A Beautiful Story Project
PROLOGUE
My little clip of the city skyline, a few Himalayan peaks in the distance, I just stood there, in the cold cardamom winds. This was the backdrop where everything became real, where the real backpacking began. On this rooftop of a guesthouse where I hadn’t planned to go, the early sun felt like a flash of lightning. Or maybe it can’t be verbalized. Maybe I finally experienced the substratum of my existence, like waking up from a dream. The morning felt like a magic cape—like I could wrap myself in it—and it would give me superpowers. Although I didn’t know it then, and sometimes I still forget it now. When I do remember that moment, it still makes me feel cool.
I had never planned to spend the night in that guest house or even in Kathmandu. I’d arranged to stay at a village orphanage, but at the airport, once I’d arrived, the director didn’t answer my calls.
I glanced at Hans. We’d just met, but after a six-hour-delayed layover with this handsome rugged adventurer, I wanted some adventure too.
We got our visas, and Hans hailed a taxi. Soon we were swirling through the city on our way to the backpacker area, Thamel. It felt like a rove through a classic cinematic masterpiece retouched in modern Technicolor. Some unnamable essence transcended the landscape, the city streets, their dusty dogs. It set the place aglow.
The taxi lurched up in front of Pilgrim’s Guest House. A thin, three-story building rose from the back of a restaurant with a long narrow patio that stretched out to the street. Tibetan magic oozed through every detail. In the low trickle of the Buddha fountain, the lit chimenea fire, the trees wrapped in icicle lighting. There were wrought iron finishes. The price was right, so we didn’t look any further. We split a room with two single beds.
By the time we settled into our room, it was nightfall. The sky incandesced in indigo as he led me in search of momos, his favorite Tibetan food.
The streets felt like a carnival, and it wasn’t far from the truth. Incense smoke swirling, singing bowls ringing. Tibetan prayer flags pranced from rooftop to rooftop across streets and alleys that bustled with vendors and foot traffic. Thamel was a parade in perpetuity.
“Whenever my dad would go to Nepal,” Hans was wistful while we walked (a wistfulness that still commanded. He was six foot six.) “He would always bring me back something, and it always had this scent. This scent reminds me of being a kid.”
It didn’t take long to find Momos. They’re Tibetan dumplings, steamed or fried, and small and cute, which I love, as we all know you are what you eat. We split his order in the back of a den that resembled a Nepali/Irish pub hybrid. One other person was in there, a twenty-something white guy, transfixed on a pint of Tuborg beer.
Back at Pilgrim’s guest house, we went to the roof for the view. By then, it was completely dark, and just as cold.
As we stargazed, Hans named constellations.
“That’s Orion,” he pointed, eyes skyward. The icy night was clear. “You can always tell by these three stars. That’s the belt.” I squinted up at the sky.
“Next to him is the constellation Pleiades. It was named after a myth from Greek mythology. Orion chased the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas, and to help them escape, Zeus turned them all into stars. In the myth, Orion was never able to catch them. Astronomically, although Orion moves closer and closer to the Pleiades, they will supernova before he arrives. So, although it was only recently discovered in modern astronomy, in the stars, the myth is also true.”
Then he mentioned Ali. Ali had sat next to us, on Hans’ other side, throughout that onerous layover. They must have spoken at length before my arrival, because he was enchanted by the man. By the time Hans had finished, he had me captivated too.
Ali was from Somalia, a refugee. He then spent twenty years in North Dakota as an accountant. “You don’t hear that the other way around.” Hans went on. “You’d never hear of, say, an accountant from North Dakota who flees the U.S. to become a Somali pirate.”
I laughed. “You’re right.” Hans had a point. It was silly, but it was still a point. We sat in a comfortable silence, as we had during our hours in Delhi. As the virtual forever in the airport had at last begun to wane, I’d told Hans and Ali about my project: to collect stories from locals across the globe about their most precious life experiences.
Ali had taken the backseat of our conversation in Delhi, but he’d been there all along. When we boarded the plane, he walked with a limp and a cane, and at that last minute, he approached me with his offer to share. His information was still tucked away in my journals, scribbled last minute on a torn strip of newsprint, on ragged, shabby fray.
Hans was also bemused by Ali’s relocation to Hyderabad, India, in pursuit of an I.T. degree. That Ali spends his later years as an expat in India—in yet another dramatic life overhaul—it paints his life portrait as an immigration triptych, spread over three panels, three continents, a masterpiece. Hans and I gazed a little longer despite the bites of cold. For a moment, the firmament took firm hold. We were both tired. Soon, the night had to end.
●
The early air echoed with temple bells and rooster calls. We’re in a nation’s capital. It was a novel thought for me, still under my six-inch-thick comforter. Hans slept in too—with a casual arm stretch—he got up and left with enough time to meander to the shuttle for his Vipassana retreat.
I was alone.
Where the adventure begins.
But that was all too much to think about.
First, I went up to the rooftop to take in the daylight view—the bliss of the mountains around me and the tantalizing truths they entailed. As if the true purpose of my life existed in that moment, for however many seconds it lasted.
Before Nepal, before I ever got to Asia, the first story I collected was about a circular rainbow. It’s theatrically apt: an avatar of endless beauty borne from punishing rain.
When I was sixteen, my father committed suicide. On the surface, his death was the product of my parents’ ever-impending divorce, a threat that my estranged mother hung over his head like a hack saw. We never knew where she was half the time, and she hated that we called her Beth, but she’d retract the divorce threat every time my brother and I reaffirmed we wanted to live with Dad once they separated. Whenever—at last—that might be. As a kid, I thought it all was normal. It only became an embarrassment once I started to have sleepovers, and girls would ask, “Where is your mom?” late at night.
Dad was the one who took care of us, but he’d lost himself.
The night he took his life, we’d gotten into a fight. He’d gone to the wrong place to pick me up from a dinner with some friends. On the phone, he hollered about it until everyone within a ten-foot radius was mortified.
Back home, I was bitter. “You’ve admitted you’re an alcoholic, and you’re drinking more than ever.” I sat at the kitchen counter while I said this. He stood at the sink. It was the last time we spoke. Beth seized the chance to, yet again, threaten divorce. She always seemed to have the upper hand over him and a high-handed upper hand at that. That hand often raised a stiff rum and coke, all as she denied any alcoholism in the family—at all—after Dad had proclaimed his in front of us both. All I know is that our domestic life had mass-wasted itself in a landslide long ago. In the wake of all the arguments, I knew any hope my dad still felt had dwindled sickly thin.
At two a.m., I lay awake in bed, in silence save for the clinks of ice as it dislodged off his usual pint glass of scotch on the rocks. He was still outside in the bitter snow. He’d never been up this late on a weeknight. He never drank openly on weeknights at all. I was this close to going down to say, Dad, it’s ok. I’m sorry. I’d still rather live with you any day. Divorce her and get this hell over with.
I was drained. I lay in bed until I fell asleep. “Don’t go through the basement,” Beth demanded the next day as I left for school. It was two weeks before Christmas, and I looped around the side of the house and went right back in through the garage, to look for a present. Instead, I found my father sprawled on the cold cement.
I pivoted and dashed up our snowy lawn, guttural holler through my body—my arms flailed while I ran—in my parent’s bedroom, Beth’s face was wrinkled from fresh pillow creases. She roused herself from bed.
I called the police. I ran back and tried to resuscitate him. By the smell of his breath, it was beyond hope.
“I can’t. I can’t do this,” I trembled to the 911 operator. One of his eyes was a sliver open, the other halfway so. I gently closed them and zipped up his open fly before the EMTs arrived.
Beth waited outside and told my ride I wouldn’t be going to school that day.
●
The police report had claimed he’d filled the garage with exhaust, then turned off the car to prevent it from leaking into the house. Beth reacted like she’d won the lottery.
In a desperate attempt to wrest sense from absurdity, this idea came to me, just as wild imaginations come to people.
Late on a sleepless night, parts coalesced in a flash.
If I could walk the earth and interview people about their most beautiful and transformative experiences, I could write a book that shows how to overcome any tragedy...
Images of myself in exotic places with eye-catching characters fluttered across my mind. It was brief, barely a montage. Instead, I focused on those around me, with stories like my own. So many people with lives like mine become so wrapped up in their inner world that they find no peace in the one around them. Such a pity to gaze up at a patina night sky and feel nothing but crushed underneath it. The sorrow of the masses emboldened me. And my thoughts of this world soared beyond a mere place to walk around, to a far more fantastical ether.
My place in physical space was still small and timid. It’s not a normal endeavor for a broken person to travel the world.
To this day, that night remains vivid in my mind. When my crushed dreams crawled from my head to crystallize as a crown. I lay in bed under my vacant truth and the swirled plaster pattern of my ceiling. And I planned. And the shadowy moon shone through my windows, and on the snow.
Thank you!