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Mark Terrill |
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Bearing Off-course between Fez and Tangier, we stopped the car and got out. The engine ticked and a lone cicada augured its screech into the hot silence. Dry scratchy brown hills sloped down toward a shallow river valley where figures in white threshed grain and a hoary donkey gnawed on thistles. We were very far from everything yet close to something else; that same blade of sun suspended above the same primordial scenario. Contingencies forged in heat and dust, the ties that bind made of straw; could love reach through all of this and bring us out on the other side? The changes wrought by time are either merciless or benevolent. At the next fork in the road, the direction would have to be decided anew. Star Ferry In transit, reality is in real time. In flashbacks, it becomes compressed. From the Kowloon YMCA I walk through the streets to the harbor and board the Star Ferry. Enameled metal signs on varnished wooden bulkheads say Don't Spit, Beware of Pickpockets. We pass sampans, junks, and rows of rusty freighters tugging languidly at their frayed lines. Victoria Peak looms with oriental majesty above the toothy skyline of Hong Kong. Already the memory is devouring the day; the wind, the water, all that won't endure. And so it's true: the memory is the one side, the other side we'll never know. |