love are summoned to the rare courage found in my heart
In my own room or perhaps am I in Norwegian Wood?

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My 24

With the last barriers of Civilization looming over me

The last meeting with your gaze

Still whispers ‘I love you’

The most amazing thing about

Falling in love with you is

I can see a different world

Of Human stories

Through every single look of your eyes

Through every single touch of your hands

We bite the love

Sandwiched between helpless tears

And indulgent kisses

When the stolen time is ticking away

All I could do is letting the remnants

Wrap me up

And place me safely

In the protected field

Of enduring memories

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