The warung was four walls and a roof, twelve tables and a door, twenty-four slight and elegant locals,
one pallid westerner, and me.

The walls weren't really walls, as we would imagine them in Europe or the States: what would they keep out? Woven bamboo that allowed light to escape and the afternoon breeze to enter, allowed the quiet river of Indonesian conversation to course in an out, to mingle with melati blossoms and diesel… and the fire of equatorial sun, and the overripe stench of durian… and the pulsing twitter of the bird market…

Maybe at this distance the memories merge. Maybe the cities crouch together there, near the bottom of the well of time, and the street restaurants begin to blend together, the whole of my history perfumed with flowers and the memory of intimacy and of war.

Maybe the other ex-pat was aware of me; maybe he was not. I watched from my table in the corner, recent inhabitant of central Java, still… innocent in Asia. He sat at a table alone.

He sat at a table and he would have been alone, accompanied or not. His clothing was traveled, and washed when possible. A three-day beard. And a disanima that drew the eyes as silence draws a listener.

— There is a body filled with stories, I thought.

I thought, as a foreigner myself, of making acquaintance. There is a sharing that can take place between the traveled: I have seen, you have seen. I thought of saying hello.

The silence hung on him like a shroud. The stories clung to his skin like parasites. When he moved his hand it was against the gravity of histories; he was slow; he was buried in memories.

Suddenly, I understood him. — Of what I have seen, what can I share? Of what I share, what will be understood?

A poet, an author, delights in the challenge, delights in making the invisible seen. Your life becomes a conduit, your eyes and sense of touch the way in, your voice and your fingers the way out. If you speak, you reach out, and something finds you. But a traveler alone… a traveler alone creates countries of himself, takes in til sated, cannot stop eating colors and words and time, til glutted, grows more and more removed.

He hardly lifted his eyes. Only once. Only once to scan a scene he had seen hundreds of times before: himself as an outsider, adrift on a sea of culture and history and people, those whose roots reached down to water, while his were cut loose and wandering. He scanned the scene and his eyes drifted over the familiar unfamiliar, round in a shallow sweep that would admit look for something new and not find it, would allow nothing more. Unshared is as good as unexperienced.

His eyes found mine. Empty-full. Empty-full. The other ex-pat. The other Other. The bottom of the well. The depth of the waters.

I finished my meal, feeling suddenly lonely. I made my plans to return home. The sooner the better.