/excerpts from letters to Erik/
Hey Erik,
I will try to define strangeness in this strange city for you.
I feel like I have been picked out of everything I had known and been dropped inside a movie, and there's a director saying here's your cinematic moment, you always wanted to make a movie out of your life, right? but I don't know the script, or the plot or anything at all. I am trying to find the Dublin that Joyce wrote Dubliners about and I traveled so far for, but I think I am too late for that, or perhaps I haven't been here long enough yet. But except the graffiti which somehow reminds me of you, and another young man who didn't know a lot of English but still helped me cross the road, nothing in this city feels right. The only colours I see are brick red, beige and grey, and I miss the warmth and chaos of home. I am too scared to get out of the house, I stumble on my words, run out of things to say and I am convinced I have made a mistake but I am trying not to think about that. Trying to focus on the positives. I think I will figure it out by and by, enough to last me a year at least, I hope.
Let me tell you about my roommate. She used to live here with her boyfriend she broke up with last month and had me move in. I can't help but wonder how she must feel to have a stranger replace a dearly loved one. She works all day, parties all night, comes home at 3, never offers her secrets and doesn't ask for any in return, and I am grateful. There are cum stains on the bed and his belt is still on the hook and I feel like a ghost inside the memories of a life lived by someone else, but in good way. The place is filled with things and something about that is so homey. My roommate doesn't offer any secrets but she is kind to me and she made me food for tonight before she left for the week, which I am going to heat up now.
I am trying to think of this as a very long exile from everything I love, and I know you don't approve that way of thinking but then I never had your wanderlust or your love for new cities, and this helps.
...
I think I am starting to see the colours now, or the the colours are beginning to show themselves. Red white and grey are the predominant colours but not everything is red white and grey. This is a city that loves it's graffiti, and the old colonial architecture reminds me of everything I loved in Calcutta. It's like meeting a ghost from long back in a place you least expected. It's funny because the only things that stand out to me are the ones that remind me of home, but that is to be expected I think.
...
I have been taking long bus rides, window seats, getting off near the last stop and taking the bus back. The scenery gets boring after a while but it's better than being alone at home, and it's fun listening in to the conversations of other passengers. There was a group of teenage boys who were trying to spot their school from the bus and a couple of girls who accidentally played what I assume was sex video - sounded like it anyway - and dissolved into giggling laughter. Dublin is starting to get me in little ways like this.
