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“Where’s the wedding?” I asked, looking across the desert and seeing nothing.
“Oh, it’s somewhere.” the man said.
My first thought was oh, so is it like Narnia where you only find it if you aren’t looking? I hope it was the allergies, but a tear formed in my eye as I looked out into the vast valley of death in which I found myself. The sun was beginning to set – it was almost 6 o’clock. In the distance, I could hear the sound of drums. The wind had picked up by now, and it was stronger than any wind I had felt before; it was so strong that it actually pushed me back. We managed to make it to the wedding party by 7 o’clock. A canvas tent set up – a three-hour walk from any sense of civilization. The packs of wild dogs, obviously sensing mammals with an aversion to a Darwinian sense of self-preservation, surrounded the tent.
Inside the tent (technically, as there were no actual walls to the tent), the women and men were singing and performing the traditional dance, where they stand in a circle and bang a drum while they sing out and women respond. I watched as they all banged the drum and moved their waists back and forth. Then I noticed one of the women looking at one of the men as he thrust his pelvis forward, and then I realized that we have a similar thing in America – we call it grinding. The difference, of course, is that in America, the men and women do it to each other, whereas here, the men have to do it with each other in a big circle.
As the evening wore on, I realized that the wedding party wasn’t even here. The groom, yes, but the bride was still down in the town. I still haven’t quite figured out why we had to have the tent set up in the middle of the desert, away from all sources of water and all sources of potential help. What if, say, someone was dehydrated or had accidentally strangled a child for banging the drum so close to my ear for an hour that I couldn’t hear anything else? These questions remain unanswered.
As 3 o’clock in the morning rolled around, the groom finally set off on his horse to get his bride. And the dancing slowly came to a close. Finally, I thought to myself, though it is early morning, I can finally go home. The Rays lays down to go to sleep.
“Hey, I don’t have my allergy medications.” I said. “I can’t breathe, and so I can’t sleep.”
“Oh no.” he said, and he closed his eyes and went to sleep.
I looked around and saw that everyone else was asleep. I decided to stand outside under the stars – I watched as shooting stars fell one after the other, and let the silence come over me. The stars blinked furiously, and I imagined for a moment about the lives on the other planets around those stars, about how somewhere, someone could be looking out right now and wondering if, perhaps, they wondered if there was someone looking out and thinking the same thing. As I looked into the tent again and watched the faces of the men and women, at how happy they were, I thought of how peaceful, how purely content. I guess it could be worse, I thought to myself.
And that’s when the packs of dogs came in.
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