01 January 2012

time

And so, I am back, and this is a new year. Or something. I'm never really sure about this time thing, even though I like the numbers that repeat (11:11 is my favorite).

It's just all so arbitrary, though. Who says that this particular moment in the middle of the night means something? Someone just decided it, but there is nothing to differentiate it from the moment before or after, not if you don't have a clock.

Even with a clock, if you don't have the tv on to Times Square, the moment means very little.

...

For some reason, I started thinking about New Year's Eve 2003, when I'd been in Rwanda for two months. I spent the evening at the hotel that I always stayed at, in Kigali, and somehow I fell into sitting out in the grassy courtyard with a Lebanese guy who spent the evening telling me how he got a girl pregnant when she was 15 and he was 25, because it was the only way her dad would let them get married.

It was, to say the least, a strange evening, but at least I was too busy deciding whether or not he was creepy to be lonely.

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