hey, I'll clean the pool

With the windows and door open a cool refreshing mountain breeze passes through on a cloudy and calm evening.  I spoke with my boss today and they’re flying me down to my next place of employment tomorrow morning.  It didn’t take too long to pack either, eight days of personal belongings spilled out only so much.

My boss’ sentiments echoed my own regarding living in Kabul.  In Buraimi it felt like house arrest without a border pass and the guesthouse’s proximity to the university campus here is bleak.  With tight paranoia security and basically nothing for the expatriate to socially escape to, I see how the leash chokes quickly. 

The university ought to do more for their staff here to get them out with each other.  Of course Kabul has what most don’t have and that is fear, the slow uneasy numbed simmering kind, people afraid to get comfortable, people afraid to believe there’ll be no more damn sudden death before their eyes.  How do you shake horror from the collective conscious, I can’t put myself in their shoes nor do I want to but we can only give empathy.  And hope? 

I was told there will be a pool for me to use.  Really?  What’s the catch, there has to be, wait, there’s no water, it’s filthy, it’s too hot, it’s two feet at the deep end.  I can’t imagine someone has been maintenancing a pool with no teacher there for now six weeks.  I’ll take care of it and keep it clean.

I am forever thankful that Erika asked me to go with them to the Panjshir Valley yesterday.  If I had not seen what I saw and headed to the desert city what a loss it would have been.  The routes to the places written in Newby’s famous book, stories of the Soviets and Alexander the Great and the abundance of fruits, fruits!  An apricot tree, a walnut tree, a mulberry tree, a cherry tree, all within my reach, a garden of eden wedged next to a river that I drank freely out of is pretty damn special.

War, ironically, gave nature a breather.  No tourists, no picnics, left alone except by those who live there and there aren’t many deep though there was light traffic heading further north along the dusty road.  Don’t you always wonder how far roads going up go?  Do they end at villages?  At the top with nowhere to go but down?  Like those in Nepal?  I think the valleys in Afghanistan never stop until they go over and you start another one. 

And I blew off my dentist appointment this morning.  My pain threshold felt a little higher though it’s still uncomfortable to eat a toasted peanut butter and marmalade sandwich with potato sticks this evening.  Great dinner, eh?  I know I might be taking a greater risk but like my boss said, if I arrange it with my students I can fly to Dubai and see a dentist if it becomes that bad, o please I don’t wanna fly to Dubai to see a dentist.  There has to be someone semi qualified to fill and crown a stupid tooth in Afghanistan.  If I can make a contact with someone on that big army base with Tim Horton’s sour cream doughnuts and Subway steak sandwiches, maybe I could see a dentist there as well.  I mean I am being paid by the same government as those fellas behind the big walls, right?

Come on, please, let me in.  Twenty minutes is all I need, okay?  Where’s the px?  Is there a Walgreens around here somewhere?  What?  You’ll let me in if I answer one question, sure. 

9.11pm

The cool breeze has stopped coming in.  I said a few crazy things yesterday and wonder how people take that kind of nutty talk.  I told my colleague while we lounged under a canopy of fruit trees about the crazy ‘vision’ I had that somewhere up in Hadai Gwai country there was an island with my name on it.  Being from British Colombia I thought maybe there’d be some insight I might glean from, some clue to what kind of ‘wishful’ vision this could mean.  Nah, nothing.  I guess I assumed she being from that province of original nations and…never mind.  It’s embarrassing still, to wonder when I breathed really rare air six years ago.  Foolish man.  What good is it to hold onto imaginations beyond this present reality.  It does no good.  Go to bed and God Bless this tired city.