Reflections Scribbled at Dusk on a Bus Ride into Ethiopia

Homelessness: that strange ache of nostalgia and déjà vu that you feel when entering a foreign land.

One that is not yours, nor has ever been yours, yet somehow, gazing out on its gently folded landscape, you feel a calling as if from the house of childhood years, and the man you might have become.

If only you could remove yourself from the current, descend from the ton of metal and plastic and engine fuel, have these evaporate around you until even the roar of motors and the squeal of brakes are no more than a dissipated echo, a mirage gently sinking into the moist earth below.

If you could walk barefoot through this earth and feel the pulse of its ancient rhythm, as soft and malleable as silt curled beneath your toes, then you would have found an origin, a starting point at least, a tap from which the soul trickles, spreading far, but always with the taste of this spring on its ephemeral lips.

Through the kind bushes and sunken ravines you would walk, over the mounds of soil and craggy rocks alike, until you would come out onto a surface, more alien than the stars above (your roof), more unnatural than the cathedrals built by insects (your neighbors), sliced across the horizon as if to subdue it, pulling the soul’s trickle faster, tugging it toward a mythological infinity that whispers, always barely audible, yet piercing through the low rumble of the earth, implanting a desire that cannot be fulfilled, yet begs satisfaction,

until the metal and the plastic, the rubber and the fuel with a destination to achieve, re-condense around you, forming smudged panes through which the eye hungrily digs, and in the belly, or behind it, barely audible over the motor’s hum, whispers an ache.

Ethiopian countryside outside the walls of the ancient city of Harar