This land is nothing like that which I have known, the familiar, if faint, of South America--Central America's bite back. I am most adoring monks on motorcycles, orange flights with sun speckled umbrellas to protect their heads. Temples tickle the senses in Phnom Pehn, send all eyes up to the sky.
Of course, I have been feverish and seen very little of the city. What I have witnessed has been by tuk-tuk, a motorcycle driven carriage with padded seats. It reminds me, somehow, of a carousel ride, with the same pleather on cotton as those red seats that twirled. Here is instead a modified game of chicken that rules...there are no stop signs or lights; I have taken to looking away when we enter crossings, my eyes at the temples, eyes at the skies.
Men and women eat at street carts, hot stews and rice warmed by relentless sun. Women in pajamas dance hip-hop in street side parks. Taxi drivers wear real rayban sunglasses and boys smile with overwhelming reluctance.
My desire for coconut milk has already been satiated in these days; and I am certain in saying that my father would faint from the incredulous amounts of lemongrass in the national dishes. Frozen lime sodas and seafood stews make me swoon.
And still, the echo of the past remains. It is as eery and altogether tortured as a past impenetrable by us, outsiders. I stay so far outside of that world, no matter the ache it awakes inside--those ghosts awake and alive in the streets, in the airs, in a generation of men mostly missing, unmistakable.
Even with fever, this city opens up a world to glance within, of tropical fauna and gold turrets that cannot reach beyond the glare of ghouls.
