Maghoodoo, 25 July 2025
———— ———,
I often recall the last words you told me. You said you were exhausted. I also recall the gesture that followed them: your hand drew slowly towards your mouth, grazing the two rings. I can still hear the sound – ( ). There were cork- and olive trees all around: leaves waving on a warm wind, bats carrying a scent of bergamot, neroli, vetiver. The mattress was coated in soft, light turquoise velvet. You bent, rose seamlessly as if whispering while a choreography of lava unfolded, all your edges simmering in the landscape without a shiver. My nerves lingered as though on a burning hot shaft. I could feel their concave reverse softly steaming in the silence you’d leave behind. Then it was over. Then it all started again.
The days in the Maldives have been long and healing. To come here is a long stretch, but it’s certainly worth it. It took me about 18 hours to get to the resort in Maghoodoo, a slice of paradise in the Indian Ocean. First, 1 hour by train from my place to the airport, followed by 2 hours of security check, customs, lounge, 6 hours and 30 minutes of flight to Dubai, 2 hours and 10 minutes of layover, 4 hours and 20 minutes of flight to Male, and then another 2 hours of speedboat. On the first flight (EK44, +2 time zones), I started watching Matrix again in the hope of falling asleep. It didn’t work. Time went by slowly. Outside, nothing but dark grey, some orange hues. The wait during the layover was the hardest to endure, though. All airports look the same. Dubai could be anywhere.
As I finally arrived in Maghoodoo, I realised that everything had been prepared so that I would feel like I’d never left, even though I had never been here before. The anonymousness of hotels peculiarly produces this feeling of familiarity blended with strangeness, a sort of return embedded in novelty. I saw that in the way the sheets were changed, stretched, folded every day in exactly the same manner, how the room magically presented itself to me spotless, once and again, how the staff smiled at me. At some point, I noticed that even the music in the hotel followed these mantric patterns. You know, I am always one of the last ones leaving the breakfast room. This time that meant something like 11.02, at which point the second chorus of Nelly Furtado’s Say it Right would be playing in the lobby.
I guess that’s what idleness is about: white noise, the shadow of a sound of a color, the shadow of a wind of a color, strawberry hands and cathedrals wrapped in cloth, coconut ice melting. Nothing should be moving. No friction. Every now and then clouds as cold molasses, moss-grey, amber, perhaps mold. Flight, but steady. No friction. Every day is the same.
