pretty strings in the wind (2/4)

by cthurst6

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it.”

~ Ernest Hemingway

you lose pieces of yourself as you go and look for what can replace them, but there is nothing that can replace them. so you pick things along the way that might fit where they need to fit, though not necessarily where you want them. this is the downfall and the art that is life. don’t forget it. and eventually there will be too many pieces falling and too many pieces missing. then you will fall to your knees, and then to your hands, and there you will remain until maybe someone comes and sees you and picks but the choicest pieces of you to put where she really wanted someone else.

we left Hoi An after the fifth night, just before the sixth night, taking another sleeper bus further south to Nha Trang. leaving around 6:30, we were expected to arrive twelve hours later at our destination.
my head had begun to hurt earlier in the day, so full of thoughts and concerns, that i lay back in my seat and took to sleeping almost immediately. it helped my headache, so that when we stopped i could get out for a snack without feeling blood pumping in my ears.
sitting, looking around at our stop–some square including a quiet restaurant, public restroom, and small collection of local food vendors–i was struck by the lives of each person i’d passed, and was currently sitting beside. and me, just one more tired face to them driving through. they would not remember me, and i would not remember them–only their condition, both tourist and local. there were cracks in the tile of the restaurant, and someone knew how they came to be. someone had built the concrete lavatory, had stirred the mixture, had fetched the water and poured the foundation and laid the pipes. things had been new at one point.
and we all move past.
the bus did so, boarding everyone and leaving the vendors sitting sleepily in their stalls to wait for the next bus to arrive.

Nha Trang greeted us in the morning. i woke first on the bus, and was rewarded with a view of the slumbering villages and hills on the coast. just a few early fishermen were rowing their canoes out, their lanterns hanging on the smooth waters, leading them towards the pink and red horizon. it painted the sky, the still sea, and i was reminded of Forrest Gump when i raised my camera to take a picture. it stopped me, considering the scene in which he talked to his buried wife recounting all the things he’d seen–the stars in the war, the beauty of the sea, the moments when he ran and the earth and the sky seemed to merge together as one. sometimes life deserves not to have its picture taken. sometimes it deserves to be seen and forgotten, or remembered only as we remember each other–not by faces but interactions–and recounted only in words, that the teller might convey the sunrise with his emphasis alone.