Here you always are

When you have spent some time living in a natural landscape, the feeling is strange suddenly to burst back into a human landscape, where everything is skin and sun and exuberant energy — to touch, to feel, to smoke, to eat, to have the air on your feet and the sun on your legs, and to walk under trees hung with oranges.

You see people poking potatoes with toothpicks and putting them into their mouths and guzzling beer out of mugs at tables in streets. You see people pacing down crowded boulevards, staring into books and dodging pedestrians. You see people picnicking on concrete corners, with just a thin sheet between their butts and the ground. You see people standing in line for two hours to hear some band wail on guitar. You see little boys on bikes whizzing by with their hands in the air and no shoes on their feet. You see old women with flesh-colored stockings and faded flower dresses standing in doorways whispering, "Ohhhhhh". You see a man in purple pants carrying a fan because summer is coming. You see Arab men on benches, all of them with mustaches and all of them talking, talking, talking.

Everbody talking and touching and leaning into each other and smoking and touching some more, and you can think about the future and dream about the past, but here you always are, and that is the hardest thing to remember.