a book store in the north

I'm leaving in about 15 minutes.

It was a great trip, these past 2 weeks.

Those I did get to see have matured, grown, blossomed even. I'm not talking physically of course, instead I saw people on career paths, language skills, successful relationships with friends and family.

The nature here is wonderful, and I just depressed myself by saying that. The nature in Washington, D.C. really made me say that? Ridiculous.

I'm going back not ready for the 14 hour flight and airport shuffle. I think I hate that most of all. Wish I could teleport. Such an arduous amount of time spent flying and traveling really makes me want to stay.

And, indeed, a part of me wants to stay. A lot. It's not just the fresh air. It's not just the people I can relate more to (whereas once upon a time about a year ago I was scoffing at the ignorant Americans when I visited home...arrogant in my labeling them as arrogant); relate to people I see on the street and will never talk to but we share a kinship in country and mindset I can't share with Chinese. It's not only the food and a lifestyle I deem now as luxury but once could afford. It's not just my friends who've known me for years, people I can talk to and who make me want to be good and remember that I am good and used to talk about right like it was truth instead of talk about wrong like it could maybe be right and probably was the reality we had to face. It's not just my father, a father who sits like a stone marker to all father's cool and wise and unmoving and dependable in a grove surrounded by obsidian trees that stretch near to blocking out the sun, he's there in that opening with all the answers on how to traverse everything and anything, he sits in that clearing not on some pedestal but rather in the bedrock of a little hill covered in grass and I can find him always. It's not just my mother, like some delicate fish I can talk to, when I was growing up I told her most anything and when it was hard on me to fit in or I felt sad she was there with a hand on my shoulder and a hug and the sweetest voice I ever heard from a woman and now she's a lily I want to protect and correspond with and maybe even work with as an adult the one who bore me and nurtured my kindness through her own infinite spring of gentle caress touch and words a soothsayer I can teach and learn from now. It's not just my sister, the one I must protect and I must cherish, the honest angel prone to fits of emotion that are something of great exaggerations of our own ups and downs we try and keep the water in her porcelain bowl fresh and replenished without spilling over but it will spill over time and time again and I want to be there because she is the one and only sister I will ever have and she is a reminder of good and purity and right and I love her. And she's wonderfully flawed and beautiful.

It's not only for all these things...but also a feeling I get here. Slower, more tranquil, a feeling of poetry.

It depresses me to think that I will always chase beauty, the kind of beauty you find at the end of a book. But it shouldn't. Sometimes I feel like the only way to live that kind of beautiful existence is to run away, again and again, to some new place touched by the same sun in a different way.

Fall in love. Over and over again. Be loved, leave, over and over again.

Chase beginnings, butterflies.
Shirk the responsibility of being around when things require real effort, discipline, love.
Be forever in the exposition, and the pages leading up to the end.
Heart quicken, breath slows.

I'm stuck here, waiting to turn the page and see that space of white indicating the end of this journey.

And the beginning of the next one.

See ya in Shanghai.

2 things: beautiful scenery and depression

I was thinking about how much a change of scenery affects our mood. Like music, only the song is a palette surrounding us on all sides, with smells in addition to sounds filling our heads and hearts. You can sit in a place like this and think, or not think while trying to find a Zen-like tranquility or a spiritual revelation.

It's feelings like this that people travel to places like this.

Safaris over sun packed earth, golden and brown and baked. Adventure and vigor and the wild.

Azure fields of grass tickling and caressing while another sun touches our faces from above. Nostalgia and innocence and soft beauty.

Nighttime walks through giant graveyards, fear and respect checking each other on a scale. Mystery, culture, mortality.

Nights measured in thumping bass and glamarous flesh, and bathed in rain and neon. Love, lust, and denial.

Rained on by kisses
from the happy mouths of kind strangers and family
Dark as delight
Sweet as salt

The next day
And it all ends perfectly,
Or bitter sweet at least as you drive past it out the window.
His neck hurt, he couldn't look anymore and turned around.
And we go home with a treasure in our hearts
It can't be sullied
but
It can't be recreated ever.

It's a shame I can't uproot some of this grass from the hill, mix it with the warm earth and sand, and put it in my mouth and swallow it to make me whole.