Happy Valentine

I don’t know what the artist would make of it. It is like an oasis at the side of a desert, a gulf between us, a wet fruit in a dry skin, a chapter in your own book that you did not write. Tall thin buildings stab the hot smoggy air like bent knitting needles striking out from a half-baked pancake. Serious faith mingles with sun-reflected aspirations. I have not reached my destination. (I shall not cease from exploration.) A mixture of fog and snow where I am heading means a delay of at least another day. Such is the nature of the beast. But I am not alone. I have carved the initials of some kind of camaraderie with someone also working for the same people, and our tribal elders so-to-speak have found a way of taking care of everything. As a result, I am sitting alone in a hotel room on Valentine’s Day having managed to catch - like amnesia - a few hours sleep. Desert images from the plane journey to this moment flash back. Oil fields pocking Planet Sand. Night flashes like night sweats. But I do remember the artist, oh yes, and the children. As I write, the sound of air-conditioning hums like a progressive, slightly dulled choir. Just then, as I finished that last sentence, there was a knock on the door and a polite man in a black suit entered with a beautiful bowl of fruit. There is no round red table, no bright red sofa. But there is fruit. I am due to fly out of this fictitious oasis early tomorrow. I am sure this world and the world belonging to my destination could not be further apart, and yet both my destination and the other war zone are really no distance from here at all. Is there some kind of moral there, a clue perhaps to the mechanics of peace rather than the splinters of war? What is it for example about one place and another that makes one prickle so with violence and the other chill like a perfectly cooked pepper plucked from the fridge? It can’t just be natural resources, for obvious reasons - one of the war zones is on fire because of oil, this one not. Was it because it was attacked? (Sometimes, obvious is illuminating, instructive.) Anyway, I am watching the news. I am thinking of the artist. I am eating fruit. I am poking through the plastic seaweed of this culture clash in order to get my bearings. I may slip out of contact again.