The End of China.
On the most southern spot of Hainan island, China’s most southern region.
The more I see these metal cranes soaring along the city’s loading docks, the more convinced I am that their designs are, if not conscious, then subconscious attempts by humanity to recreate giraffes on the African savanna.
I talk to Sherin, and it feels like… lightning. Energized, it’s like I have been charged up, intellectually electrified. This girl, she can make analogies out of anything. Give her a mathematical equation, a rigid technical formula, and she could and will dissect it for you, turn it figurative, give it a visual landscape where you can travel around and onto the hilltops of even the flattest, most mundane idea. She picks up on words with metaphorical potential, takes them out of the sentence, and places them within a completely new structure: She gives my idea an image to live in.
Inside this new architecture of thought, there are different floors of meaning, which together form a building where my idea is able to grow and expand. Though still a trivial, and still “just” a thought, it’s no longer vague nor mysteriously abstract. It now has a shape, and that form is shaped and coloured by the way she talks: The way she gesticulates when she brings forth the metaphor from the back of her mind to the tip of her fingers; the firmness with which she hands them to me, flat on the table, or simply lets them go, gently releasing them like little guppies into our aquarium of thoughts. A fishbowl of ideas, it hold our sentences and pauses, it holds the discussion itself. Yet it also contains the assumption that the glass will only last for so long, before we start to go on tangents, before the guppies begin to breed, and the pressure of the water inside the aquarium eventually causes the glass to crack, to burst, sending the discussion gushing forth into new, unpredictable directions.
S,
I think you should let me sneak you out tonight. Not to go anywhere special. Swing sets and benches. Planets, stars and planes in the sky. Wake up comes quick for both of us. Don’t tell your parents. Leave a note: “chasing stars with JL. Love, S.”
— JL
DO YOU RECKON IT WAS EASIER for people to forget about past lovers before Internet and Facebook came along? Or is that just a notion, a failure to recognize how long our memories just linger, regardless of the kilometers, minutes, years dividing us from them, and now from then? A kind of inability to see how inapplicable that “out of sight and out of mind” mentality is to anyone who’s older than an infant?
(Mind you, I’m not blaming Facebook. But it’s not really helping, is it?)
I WAKE UP to the sound of my own voice. I’m talking in my sleep, again, waking up mid-sentence cause the sound of someone talking immediately wakes me up. I dreamt that he was calling. Recalled his voice and everything. If that is how he sounds like… Well, you know how voices sometimes are the first things you forget when people leave. Anyway, his accent there, he called to ask where I’d like to meet, rewinding my mind back nine months, to February 13th when I asked him in reality but also, in this dream, a sentence that I barely finish before I open up my eyes, a now rhetorical question spoken out into the echo of an empty room: “I don’t know, it’s up to you?”
Each night, the possibility
of running off to somewhere else.
Someplace spaceless,
endlessly expanding into time.
Somewhere less confined,
restricted not by grids or lines
or rules we’ve put upon ourselves,
designed and named,
Reality.
A dreamed-up playground
made of clouds.
Or water.
Or just air, perhaps.
There, we fly, betray our bodies
by dancing with our minds.
So free, we wished we didn’t know
how to find the way back home.
Wide awake all the while,
the city watches this.
Waiting and anticipating,
it knows that soon,
the inevitable return
of our consciousness will come.
Soon, we will come home.
