I woke up finding myself in Mario's apartment, having fallen asleep in Mario's soft chair, looking out his window. I had the sunlight warm and painfully bright against my face and opened my eyes which felt dry and tired. My whole body felt tired and unrested. My head ached. Mario lay snoring loudly on his sofa. Though I knew that he would need to get up for work, I didn't feel any need to take responsibility for him any further. I slipped into his bathroom to splash water on my face, and like a good former journalism school graduate, took another look at the contents of his medicine chest, just to be sure I hadn't dreamed what I saw there last night when I was tired, perhaps buzzed. But now, with the morning, and a fresh perspective, I felt bad for Mario, but wondered why misfortune seemed to have brought out the worst in him. It had -- he was now the type of person I couldn't really imagine I was friends with. And once, he was someone whose company I enjoyed so much, with whom I had long and intelligent conversations. Perhaps I was idealizing too much, missing Tashkent, and having clouded judgement, but the people I had met in Uzbekistan, who had known much more serious misfortune, seemed to have preserved a much more gracious and friendly attitude, despite bad times. At least, that was what they showed to me. How they behaved and treated each other out of my sight was probabaly another story. As I walked out of the bathroom, I froze hearing what sounded like a battery of machine gun fire, but was relieved to know that it was just Mario's pent up gas. He said nothing, stirred a little, but didn't seem to be awake.

I quietly opened the front door and slipped out, quietly closing it behind me. I wasn't sure if it was locked or not, but didn't worry too much. Mario lived in a safe, quiet family neighborhood in a safe brownstone. Everything here seemed so safe, it was hard to imagine that anything truly bad could happen to anyone here. Then again, 9-11 did.

It was still early out, but the heat was forceful and heavy, almost oppressive, making me miss Tashkent's dry heat. In Tashkent, the mornings were the only times you could be out in the sun and it wasn't too harsh, but gentle, with a very slight wind. But now I was already bathed in a thin layer of sweat. Whereas there nothing moved in the morning, but the slow sweeping of the street sweeps, or a sheep slowly trodding the streets, here there was already traffic, a line in front of the laundromat just opening its doors, impatient and energetic children waiting for schoolbuses with their fussy protective parents trying to reason with them as though they were talking to adults. It was as if the movement, the noise, the heat made everything heavy. and I longed for my Tashkent mornings on the potholed streets and their practically non-existent sidewalks, the ramshackle buildings, and near absence of life that made me feel like Dr. Morgan in that movie "Last Man on Earth," the not unpleasant loneliness and the faint excitment and hope of finding others. I cherished those few human interactions -- the nods, the waves, the glances, the small chit-chat that I had with the people i would predictably pass in the mornings, despite embassy warnings to regularly vary my routes. There would be Sergey from the kodak store, opening the shutters at 9am, the lady who sold cigarettes from the window of her house or sometimes her pre-school aged son, the lady who swept the streets, who barely looked up at me, the speechless night guard from the office, who had once been a security guard for the presidential outfit, and a former boxer, sometimes would still be sitting in the office shirtless, unaware that I had walked in and that I stole furtive longing glances at his impressive physique. I loved that in that quiet town, I knew some hidden spots, where I could find noise and people, like at the Lucky Strikes. I loved that I could sit down with people and they would take time to tell me the story of their lives, which they seemed to take pleasure in doing. Here, people told me nothing, just acted out in ways that seemed incomprehensible to me, but likely underpinned some kind of history that I had missed out on.

Perhaps it was because of 9-11, I thought, though people smiled on the streets, didn't look at the sky expecting some horror to appear, or look at one another suspiciously. My presence was neither welcome nor unwelcome, nor questioned with the curious glance or stare, a smile got returned with a smile, a stare with a stare, but if you kept to yourself, people left you to yourself. There was no stranger on the street asking me the time, as regularly would happen in Tashkent, not because anyone ever needed to know the time of day in Tashkent -- as no one was ever on time, or had any place to go. But simply to hear me talk, hear my foreign accent, find an excuse to start up a conversation and find out where I was from, my marital status, my job, perhaps how much money I made or how much my shoes cost, all the kinds of conversations that I'd found myself in over and over again, and which I had always felt uncomfortable about. When I got into a situation like that I was inclined to turn things around and get them to tell me their story. I was more comfortable on the listening end.

Before going to my father's place to shower, change my clothes, perhaps take an early morning nap, I would do some shopping for those few things that I had decided I needed in order to keep me happy, those few things, like many things, unavailable in Tashkent, that I had to have to bring back with me. My material needs there were few. I wanted sunblock moisturizer to keep myself looking young. The sun there was strong and I supposed that it was one of the reasons why people seemed to age so quickly, why they imagined that I was so much younger than I was. I wanted that to continue. My age was the source of lectures for why I wasn't married and with children from straight people in Uzbekistan. From gays, it was that I was too old for most, or only of the age where you would have to pay or be a sponsor, in order to have companionship, and I just couldn't deal with the idea of paying. I'd rather just lie about my age, moisturize religiously in the mornings, before bed, and sometimes in the middle of the day, when struck by anxious fears of age.

I would buy a supply of deodorant to hold me over for the next six months because it was in scarce and unpredictable supply, often not the kinds that I would use, usually being sprays with heavy scents worn by dandyish young men to cover up, or so they thought, body odor. Former soviet culture did not seem to leave much of a legacy about meticulous bathing or body odors, and often I was privy to many various and strong body odors. Sometimes on a hot day in Tashkent, you could walk by someone on the street bearing such a bad smell that it would feel almost as if that smell bumped into you, it had such a powerful presence. And many people I dealt with on a regular basis didn't smell so clean, so I felt there was probably little expectation for me to do so; but out of my own self-dignity, I wasn't going to let myself go that native. That would be the first step to the demise I had seen in my predecessor. If I was clean, if I smelled ok, if my appearance was neat, then I was pretty much ahead of the game in Tashkent. And as long as unpleasant body odors continued to make me cringe, I felt reassured that regardless of whatever changes were going through me by living away from home, I remained essentially the same, that I had not gone native, that I had not compromised many other things, such as values or principles.

I would buy jars of peanut butter, since it was something that I couldn't find out there regularly and it was something that I would share with other expatriates. My local friends seemed to detest the stuff, they didn't have the palate for it, much as an American doesn't understand the taste of marmite. There had been a young Russian man who would make it at home and sell it to families at the international school occasionally, but his appearances seemed rarer and rarer and I'd heard a rumour that he had emigrated to the US, as many other people I had had contact with did, and every year, a few more of the people I knew seemed to disappear. I would buy some new books to keep myself busy with and to share with other expatriates there who would pass their books among one another in full circle, so that after a few months, inevitably you read the exact same books as all of the other foreigners. For example, we had all read Kurban Said's "Ali and Nino," though I didn't know anyone at home who had read this book. I had begun reading detective novels, which I'd never done before, simply out of lack of something to read. We'd all read "Lenin's Tomb" about the last days of the Soviet Union and Solzenitzin's "Cancer Ward," which took place in Tashkent, "The Modern Uzbeks from the Fourteenth Century to the Present," Bulgakov's "The Master and the Margarita." All these books had made the rounds and this what we talked about. In the back of my mind, I did think that my horizons were somewhat limited by this, by being around the same small groups of people, finding ourselves so isolated from the rest of the world, and frequently cut off from information. We all had poor internet connections, had some access to CNN and BBC. But little exposure to big new ideas and trends, and coming back to New York and hearing things I didn't understand, I felt like I was missing out and that if I missed out on too much, I would be dooming myself to a lifetime of never being able to return. Like the time I turned on the Oprah Winfrey show and they were talking about the "down-low" and I had no idea what it was. I had asked Mario during one of our awkward moments at the bar what the "down-low" was. The "down-low" was the situation when married men carried on affairs with other men on the sly. Again, Mario had been amazed at how out of touch I was. And whereas perhaps I didn't understand some new terms, I did understand the "down-low." In Tashkent, most all of the gay men I knew there were doing the "down-low."

I was about to head into the first bookstore I passed on the street, the large Barnes and Noble on 79th street, which began opening its doors at 9:00 when I ran into Mrs. Berger, the mother of a dear childhood friend who I hadn't been as good in staying in touch with as I wish I had. Mrs. Berger was German and had a very direct, sometimes prickly manner. She seemed so happy to see me, embraced me, which is something she didn't even do when I was a child. She had heard that I was in Uzbekistan and was surprised to see how healthy I looked -- it seemed that everyone was surprised, expecting to see me turned into some kind of emaciated and aged third-world waif. "But why," she asked me. "What is it are you running away from?"

It was either her directness or perhaps something lost in the translation of her sometimes stilted, accented English, that was a bit jolting, of course making me feel a little defensive, on the other hand, it was rather incisive for her to make this point which no friend or family had dared to express for some reason or another, fearing or perhaps knowing that I might let on that it was actually, indeed them that I was running away from. It was probably much easier to justify my leaving in their own minds, or in discussions behind my back, due to a weakness of character, a need to "drop out" because I was unable to handle the pressures of growing up, all of which were probably things I was unlikely to admit to or the kinds of things you say to a person without the expectation of an escalation of hostilities. It was much easier to do that than to admit to being a part of the problem.

Whereas I was of the mind at the time to say that, yes, I was probably running away from friends and family, which weren't so much my original motives for leaving, but after having left, I recognized more and more that these were likely the very reasons for why I left or should have left, it probably wouldn't be politic to admit to it. I said that I was running away for me, for myself and that I was happy. And as I told her, I believe that I spoke with some conviction about how I had experienced a happiness, or better, a contentment, a peace of mind, that I had previously never experienced, and it perhaps had to do with the relief from the pressures that family and friends had put on me in the past and trying to make it on my own, trust myself, my own judgements, navigating through a world that was very different from home. "Everyone should try it," I told her. "It does a person some good."

I think I had her stunned, because she said no more, and that was unlike Mrs. Berger, since she was someone who always liked to get in the last word and was not known for her restraint in expressing a contrary opinion. Perhaps she agreed with me.  ¶ 5:42 PM