Thoughts From Under The Net

There’s something about waking up inside a mosquito net. Rose-coloured dawn stands peeking tiptoed through my window and plays like an old film on the insides of this gauzy veil. It has something to do with memories of tipping the furniture on end in the living room when I was still child-size, covering the whole wonderful jumble with bedsheets and crawling inside. A tent, a cave, a spaceship, whatever you want – a world. The real one disappears. I have this illusion that inside here no one can see me, that this shimmering thing works only one way: me looking out. It defines something extremely, irreplaceably important. In here is my place.

I have a particularly good net. Cylinder shaped, flowing like a moonshower from a single brass ring, and stretched gracefully around at the top by an octagonal wood frame like the veins of a moth’s wing, it stands like a white tower around my bed. Inside it is an airy castle, a spaceship headed for the stars. Fly Me to the Moon. Outside it is treated in some poison. In the morning I step out over mosquito carcasses on the floor.

Outside is my day. Uncertainty. Heat. Another trip out into the world in ruins to find out who is doing what where, who has been lost and who saved, who is rebuilding and how grateful everyone is for the help of my organization. Down the hall is the hot, mosquito-y washroom with its slightly slimy floor and the dear, cold water that comes out of the plastic hose feeling so nice for the moment while you are scrunched beneath it and disappearing so quickly afterwards into the stickiness of the rest of the day. Down the stairs are the hideous cast iron furniture and the round glass table where breakfast is sliced fruit and bread and peanut butter with the chair-petals poking me in the back. Everyone is speaking another language. The dial-up internet connection takes three tries and finally bites. Nothing is resolved by the morning mail and the daily pleasure of some contact by a friend is quickly used up after the third read-through. So then: my notebook, the scribbled shorthand from yesterday, and the copy to write today. Turn it into the kind of thing that lets people feel it, even though I was only there for half an hour, and spent most of it standing around – even though I hardly felt it myself.

What I feel is like staying here in my mosquito net world. Look, there is my headlamp. I could get up and slip out unnoticed, close the door, close the blinds, trap the darkness in the room and dive back in through the white waterfall to read by torchlight for hours. Could we not just hold the sun still in the sky and delay the hotsticky day for just a little? In here I have books by the dozen, prayers, paper and pen to write with. I understand the mosquito net culture, I’m fluent in the tongue. My job description is the clearest of things, no confusion, plenty of work, much reward: read, write, pray, watch dawnlight play on the screen, dream.

But it will not do. Already the house stirs beneath me, shaking like an earthquake of Things Waiting To Do. The daily task, if nothing else, of finding reasons to believe in what I’m doing. Ok. I will get up, tear the curtain hiding the Holy of Holies from top to bottom, hang the pieces on the bedposts, and let the rest of the world pour in over me like seawater.