Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
He felt lost and loose. He still felt stunned. He remembered that he had only
touched him by barely stroking his hair and his hand and then touching his
underwear. It only lasted a minute and then he turned on his side away from him
and his own instincts. It was an insignificant minute in one's life and he
could not figure out why it became such evidence of the accuser that he was
dirty-the charge of homosexuality not being directly stated. He asked himself
why, even now, he was staring at moving forest and long stretches of road with
this yearning for love. He opened another pint of milk. He sipped and then
rested its opening to his bottom lip. Why did human beings end in such closure?
Why did they gain worth and awareness of their being only in personal
interactions? Was he nothing but the composite of other people's impressions of
him? These impressions--these judgments-- could not be real. They were based on
brief outward gestures and the judges had nothing but their own usual
experiences of their petty and selfish lives to compare others with. In Japan
women who left their children locked up in hot cars were rarely accused of the
crime of manslaughter; and in Korea the handicapped, he had seen, were left to
crawl like worms, pushing their carts and singing their songs as traditional
music blared forth. He died every time he saw one of them. He yearned for the
love and the language where he could befriend someone who was handicapped and
he chastised himself for only being able to lay money in some of their cans.
Once he put his hand into the hair of such a man. He stroked the hair around
his face. The gesture lasted only a couple seconds. The man screamed out
something and a security guard began moving toward them. Sang Huin placed money
in the can and went away. Then he began to question himself. Maybe it was
loneliness that had compelled him to do that. After all, the action was
undoubtedly bizarre in the sense that no one else did such things. He was not
wearing a monk's robe. Another man's fate was none of his business. This type
of action just was not done; and yet, he was not the same as others. Suffering
the paralysis that would not allow him to make a full smile and finding the
eyes x- rays that could go, for the most part, beyond pleasant countenances to
a suffering innate in other beings, it was no wonder that he was peculiar. It
was no wonder that at Christmas parties or barrooms he sat and drank in silence
feeling like a buffoon for not acting like one. In ways he was a buffoon: his
taciturn ways that thwarted the lighthearted frivolity of a world conceived out
of motion was the substance that often caused contemptuous laughs.
What did it matter? What did any of his actions towards others matter? Everyone
came and left him. He was dizzy on a merry-go-round.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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