The Hangover.

There is a feeling that you could not quite describe other than with the phrase 'hangover'.
It fills you to the brim and rips through the pits of your stomach,
you feel cold of the mountain that you left only momentarily as ice down your shirt.
Eyes sting from a glare of white.

An erratic buzz where conversation once was. Connections are blurred with your own tongue and anothers, you don't understand it, but you belong completely. Turn your head to face the wall, gazing at the letters that paper it. They get a little more yellow each day I see them. Some curl at the edges, blutac hardening to a solid against the wall. Everyday the letters age, every day they turn a shade, every day I feel just a little bit better about leaving it all in August. I'm just one step closer to being back to tatami. At home my bed feels too high. Some nights I'll slip off with my blanket and pillow, and sleep on the floor. There I feel grounded.
I heard once that 'the story is in the soil; keep your ear to the ground'. This was told me by a man, over a recording, who spends his days and nights searching for a yellow bird. Or in Korean, they say it, No Ran Sae. That's what Ji Hwan told me. I keep my ear to the ground. I listen for the story. Dig through the dirt to find the hidden treasures. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the drumming, like in Jumanji but less African. The story I hear, when my ear presses to floorboards, is the same another would hear in Indonesia, within their own home. Through the tatami mat of her Japan. The tiled floor of his Brunien apartment. The dirt floor of his Cambodia.

Kami adalah dunia.
When you put this into a translator in English, it is 'We Are The World'. When you reverse it, and put it in written in Indonesian, it says that 'We Were The World'. Now I'm not sure.
But the tone is not for me to decide.
It'll change whenever I read it back to myself.
I'm never quite

sure.