The Alpha Monkey Man

Notes on primal property law, jackfruit division, and what romance actually sounds like

I woke up this morning to the sound of two very large men walking across our roof.

That was my first thought, in the fog of early, very early morning — there are men on the roof — before my brain caught up and corrected itself: wait… not men. Peacocks. Two of them, clomping across the metal sheeting with all the subtlety of a furniture delivery, and somehow that was the less alarming explanation, which tells you something about where I live now.

This is, more or less, how mornings work here. The lizards scrape their nails across the terrace roofing like they’re filing a complaint. The monkeys announce themselves first — a sound so primal it doesn’t seem like it should come from something you’d otherwise describe as cute — and then swing through, thumping across the roof on their way to the jackfruit tree on the far side, entirely uninterested in whether we’re awake yet. Today it was peacocks. Tomorrow it’ll be something else. The jungle does not run a quiet ship.

~~~~~~~~

I should tell you about Rory and the monkeys, because it explains a lot about this morning, and honestly it explains a lot about him.

Years ago, before Sri Lanka, we were hiking up to an ancient temple in India when a troop of monkeys surrounded me, going for the snacks in my bag. Rory’s very reasonable, very human first instinct was to jump back. I don’t blame him for it (or maybe I did in the moment). But I looked at him — surrounded, feeling utterly betrayed, mid-monkey-siege — with a look that apparently landed harder than either of us expected, because he took it to heart. Really to heart. He decided, somewhere on that trail, that he was going to become the kind of man who does not flinch when his person is in danger, monkeys included.

He is, genuinely, one of the most romantic men I’ve ever met — especially once I let myself see what romance actually looks like, when I stopped measuring it against the version we’re all handed in movies.

Turns out it looks like this: a grown man on a terrace in Sri Lanka, slapping two pieces of wood together, making sounds I can only describe as alpha monkey man, defending a jackfruit tree that was never really under serious threat, because somewhere in his nervous system this is still about that day on the trail.

The repertoire itself (the alpha monkey man dance, as I’ve come to call it) is half instinct, half education. Some of it he came by naturally — some primal reflex that seemed to surprise even him the first time it came out of him. Some of it he’s picked up from the neighbors, who have their own roofs to protect and their own opinions about primates and property. Either way, every monkey encounter has become, in some small unspoken way, a referendum on his manhood, and I say that with the biggest smile on my face, because I love him for it.

I want to be clear this isn’t a story about a man being silly. Some ancient, pre-verbal part of me watches him out there and just thinks: G O O D. That’s it. That’s the whole full-body-thought.

~~~~~~~~

Here’s the thing about jungle terms, though — and if you read the last post, you already know this — the jungle does not care about our trees, our roof, our internet cable, or Rory’s very sincere campaign to hold the line. As I’m writing this, I don’t have internet, because something — monkey, lizard, peacock, jury’s still out — has knocked the wire loose somewhere up there, which has happened before and will happen again… with no fair warning.

So I’m sitting here, no connection, listening to the aftermath of this morning’s chaos, and I ask myself the question I ask myself more than I’d like to admit out here: did you ask for this, Tiffany? And what is it you actually love about it?

And the honest answer is: the novelty. Look… not always — I can lose the plot on this in about four seconds flat, same as anyone — but on the good days, the days I manage to look at it sideways, the way Chiara looks at nearly everything, it’s all just wildly, stupidly extraordinary. A grown man fighting a jackfruit war. A bird mistaken for an intruder. A cable knocked loose by forces I’ll never fully identify. Nothing here is dialed in, or predictable, or figured out.

It’s taken me the better part of ten years to get here — to the place where I can laugh at the absurdity of a morning like this one and still be honest about the frustration underneath it, both at once, without either canceling the other out.

Sri Lanka has never been a comfortable love. It’s been more like that temple in the story, actually — something you climb toward sweating, surrounded, slightly overwhelmed, and come down from a little different than you went up. High highs, low lows, the kind of lover who keeps you a little off balance and somehow, and at the same time, leaves you nourished anyway.

Having it all dialed in, predictable, figured out — well, if I’m honest, that would be a little bit boring.

Tiffany Carole

^{Founder of the Lumina Guild ~ A place for those creating the extraordinary, together.}

^{Author of The Inner Nature of Essential Oils}

^{Creator of The Windows of the Sky}

Subscribe if it brings you delight. And share with others if it tickles you.