"But where is the school girl that used to be me?" -Joan Didion
I was riding my bike through the villages, it was 100 degrees, too hot to be on a bike, but almost too hot to sit still, every breath I took felt like a mouthful of hot water. We stopped in a village 40 kilometers away in a place that you can’t imagine growing up in because it’s made of sticks and stones and you would know everyone’s story by the age of two. There was one shop, a small store that sold coke, cold coke. The sugar and carbonation were a relief as was the condens
Living
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (o
