My Surreal Life

Every time I arrive in a new country I am overtaken by the feeling that my life is unreal, or perhaps the better term is surreal.  

After living in Japan in an apartment not much bigger than a shoebox, in an apartment in Mantova, Italy adjacent to both the train station and the busy "Street of Trucks" (also above a pizza joint where I would be awakened at least one night per week by the smashing of plates, hurled at each other by the highly vocal and emotional husband and wife team who owned the place), in a haunted medieval Dutch castle with peacocks and geese shrieking and honking half the night, in a renaissance era complex of villas overlooking the Florentine skyline, in a campus that resembled a giant yellow spaceship that was nestled in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, and now in a high-rise apartment building in the metropolis of Jakarta, home to 30 million residents, I feel as though I haven't been living a life as much as I have been inhabiting a peculiar dream.  

And the previous paragraph outlined just the highlights. I didn't even mention life in Red-States of Kentucky or Arkansas, which in many ways represent a more alien existence than most of my international experiences.  I mean no one in a foreign land ever served me a road-kill deer that had been run over by an ambulance, dressed and cleaned in a bathtub, and secretly served, until I learned the truth later, in a stew with potatoes and dumplings.

Surreal. 

I remember asking myself on several occasions when I lived in Kyrgyzstan, "How in the name of God, did you end up here?"  Never could really answer that question completely. And, in reality, whatever that is, despite my total befuddlement, I usually was happy to be where I was whether it be Kyrgyzstan, Japan, or the boarding house I lived in when I worked in New Jersey that was operated by an elderly Greek woman who would yell at me and all her boarders each morning as we ran off to work, accusing us of not paying our rent for the month.  That's why I always carried my rent receipt with me, tucked into my wallet as evidence, each and every day.

After a few weeks or months, I will become more familiar with Jakarta and the outlines of my new life will begin to take shape and everything will seem a little bit more like home, although that concept tends to elude me. And after that, people and places here will begin to occupy a fond space in my heart, assuming we all make it in this dangerous and unpredictable world. Perhaps what is real will become clearer with the passing of time and I will add experiences here to those which I try to always carry in my heart from all the places I have been during this strange journey that is my life. Kind-hearted companions. Laughter.  Tastes enjoyed, incredible sights seen, the gentle fragrance directly after a spring rainfall, the image of a full moon glowing in the night sky.  Perhaps it is these constants across all boundaries where one can ground one's self beyond the surreal.

I will go to bed tonight and will be awakened at 4 a.m. not by shrieking peacocks or angry purveyors of pizza, but by the chants emanating through the loudspeakers of the dozens of mosques in my neighborhood.  After waking up and wondering for a moment how I ended up here, I will turn over in my bed and give my own brief chant celebrating my surreal life, before I return to my slumber.