At 11:40 PM 5/16/2013 Beijing Time, when I've just slept for 2 hours, I'm already awake. Maybe before sleep I was so determined to change my schedule to fit it with that of D-day, my bodily function overcompensated. But the nocturnal setting offers more than fatigue, it makes the majesty out of the routine, that however menial and unknown, I can still do something of my own redemption. The rain rains still, it doesn't have to stop to indicate that I should do something to convenience the possible success of my diligence - writing Personal Statement the crucial document and occasioning my willingness and delight.
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The sun had vanished when I left school that November Friday.
As usual I needed to walk several blocks for the bus stop, which was made inevitable by my carless family and a desire for quietude. En route agitation was scarce - the street was dull as it'd been walked a million times, and I was dull as I was a millionth that walked it.
Beside me were pedestrians passing by, in a discernable but inaudible voice; behind me was a shadow distorted and restarted by the stars, but beyond me was nothing, a visible nothing where only a pirouetting leaf and a solipsistic repetition could remain.
Someone at a distance turned on the lamp, but it didn't disrupt me, it freed me. Meanwhile, the mild saffron of air, the dance of wind, and the hush beneath them, created something poetic and unpredictable to my inattention, for as I looked back to the length I'd trodden, and looked forward to the bend I'd turn, I neglected the place I was standing. I went to a necropolis of my yearning, but I was no more than a witness of its reduction. I walked towards a completion that was indeed a completion.
Upon the verge of sleepless and sleepiness, of confront and confess, I stagnated between the vastness of destiny and the nothingness of my being.
The bus was crammed with people submerged in a mutual indifference, because difference would always be otherwhere, otherwise, and otherworld. At the meantime, no line would be crossed, no farewell would be waved.
I gawked at the endless flow of irrelevance through the window, and saw a phantasmagoria of dust and youth and elegy below, with a ginormous, monopolizing wall above. I felt like I was a deserter on a bus, except that the bus was circular, and there's no desert.
I was buttoned behind dream by impossible hands, and I realized I woke up in it, and I persisted in it, like the scrap of residue at the bottom of every sensation, positing itself to no one's interest. But such was my morality, or prophecy, or surrender, or me: a spectator of a show starring himself as protagonist, without exhibition or production, without film or camera, only a soul whose mere leftover was yet appeased into emptiness.
I was denied like a beggar, who didn't know what he's begging for, or did know but chose not to notice. Oblivion was my nostalgia; anger was my anguish. I hoped the hopeless hopes, lived the lifeless lives.
But I was tired, I wanted to go home, not the apartment downtown, not otherwhere nor otherwise, but someone who'd been me before I evolved out of it.
I gazed up for God that was never there, and he told me:
"Don't part with your illusion. When they're gone you may still exist, but you have ceasing to live."
I heard him.
I'm here.
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P: Wish myself good luck :-)
