Appendage

I am a thirty six year old man in a small hotel room in Jakarta Indonesia. Outside a hive of motorbikes make tremendous noise as they rev their engines and honk their horns jockeying for position in their never ending race to nowhere. Where I am is not even the heart of the city, only a quiet suburb. Even the appendage of a city of eleven million pulses uncontrollably.

Beside me, curled up like a tiny planet is my exhausted nine month old daughter and across the hall my other little girl and wife are sleeping. I spent the night lost in The Great Gatsby. Swishing the words through my teeth and spitting them into a spittoon like a fine mahogany tinted tawny port.

image by bigux

And, now as my eyes grow heavy, I get ready for a long and comfortable sleep. I am not sure why or for whom this night needed to be documented and shared, but the way I see it- if our lives are any more meaningful than the awareness we have of them at their most mundane, I would be surprised.