palm trees, fresh coconut juice, exotic fruits picked this morning, sandy beaches, perpetual sunshine. the constellation orion is on his side here. when i was a child my mother always pointed him out to me. his belt, his sword, his arms and feet. he was a soldier standing upright and at attention. here, orion is on his side. he looks like he has just woken up from a nap and is stretching. he looks less like a soldier and more like a lazy security guard. i love all of the diversity and difference. i love waking up to roosters crowing in the morning. i would be living in paradise except for one incredibly annoying vermin.
it’s the scourge of vietnam. it’s the uninvited guest ruining my party. it’s that piece of food stuck in your back teeth. it’s that person who chews with his mouth open. it’s the feeling you get when you’re stuck in a traffic jam when you have somewhere to go. it’s the headache that never goes away no matter how much aspirin you take. the mosquito.
you see them everywhere. they swarm in packs and seem to float like specks of black dust through the air. your first reaction is to try to kill them by swatting at them. you violently attack them with your hand but they only seem to float harmlessly past. it’s like trying to catch air.
then you finally kill one of them. maybe it perched somewhere on your wall and it caught your eye. you slowly walk over to it and wallop it with all your might leaving a black and red miniature carcass on your wall. you feel elation, joy, success. that’s the next stage. soon enough you see another and another and another. you realize that trying to kill them one by one would be like trying to eat a bowl of spaghetti o’s with a needle. you give up.
the next stage is acceptance. you learn to live with the constant itching. the moments where you’re sitting around enjoying a cup of coffee and you notice an unexpected twinge of pain on your bare feet. you itch and itch and swat and swat knowing that any one of these bites could carry with it malaria or the dengue. it’s a game of russian roulette on a miniature scale.
living with a perpetual pest is nothing but a random annoyance once you’ve given up. just accepting the fact that every night you go to bed with itchy feet. just knowing that you’ve been robbed of your blood by a tiny winged vampire. just learning that there’s really no such thing as paradise.
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