No Gravity
A careless table and a dark purple wall: that’s all I could focus on. Just a single day in an alien country and I was already tired of the air I was breathing. I remember vividly the day I regretting not coming here sooner. I felt overwhelmed and unprepared for the United States. My mind told me three weeks was enough time, but when I reached it I couldn’t have been more wrong. I managed to lose my contacts, addresses, numbers, and almost myself within a day, making this transition even more difficult. I felt that nothing was going to go as planned, and that’s exactly what happened.
Coming to the United States was an adventure that I could never truly prepare myself for. While staying at a motel in Brooklyn, New York, my room was broken into during the night and my phone was stolen from me. This is how I lost all of my important numbers and my mind. I never would have imagined my first night here would go like this.
Realizing how tragic this incident really was, made me fall into complete sadness. To think that someone I never harmed, hurt me so bad was difficult to take in. Especially since I needed my phone more than ever to locate services I needed and contact people to guide me. Luckily I was able to make it back to the airport to reach my flight to Erie.
The only person to blame in this experience would be the robber. Although I do not know this man and most likely never will, I still to this day get upset about this incident. Looking back on it now, I can laugh about what happened, but I never would have thought things would have gone so smoothly with my flight previously. I take some blame in this occurrence because I should have made sure my window and door were secured. However, I was so exhausted from my twenty-six hour flight. I figured that no harm would come, but this day has taught me a valuable lesson. If you don’t want to lose anything valuable, you should protect it accurately. Also, I learned that nothing goes as planned, and you must overcome hardships effectively.
Suddenly, I was struck by emptiness, the pitch black void surrounded me. In this moment I realized I really had no one to count one or anywhere to go. I kept thinking why someone would do that to me? Maybe because I have always tried to filter the rationalism in everything it made me think for a while. I went deep into my past. I could hear my grandfather playing his folk instrument while I counted the numbers.
Throughout these years I have realized that through my counting sessions with my grandfather, I had developed an unconscious love for the beauty that Mathematics reflects onto this real world. I would always imagine the numbers dancing on my grandpa’s rhythmical beats whenever I felt lost among the complexities of my days. My very first lesson my grandpa taught me was that you can only start counting and understand the infinity of it.
I believe this has to be my brain’s counter-mechanism to wipe out all the anxiety caused by the situation I was in. The first thing I had to do was inquire about the robbery with the motel’s manager. The Indian man responded with “I don’t care”. Which seemed rather quirky and unprofessional to me. I told myself however, that everything was going to work out. I did not bother to speak to man except for asking him to call me a taxi. I hurried and packed my belongings and put on a new attitude.
In the cab I was still thinking of drum beats and how they inspired me throughout this journey from my home to pursue further understanding and knowledge. But I guess all your ambitions become secondary when you have nowhere to go or no one to call upon.
I could see the grey-bluish sky beyond the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and somewhere deep down I wanted to see them as snow- caped mountains. I was missing my homeland so much and felt a deep solitude. I asked the driver if he had a light. He said “sir, yes sir”. I had not had a cigarette in a very long time but I just wanted to blow all that frustration into the thin air, rushing to disappear among the clouds hanging in the blue sky.
As I sat down at the bus station after purchasing the greyhound tickets. It felt unusual seeing all these new faces of different origins. As I became aware of the time again I hurried to the pizza corner to fill my empty stomach. It is funny how your body loses track of food once space and time gets warped around you.
