Being Nowhere

lost and found

by Jeneen R. Garcia

Published in October 2005 

As I lie in bed now, puddles on the roof, left over from this afternoon’s rain, trickle down to a gutter below, pounding gently but insistently on the heavy quiet. Outside my room, the lights are dim, padlocks clicked shut on all the other doors in the house. Everyone else has gone. I peek at the moon smiling its Cheshire-cat smile between the slats of my window. It is an extraordinary view that I take in again and again, since at this hour, I am usually still out at work, or at some appointment in a place where no one looks out at the sky.

I am, in fact, supposed to be at choir practice right now. But nights of staying up late, and a work and home environment of sneezing people have forced me to get off the world and allow it to turn without me for awhile. And what a blessing this sickness is!

Because I am legitimately excused from my responsibilities, nobody needs me, nobody misses me. Everybody else who COULD need me believes I’m already tied up elsewhere. And if I suddenly show up someplace I don’t usually go, no one would have any practical use for me, because I’d just be a kink in their routine. I can wander freely, and people would just see me (or not see me) as a blur in the crowd, a fixture on the wall.

As far as anybody’s concerned, I might as well be nowhere: a place where I serve no other purpose but to listen to life as it pulses. Not in the past, where regrets cycle in repetition. Not in the future, where to-do lists stretch on in constant forward motion. But here, where the moon appears through my window as it is meant to, and the sound of every raindrop is as clear and steady as my own heartbeat. Here, cats leap nimbly from roof to roof, yellow-breasted birds chirp as they fly off to other branches, gumamelas fold their petals when twilight begins to fall.

These rare times when I must stay in sick (or perhaps, when my body allows itself to be sick), my more active senses are dulled, and I am forced to tune in to the world without the usual buzzing in my head of must-do’s and must-have-done’s. My body tells me, “slow down, stay awhile”. And I listen. I close my eyes and hear the neighbors’ voices ring clearly with what they mean--pain or love or the quiet joy of being alive to cook and clean and do the everyday chores. I hear vendors calling out with their trade--“anduhaw”, “mais”, “puto kutsinta”, “ay’s’pat’”--words that ring with dignity, and the strength that keeps their family alive.

Fortunately, I am never too sick that I can’t go out to get myself some food. My body knows that, living alone in a strange city, there’s no one else who will feed it if it breaks down completely. And so as students fidget in their classes, and employees hunch over their desks, do not be surprised if you see me one afternoon sitting under a tree with lunch on my lap and my eyes closed, wind tousling my hair. I am nowhere--now, here--the only place any human being can ever truly live.