Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
We, this odd mix of writer type folks and me, are in Raleigh. And we’re typing away, just as we do when we get together. Or to be more clear, when we used to; me and an old writing friend from back in the day are here together and at it again, for fun. I have not been here for a time, and I’d forgotten this kind of experience.
A few others that I don’t know are here, too. Each of us have staked out a spot in my friend’s acquaintance’s house, that feels cozy the way cats sometimes do.
Taking it in, I am jazzed. It really feels good to be back in a place where the light is the same quality of color that I remember from growing up in eastern North Carolina. Summertime light. You go outside and you hear the season. It’s nice.
Strange, though, since the time’s gone by and I haven’t been here for the changes. Thirteen years away is a long time. As I’ve hardly exchanged any correspondence with most people back home and so much stuff has gone on for them, it’s… not like visiting home so much as touring yet another foreign country.
Of course there are the natural changes like getting older and growing up, moving on from past lives and into new ones. But there’s more. Here in the United States, there’ve been so many more kinds of changes.
Things that seem ‘surreal’ as some of the new people today said when we did our introductions. They said they imagine it must be like that for me, walking out of a time warp, as I have.
I go, ‘Yeah, you could say that. Surreal. You could say that, for sure.’
We try our best to make small talk between bursts of typing or scribbling. But as you know when you leave and return, such a task is not simple. There’s the temporal axis, but also the physical one. I live in Cambodia. A hemisphere away. Despite technology it’s been hard to ‘keep in touch.’ Besides time and geography, though, miniscule ‘deltas’ over all this time culturally have led to a wide gulf between me and them, too.
So let me focus on what I know. Today, for me, it’s about sharing writing experiences, like this one.
Setting up places and ways for people to explore through making is my ‘work’ these days, where I am. I think of it as ‘writing as experience.’ I try to see how others do it. I join other people’s stuff. A book club the other day, a writing meet. These were curious.
I like this. Making, co-making, drawing, writing, and designing zines… that’s what I do. Here and there. Virtually, too.
I’m trying my best to interlink us. We are making time and being together to talk about whatever we want. We talk, talk together, and talk together over time. This is how I have learned is the very best way of feeling like you’re part of something, like you belong. Places like this are ‘third places’. Where you are welcome, can show up as you like, and just be yourself. That’s valuable. That matters. The things that truly count, well, you can’t quite see them all the time, but you can notice them. When they come back in moments that surprise you — this light, for example, here on a late summer’s day that brings me back to my teen years and sitting on a screened-in porch, somewhere east of Raleigh, watching sunset, a neighbor’s cat, a field, a red kite in the distance.
Summer.
There’s something comforting about being here in this season. And in being able to talk the way you talk with others who talk the same way, for instance.
I tried a few jokes, but they were more Irish style and didn’t fly. I used to live there, too. I kid around the way I did in Viet Nam when we made light of everything with gestures or absurd songs. That place, thanks to the pandemic’s keeping me there for a while, is also a familiar one, now. In some ways. Not all, of course not all. But when I see things that remind me of places, of moments: a menu in Vietnamese, a bracelet I got in Cork City, I’m brought right back to those points in time. That makes me feel connected.
Here it’s this light, hitting my notebook, one that has notes from 2013.
‘Time’s up,’ says the new person who is in charge of keeping up with it. We break. We talk. We ask the same questions as always. How did it all go? What did you write about? Care to share with the group? And: Did you enjoy your time?
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
