Today is another mediocre and anxious day. On my schedule are only broad instructions of waking up, doing test problems, reading, evading ramen noodles that testify my being in this apartment building lived by me and my mother and several hundreds of strangers.
I have uttered no more than three words since morning, and I notice that my contemplation is getting more derailed from the expression of language. I turn plain and pointless diction into something sophisticated and deep, I use the innate words like solipsistic and overwhelming to describe a colorless motion, and that only adds to the extent to its colorlessness. I'm reminded of a medieval temple where monks argued with other monks in an esoteric manner untainted by any perceptible reality, and strive to understand the principles underlying those rootless principles. For the mundane and the routine are deprived of any substantial improvement, and left only with the protraction of cadence, and substitution of some more syllabic and tongue-laboring word.
When, because of the demolition of my previous home, I moved to the apartment in the downtown area of Wuxi city, the cluster of 1970-style building in front of it was yet to be removed. There was a public bathroom stall that my uncle used to take me to for the price was adorably lower than any outside franchise. I then didn't have a hygienic sense and inherent snobbishness towards those people covered with sweat that turned into oil due to insufficient cleansing. That was the only available welfare for the workers in that loosely guarded factory, which was the reason of my entrance. Now those experiences, however unpleasant and base, become something of a precious memory - the permanent expunging of anything has an effect of enhancing its significance, and leaving me disturbed by the changing of the surrounding and at the same time a vague wish for drastic difference of becoming the noble and the respected. That sorrow and longing consistently distract and torment me, and instead make me impenetrable to neither of those fundamental sides of human contradiction. I'm those things that I'm trying to depart from and gloat at, therefore I'm nothing, as long as I don't admit it and deny if I've already done.
I have with me a strong impulse to see things as they are, that it doesn't disappear even after I close my eyes. I can still see restless dots and patterns that has nothing to imply and to do with my well-being. But I comprehend them as something abstract and transcending. The fading circle in this corner of my vision denotes the birth of another anomaly in the identical place. And I stare at them, and think that I'm staring at the wonderful and mysterious creatures in the flatland behind the curtains of my eyes. They're not only biological membrane to protect the integrity of my eyeballs, but also a mental and metaphysical one that might lead to an isolated garden in the middle of a distant ocean, of a heaven of the tranquility that is otherwise unreachable behind the dream of something absurd and enjoyable. And as a get tired of the profundity of that place, the ebb and flow of nothing other my conviction, I open my eyes again ready to be struck by the huge disappointment of seeing the same monochromatic and inscrutable things.
The bilingualism provides me something further than the convenience of communicating with strangers from other continents. It creates a different self that's interchangeable with the original one. The compactness of the Chinese language is so compelling that I must adopt a different way in organizing English, so that I can be thoughtless and thoughtful at whenever appropriate occasion.
I sometimes stagnated in the versatile inabilities of myself, and my subsequent effort to averse that inability and a disdain for that aversion. When the external and the alien is repealed from consideration, there will be nothing left. And I embrace and doubt nihilism as the answer to all things, however trivial and frivolous, may sometimes really offer me the pleasure of not having to think. But more often, I dowse myself in the sublime scenery of my own conjecture. I'm the God in my own sensation, and the only impertinence is that I'm the God of my own sensation.
In those empty thus childish moments, I put the mouse on the edge of the screen, and shaking it violently on the mat and watch the icon follow my madness. I savor the control of at least something, until an unexpected dialogue or option pop ups, and stops me. I confine my frustration to my possessions, and at some point I think that I want possession so that I can keep being frustrated.
But at the middle of all these, I'm privileged of few things I accept and not doubt, not think and feel the perfect understanding. The tiredness, the resignation to the flow of whatever pushes my humble being, to whatever direction I can enjoy and then cope, or cope and then enjoy.
