I know I don’t belong to you anymore. Words and feelings passed by, too quickly that I found myself again reliving the moments, going back to the images - no longer sensation - of running my fingers upon your nose bridge and telling myself I was not at all ready. I stepped gently into what I refrain from and admire the most, to make the first move when all was bright and clear that i would be hurt and you that i would damage. For some reason, I knew our philosophies would leave no space for us to breathe, no matter how close we lay next to each other. Even when you slept, you kept to your own too. I could only do so much as being a kind and generous person, aloof to myself, leaving one like you to wonder and question why I was always giving up and trying so hard. I told you, if I didn’t, I would cease living.
Denmark was kind, too. I did not ask it to be so or to hold me, but all it did for me was helping me separate myself from my doubts. In another way, it cherished my doubts. The flowers helped; the rain, the streets, the canals, and some readings or two. So perhaps, she was right in criticizing me for not being dramatic or not insanely fling my own into love. I didn’t leave you for Denmark. I had gathered my softness to look forward to our voices catching each other on the phone. The trying to have you tell your stories. And the truth was “it would be unfair for one to love” me because I belonged to others, so many others, that romance did not have a higher place, as she reaffirmed me last year before I came to you. She thus walked out of my life. I lost her. Standing before my thoughts and the pictures of your room, now vacant, surprised me quietly at how much I could still feel sad. It was not a sense of regretfulness. Nor am I still having a feeling for you like a hope that things could be rekindled. I just miss you today, like yesterday, two days ago, since I left Denmark, and sometimes in the past when I obliviously realized you as a person. I find it funny at how things just come to me. And because I know, I fall back into my silence. That means I have all of this infinity to be my own mediator, to let others and you free of worries, and to curl myself into my usual sanguinity and hope of life. Maybe Chau was right: I am full of emotions but always filter them, bury them under so many layers. I love others too much and endearing life with optimism that I become a monster of rationality. I then forget how to break down in front of others. I don’t know if I will give up touching someone’s eyebrows when they are half awake, half dreaming, because that is one of those rare things I can slip one or two tinges of feelings out into the world. For now, I won’t.
Missing you is good. It feels sad. I feel sad. Under my chest there is a big vast hole. It contains much and at the same time holds selfishly itself, that it carves out little by little my space each day. And I thought of sadness because it became immense, and strangely an idea to me if I personally know sadness itself. Writing down like this perhaps let me be intimate again with my emotions to then release myself. I realize I have paused my usual philosophical stream of thinking to feel sad and distracted. A temporary hiatus in working out any either/or. To synchronize oneself with the outer is to lay in bed each day and wake up to a gentle and kind sound of rain out of the window, to be small and touched by the random raindrops, to take a break from thinking about the salvation of finding myself in the presence of true friendship but to be in it. It is difficult, the last one or anyone before it. It means, detachment is hard, but meaningful. So today, I picked up a little flower (magenta and thin) on the ground, “everything was great and there was nothing that hurt.”
open window
(via thestorycanresume)
My Papi in my memory hadn’t really shown too much of fondness towards Buddhism or some sort of spirituality. All he appeared was his beautiful leniency in running some errands for my mother every time she prepared an occasion’s rituals. Cutting flowers, trimming their thorns, wiping the altar, he constantly joked with my sister and me, and now my six-year-old brother that our grandfathers and grandmothers were watching us down from the sky. They were always watching our moves - from tips to toes; and if we studied well, they would bless us much more.
For certainty, my mother and he assured a lot of times in their own paradoxical parental idealism that those higher beings always embraced us. So then, we don’t have to really be that good of kids, right? The closest I could feel my Papi’s appreciation and belief in worshipping and asking for blessings was the time we visited the cemetery of our ancestors. He would mumble these lines of ritual sayings with incenses whose roots were in his palms. Then he would tap on the grave stone, cracking in laughters and conversing with supposedly the imaginary ghosts of our ancestors about our visit and that they should proudly see us - their grandkids’ faces - in front of them. He made it real by tapping that way. By rejecting the utmost sanctimonious possibility and the utmost belief in “rituals and stuffs,” he let room for the normal intimacy as if there should not be any special worldview, any special treatment for those who are dead and those who haven’t been that yet. And the word ‘stuffs’, I hope, does the justice of describing his attitude since in reality, he considers and will gather them as 'stuffs.’ Just rituals and stuffs.
A few weeks ago, I skyped with him. I talked. He typed. He could see my face while I wasn’t able to. After some number of questions, I waited to see his next words behind those blinking dots. So you see, sometimes the flow of thoughts could be tangible and very obvious in forms of those grayish dots, which express the other person’s typing activity. And if those dots suddenly disappear, which happened, it means the words are erased and you always know of this a few seconds behind. Because – the action of backspacing starts taking place before your recognition, don’t you think? After a while, he said, “all I can do is to ask Buddha and our ancestors for blessings. That they will bless your great studies and health."
I don’t expect or even anticipate that my Papi would someday wake up with mom around 5:30 and together kneel before the altar and pray. That should not happen to twist all of my fantasy of our (my) family’s morning ritual. Our morning begins with mom’s early rising, and Papi’s lingering snores drenched in the sunlight on the fifth floor, and their kids would lie crisscrossing on the mattress down below. And when mom finishes her prayer, putting the beads gently on the pages like a marvelous bookmark, and folding the book, we should be still enjoying our sleep until she pulls our blanket away. And of course, Papi is always the one awarded with extra few minutes just because once he welcomes his breaking dawn, the bathroom would be occupied for the longest time.
Hegel the bagel
There were not a lot of my words scribbled in the book that once belonged to another student that had certainly taken Late Modern Philosophy or so. The book was sold back to the school’s Barnes & Nobles, who then became this neutral dealer or third party to connect this “I” to the book, the object of the perception whence I knelt down in front of the shelf. I have had the book since then.
The fault of picking the book was indeed the fault of believing that it would yield to me, the content of Hegel, the energy of its own being. For it is a fault, it resists (always in the present tense), and I gave up. The fault is so great for me to realize two things, one - I owed my ability too much the responsibility of a hard worker. Days that I promised to read turned out to be the days of lethargy. Days that I walked out of class, believing that there was still chance to understand and make impression upon the knowledge turned out to be the foundation of shallow and vacuous fortitude. That is the first mistake that I sincerely am scared. Of living on the thin transparent surface that might break at any time to hold my gravity.
and – those days yet gave me second things from that I started my little affection. The affection is fragile. It is this delicacy that again it scares me to touch and nurture it, because it’s not appropriate, not relevant, so lingering in the area of uncertainty, maybe.
This is me, junior year of high school. Meaning, that was May of three years ago, just finishing the annual ceremony award. Out we were, gently roaming and scavenging between the art center (is it next to Barton-Test theater or a legit conduction with that building?) and the woods. I do not really think that I had spent an adequate amount of time watching my school in long walks and taking pictures. I did something else, more trifling and sentimental in a way of mainstream, namely enjoying the wild common sense of high school. Waking up late over the weekends, spending quite an extravagant deal of time either drawing, painting, making paper, or just mentally sleeping in the art room, first floor. So hardly there were any good early mornings I walked up to the barn or just thru the woods and down to the river. So half of my high school was physically spent in the way just like other hippie Westtown kids did to their years, and half was spent vicariously through my friends’ experience. A holy envy of their quirky difference, their virtuous, arrogantly admirable silence, their capricious independence, and the whole concept of Quaker.
The bubble of Westtown, I find, is quite of the subtlety of clouds, leaves, brown colors, winds, walks, and stuffs. The more you want to get out of it-just because it tells you so, the more you find yourself being once in a while so romantic in its shelter. Greatness good! How could such a being, a thing, a campus, an infinitely big collection, an antique archive like this ever exists in life, that I or you would think in the first place that it was a mistake, a flaw of all things.
—-
I want you to be jealous of my experience, my time at, with, and in this place. Because I miss it. It now can be claimed the original cause, legitimately, of my time. It is a cause in the flow of consciousness and waking up. And suddenly the ripple of reminiscence becomes more and more evident, until hitting the climax of an instant smile recalling the time well spent here. A brief time of Westtown reunion thus is always succinct and simply what one wants. A reunion.
Phan took this picture of me while I her. In a couple of weeks from the day this picture was taken, she would walk down the Greenwoods, in the long white dress, and give her essayist speech. And just a moment or so before this picture, up in the balcony far behind in the art center (can we really see it in this picture above?), we experienced the similar moment, photo within photo. A loop, knotted right in the middle. And just before that, she said, “who will then be my photographer when I’m in college?” My question was the same, except the last word was “my senior year.”
She visited me last week, and how funny it is: we are just normal westtonians.