breaking point

I've never felt more like a stranger, lying next to your skin. Outside of myself and not knowing if anyone is in or even if I am. The breath next to me barely registers. It runs into the back of my neck, gets lost inside my hair and stays there. The air is stained copperish yellow with reality and I wished you would go, and take the copper tones with you. You did. But I stay saturated in the unpleasant colors. I think it finally happened. I think what was enough finally isn't enough. I think we're done and I think you knew it too when you left with a closed mouth goodbye, your lips pressed firmly against each other. And not against mine.

**

scarcity

I called my grandparents last week. My grandfather told me about his morning. He had gone to the market and gotten five pieces of sweet cakes. He had gotten them, because he got some earlier in the week, but before my grandmother had any, my cousin came and had two with lunch and then took the rest home. So he went out and got some more for my grandmother. When I was listening to his familiar voice I could picture him carefully putting on his battered, honest, navy-blue linen shoes, rolling his cigarette deliberately, slowly, putting on one of his several newsboy caps, giving the front end a firm tug downwards to make sure it's snug.

I was rendered silent by something, and could not find words that should come next from my mouth. We don't say "aw" in Chinese. We don't say "that's nice" to your elders, like you need to tell them what's nice. But I doubt that was the whole problem. I don't think it was just an insufficiency of Chinese as a language. I think it was a feeling that is universal yet cannot be put into any language, a feeling that haunts someone at times like these.

It was not a fantastic picture, the one my grandfather told. It was a picture of routine. But routine is underrated. Newness explodes in youth, in New York, in a world where time is not a concern. But at some point we do face another side of life, when newness is not welcomed indiscriminately, when we will have to re-catalogue some old things; when we will see, sometimes despite ourselves, the shaping of our routine.

And my grandfather's routine. It was so ordinary, so unadorned. Yet at that moment, it seemed so scarce to me, that thing he has day in and day out, for the better part of half a century. It's a strange thing, having a surplus of new, unique things; and not enough the opposite.

**

frozen particles

The people you love become ghosts inside you, and like this you keep them alive.

--Unknown

I went back to Chicago this weekend and met up with people I were with only a few months ago, and for the most part they remained unchanged. But one person, I think, did recede into a ghost inside me, because he no longer feels the same way he did. Of course, selfishly, I wish he would go back to these feelings of the past, so I could always come back and figure out what we could be. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that we had an expiration date, of course we would, of course we would be subject to the same laws that bind everyone else. Under the always beautiful, always familiar Chicago sky, our expanding distance seemed more pronounced than ever. Our breaths came in between us and froze into frosted particles, even though they had come out so warm just a moment before. I wanted to fill the silences with something, but there was no way to push these awkward thoughts out. So I just let the silence freeze. Along with our breath. Along with our possibilities.

I wanted to fly faster than our plane back to Chicago, faster than the speed of light, back to the Chicago of 2011, when times were green and golden, and I would say, let's try us now because things are not always going to be this way, because I have seen the expiration date and I want to use up our pent up potential before then.

That would have been a failed experiment, I think. It too, would have become a ghost very quickly. Still, in my insatiable desire to have everything, I wanted every mistake as well.

**

december 31st

First, or should I say final?, blow of marks have come out. In opposite-land somewhere, a cherry is being placed carefully atop a great heap of ice cream. This past half a year has been a miserable experience. With little redeeming gems here and there. I had banked on the possibility of a final saving grace. But of course, that material belongs mainly to myths and Hollywood. In real life, real life with pantyhose and 9 to 5 workdays and gas price escalations, limits are quickly coming down like a metal netting over the exuberance of youth. Every five year old dreams of being the President or an astronaut, somewhere along the spectrum of the golden years, subtle and invisible things chip away at those dreams: maybe just Senator, local congressman, school principal, salesman. Slowly, we grow up. Or perhaps we grow down.

People say there's nowhere to go but up, but they never tell you how to go up. As a corollary, they fail to mention that there is a way to go down. A very plausible way. And that way is to stay the same. Not stay in the darkest pit for now, but for tomorrow, and the day after that. What is worse than bad? Bad without hope. How to climb out? How to stop the stagnant trajectories sputtering out in every aspect and direction? New Years are meant for new beginnings. But wait, that is another child of myths and Hollywood. It is an artificial and unfruitful cut, like taking a sword to a stream of water. There are no clean slates anymore. And the more the golden years slip by, the more the slate hardens and becomes harder to mold, yet easier to break.

Excuse this post for its rambling and uncohesiveness. I don't know how to make sense of something I have never known. These are failures both new in kind and more in number than I have encountered. And now I'm no longer fearful of the failures themselves, but of their persistence. Somehow, New Years does not seem enough a cap to stop the flood of the last few months. December 31st is still very much alive, stretching past its human-imposed bounds.

**

soul splitting

Another blown-up episode, the biggest yet, involving third parties, the law, and formalities. I've chosen to intervene after the right time had passed. Had I intervened earlier, perhaps the later complications would not have come. And things would not have escalated. But I chose to withdraw. One friend described a similar, albeit more harrowing, experience, when she promptly chose a stand right in the middle of all the action. On the right side.

I'm reading a book about first year at law school, and being a lawyer in general, the author warned of the consequences in believing that the "right answer" does not matter, as law professors so assuredly insists. Rather, one must use reasoning to find support on both sides, and then instantly take the ground from under them by switching to the other army. It's a frenzied back and forth. A chess match played against the self. I relished in it. Now I see why. I see its ugly implications, purple and black like a bruise, in a panoramic and magnified view as I crash back to the real world.

Why do I love not picking a side? Why do I prize the tool--rationality--above the end it is helping to achieve? Detachment. Cowardice. Perhaps a more deeply rooted and subtle vice. I've tested out my principles with the hot iron of reason, but wielding them in the face of the enemy is quite another matter. Who was the enemy? I have a feeling I could know the answer if I wanted. Yet I never approach this last step of the game. Knowing my opponent would mean I would have to spring to action, or forever hold myself as a soul-split being, where even neutral rationality could not save me. I am not a being of action, but only of observation, perhaps even of judgment. But action. Action! Something reserved only for the brave and quick, eludes me. Or perhaps more accurately, I elude it. One day I fear some sort of undesirable event, akin to evil, will be brought into the world because of my allowances, one day I fear I will be defined by moral abdication. People always praise those who helped house the persecuted in the time of Nazism. I always knew I would not be one of them. I live in gratitude that I do not live in trying times, because the test of character will be one I will surely struggle with. And one I have a real possibility of failing.

**

collateral damage

I once wrote that being at home is the bread and butter to my writing. And that will continue to be true...so long as my writing remains angst-driven and teenage like. A regular Twilight novel, sans glittering skin in the sun. Being drafted into and allowed back from the war of first semester law school, it felt like a homecoming was the exact right remedy, and its sweet syrupy-ness should have lingered longer. But it wasn't. And it didn't. Again the protagonist is reduced to furious, incomprehensible salt drops in a locked bathroom, as only living with blood-bound relations can conjure. Over a fight that she wasn't even a part of. How can kids from divorces, the mother of all such fights, survive it? The spoils of a different kind of war, the children sit unnoticed amid the canon fumes. After the battle. After the conquer and divide. After the newly-minted declarations and anthems. Someone notices the kids again. Their silence the loudest all along. I wonder how they survive it. Because like a vaccine, these little bursts of regular, self-introduced venom keeps the real thing at bay. So tonight was only a decimal of what the true veterans have come back from. How do they survive their Vietnam when I can barely survive the empty words of the Cold War?

**

trial at chrismas time

I haven't written in a while, let's blame it on law school, which is, let's be fair, much more intense than undergrad, especially as we hurtle towards first round of finals. The other factor is that life has been boring as of late. But it's Christmas time, so I will do a blog post with what holiday cheer I can muster after expending much energy stressing uselessly about exams. Despite everyone's sighs over corny Christmas music, I happen to love the Christmas atmosphere. A Michael Buble rendition of a Christmas song, a hot cup of latte warming cold hands, it's hard not to smile about that picture. Santa Baby has been on replay in higher and higher frequency as I approach finals. It's the only thing that keeps me sane, that and talking with friends who are not in law school.

And let's face it, I haven't exactly let my guard down with anyone in law school yet, there haven't been any friendships that would allow me to talk about something non-law school related. I must confess this process is very very slow-starting. Maybe I'm too picky with friendships. Maybe I'm awkward around new people. Maybe I don't pick the right times and places. And it doesn't help when other people admit to running into the same blocks. (Well, it helps a little.) Because then what are we doing? We want the same things. We are in the same place. We have been whipped by the same cultural expectations and social handbooks for twenty some years. What more could there be besides motive, opportunity, and means? In law, they add up to misconduct beyond a reasonable doubt. In law school, they add up to no conduct plagued by self-doubt. When will the trial be over? Has it even started? Santa baby...bring me a winning verdict. I've been a very good law student this year.

**