Trenched

The world passed by silently, the trees swaying softly in the light, humid breeze. Everything was green, brown, and gray with dots of color from the trash that littered the picturesque mountainside, completely different from the white sands and turquoise waters of Bali where we had just ventured from. No sky shone through the clouds here, even though it was 96 degrees out. No matter what the temperature, Java was always gray and muggy, and full of either annoyingly warm mists or shockingly cold downpours. Yet no matter what the weather, Java was always unmistakably beautiful.

I watched everything pass as the train moved sluggishly up the hill, glad that I had rid myself of my slugabed ways and gotten up early for this excursion.

“What about the cake?” Natalie, who had a reputation for logorrhea to maintain, yelled across the train, her voice an annoying white noise to me as I looked below, my forehead pressed up against the cool window pane, my coconut smelling breath condensed onto it as I breathed, the rain blurred my view slightly as it dripped sluggishly down the window. The same rain that helps the beautiful red flowers to ameliorate from the harsh brown earth. I could see the slums made of tin and cardboard with people around them trying their hardest to keep their houses up while the rain slowly broke down the walls of their homes. Next door the kids played in the mud, throwing handfuls of it at each other, enjoying the feeling of it in their hands and laughing as the mud caromed off each other. Suddenly the rural village passed out of my mind as I felt the world stop, my eyes replaying the most disturbing thing I had seen in my short life over and over again.
There, in the middle of the hill, was a girl lying alone in a trench of sewage, dead. Her hair was in knots around her body, stuck to the excrement which was starting to become watery in the rain. Her arms and legs were twisted out around her in unnatural positions that my inflexible body would never be able to be in. Her face was cut up, but the blood had long since dried into a rusty smear. What was only a split second of passing felt like an hour as my mind replayed the scene over and over again like a CD stuck on repeat. The image of her face, her arms, and her hair were forever imprinted into the walls of my mind, a constant reminder of how different my life was from the people's here, and not wanting to think about it, I attempted to discard it from my memory.

The petulant feelings I had felt in the past suddenly seemed miniscule in comparison to the horrors I had just witnessed. The fact that a girl, who looked my age, maybe younger, was lying dead in a trench was the most extreme wake-up call I had ever gotten. My life's hardships were like a grain of sand compared to the wave of issues the people here dealt with every single day.

When I first saw the girl, I had tried to shake the picture of her out of my mind, ignoring the lesson she had to teach me. But now, as the scene began to die out and we moved farther up into the mountain, I hugged the memory of her closer. Within those few seconds, passing like hours, I had experienced the most terrifying and clarifying thing in my life.