So Bali… 8 years after my first stay, my first step outside Europe, as my traveling heart has started to leak, to bleed, sheer finality of an eternal lost. You warmly welcomed me. Arriving getting more and more a routine. Airports? Luggage? Visa? Wriggling queues? I feel nothing than routine… no hurry, no rush, no excitement. Airports are a life between, somewhere, around me but not inside me, just to get outside, to reach the road, to find a place, your place, more places, to arrive, minutes, hours later or earlier, who cares, I have my home on my back. And anyway, a bench is international.
So I left the checked-in area and looked for my pick-up, Agung, a handsome guy, with a sign in his hand, “Plorian”. My first pick up during my travel and I have to admit, maybe I am getting older or lazy or both or neither of it, just only tired of unnecessary adventures, I felt quite comfortable to jump in a car and get a ride to a booked accommodation. I have to calculate my budget new, adding pick-up costs.
Ubud, I hardly recognize you. Even though I have not a lot of memories of the rebelious days and nights we spent together, maybe we never loved each other in a serious way, maybe I was too drunken… but I still know your name! That doesn´t count?! – You become old like a modernized colonialism does. Call it tourism, call it mobile-ism, flexibilism, or try and suck your own boops. You are hiding under that thick leveled organic-eco-spirit-blessed change of a make-up in your masquerade, your smile carved in prejudice of hospitality, meticulous demonized native. – Fortunately retro has reached your trend-setting as well. My retrospective did. About 10 years after the bombing… domesticated by development as usual, so why I am blaming you like a minded bum. I even can´t claim that I don´t like your new face. I admit that there are a lot of adoring effects, sharing ideas and profit, but as I can see in your eyes, behind your smiling rolling eye-lashes, you are missing your peaceful corners on your roads, the slow beating flip-flopping rythm in your veins, the meditating breathing of your hillshores… green bright terraces, like an unoceaned, rised flowering blooming garden, a sinking heaven´s frontgate, drowning in construction sites and investments, suspecting a safe future. The view on your three volcanos, fossiled surrender to a postcard of a paradised retreatment center. – Suspect the safe future in command. But I feel I am just far from my road… I don´t want to blame you for that… my heart is a splatter triology, the cambodian family I left, my beloved and my german family, my beloved ones, loyal partners in fear, surviving and putting me right there where I am.
Leaving Cambodia was as hard as I expected, the fact that I will return in two months eased the sadness and dried the tears, still I don´t have to remember, they are always around, more the experiences, the knowledge, the horizon they expanded… my steps are much more in pace, slow, unrestless and not even aware of walking. Missing beloved on the road sucks, in a good way, but sucks.
Arriving at Ubud, hugging my beloved friends, was not even as dramatic as I supposed it will be or have to be. No tears. Smiling, yes, why not, we are friends, we always had and will have a lot to laugh about. After moments of “let me see, you look… but you… it´s so gorgeous, amazing, so WOW!!! to… after that months of skype and writing… but, so, what we are doing now?” – laughing… we kept on sharing life, spending time together like we always did, like it has been just yesterday, that we said goodbye to each other. “Let´s go to the shop and buy something for dinner!”
After a couple of days, even your sanity tells you it´s different… it more feels like, that I visiting them not they are visiting me here in Southeast Asia. It feels like daily life on holiday, like we will return in two weeks back to Germany together. At this point my sanity reaches its edges. Buddha bless my life! I will leave to continue. So. Ubud, poor hole of a rabbit, you are our stage, to act in this visionary wonderland. Maybe I just will run crazy, run crazy further down the road, keep on running, so, I never felt so purposeless, defragmented. out of order, in order of my outside. I am here. Not here like HERE, like that carpe diem-buffaloshit. I am here like I am, I do what I am and I am what I intend to do, but not reaching the surface of my awareness. I even don´t have to be aware. Try to be aware. Be aware. Come on. Try! Make this pressed strained toilet face. Feel your blood flushing up your head, constipating your “I have to think, solve, arrange, delay, rearrange, take care of, break up and fuck that”-problem shit, like close of a soaked climax or near the end of all anticlimax. I am a wanderer. Passed Ubud. Meeting friends, best friends, traveling friends, practicing Yoga, relaxing at the pool, enjoying my life and be grateful for the possibility to catch that part of beauty the world still offers, if you have courage, a dream and money to afford. And, especially, an indifference towards drama. Drama is luxury, audience boring.
Purification!