By EJ Schwartz Abroad writer
It’s the first day I’m on the shore and I am lying on the ground, toes sand-curled, staring up at a pink streaked sky. Views like this become photos that float around Tumblr, getting millions of re-blogs. People double tap them, the aesthetic beauty conveyed in a 2-D image.
They are not seeing the sunset or the waves folding in on themselves with a loud slap and sloshing against my shins. They are not seeing the sky turn dark in a blink, the water so black you can imagine anything is out there on the horizon.
Bali is beautiful, the sun high in the sky, burning my body and demanding I hydrate more, even though I’m only drinking what I can buy in closed bottles. In the daylight, you can see people on the street; the not so beautiful things, like men with red eyes, yellow teeth, who holler. Families climb onto mopeds, weaving around taxis so their babies’ heads narrowly miss being severed by rearview mirrors.
I find two mosquito bites on the back of my neck when I’m in the shower, and my brain goes on autopilot. I think malaria or dengue fever. I am going to be sent back to the United States in one of those air sealed cases—the ones where they push your meals through a mail slot—and get treatment that will hopefully save my life.
When I ask my friend Juliana to take a look, I realize it is acne. I laugh. I call my mom. I joke about how ridiculous I am sometimes. But at dinner I don’t eat the meat, too afraid that my vision of an Ebola-esque life might become a reality if I’m not careful.
A man comes up asking to take a picture with me by the shore, and assuming I misheard, I go to take the camera and snap a picture of him and his friends. He shakes his head, hands the Canon to another friend, and the group folds in on me. They snap a bunch of photos, me in the middle of eight strangers, boys and girls who are my age. They point to me and more clicks go off, and I think maybe they are mistaking me for a celebrity. Maybe they’ve never seen anyone with blonde hair before.
Here’s what I remember most: a little girl with thin bones and two missing teeth comes to me, asking for money that I don’t give. The horror of my own reflection when I keep walking and don’t look her in the eyes hits me like the slap of a wave.
The horror of my fortune, I mean. The horror that I am a woman who bargains for a fake Vendi bag, a Victoria Beckham purse and Jimmy Choo wallet, but does not give that little girl my spare change.
I think about going back, about handing her a bill, a big one, one of those one hundred thousand rupiahs—seven or eight U.S. dollars—because I’m pretty sure it’s more money than she’s seen in a long time, maybe in her entire life, and that’s the kind of person I want to be. But when I walk back, she is not there. I wish I had gotten it right the first time.
I understand what Bali is to a girl like me, a girl on a throne. A pit stop. A blink to remember the missing teeth of that girl and then forget. I go on living a life where I see beautiful photos on Tumblr, grab Chinese takeout when I’m on my period, become a girl with blonde hair in a sea of girls ten time more beautiful with blonde hair. I take photos of strangers, not with them, and pretend this is a world without children, small and barefoot, holding out hands and begging for what I did not give and what the world still won’t.
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