It is always easier to figure out the twists and turns in literary metaphors than to face the profound patience of the real world. I miss the smell of morning coffees on the long-distance train. But the morning coffees don't exist as much as I couldn't really miss a smell, an olfactory sensation, in words, which are conjectures of the mind. I was traveling from Munich to Hannover on the train, in the morning and without much sleep the prior night. I needed to renew my residence permit; the "Morgen" from the train stewardess sounded formulaic and insincere; and I was troubled by the state of my haircut, while the coffees, steaming in those brownish plastic Deutsche-Bahn cups, past by me under my blurred vision and an utter disinterest to pay. The smell of morning coffees coupled with the sweet rays of sun on the horizon, the moment of warmth and fresh feelings of a journey and of everything starting anew, stands only in my distant awareness, hovering with a false and fragrant bitterness that I have not gotten to taste.
I live off these metaphors amongst all my pulsating urges to eat, sleep, walk around, and look at things. I distill what I understand and remember of the real world into unperturbed, abstract pieces, and store them in my mental reserve like the photos in my Google library, not to supplant the dull, eventless days, but to decorate them with my hopes that, despite their dullness and their eventlessness, they, as well as my life in them, have meaning, in precisely the way I envision meanings to be. So when I cook ramen noodles at the stove, sit on toilets and scratch my head when it itches, I get to overlook the fallibility of life that underpins these actions - my immune system is fighting off infections, my digestive system is getting energy from what's left of the food this afternoon, my toes are occasionally twitching, and I, sitting on the bed with pillows and quills covering everywhere, am typing on the keyboard in a state of spiritual nobleness while the dusts from my skin dance invisibly in the air with Engerer's Chopin vibrating off my speaker.
The furnitures of this room, the walls, and the milk cartons are rendered with an orange hue from the late evening lamp. The brightness shines down from near the top of the cabinet and spreads on the table like a piece of butter I cannot eat, and grows gradually feebler towards the more insidious places of the room. As usual the outside noises, always sporadic and lazy in their composition, lift somewhat the weightiness of my whole body on bed, before it resumes and relapses into the pull of gravity. Aside from this room on the third floor of this residential college, I have not known a place that captures more duly the inaction, the tedium, and the permeating immaterial blandness of a twenty-something life, looked forward to as that of hopes, enthusiasms, and excitements, and remembered as a series of fond memories of crispy red lips, gentle skins, and tight jeans that are the youth. I admire greatly those who are staying outside on this time of the day, telling words to each other and drinking alcohols to make the words more relating and believable. Or maybe they are just eating pizza, with a couple of them sitting together neatly around the table, chatting away time in senseless mumbled sentences. It seems an agreeable way to combat life's vacancy. But strangely my interest in these activities has never been greater than my awareness of myself being in them. I tell funny jokes and put up a laugh so authentic that all of my prior restraints would melt away like the sand dunes in a storm, only for them to come back later like the hollowness of an empty room when the festivity has ended and the lights have been turned off.
The mood begins to take on a more positive note as the Chopin has changed into the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 32. I appreciate the way classical composers manage to convince me of the virtue of optimism with such pathos and hope. "After all! After all!" - they yell at me through the notes in a calm despondence and bliss, in a state of ecstasy that almost borders on the sadomasochism. And as the piece slides towards its unwilling but inevitable end, the last lights of today's passing are boxed in firmly behind the curtain, from the same building to which I am eternally subject.
I lurk myself further onto this side of the lamp, and onto the blue twilights of a laptop screen with dead pixels. The flame of my 23rd year continues to burn low under the rim of this ceiling, amidst the random footsteps and a beveled corner of my beloved magazine. While I, for the last time today, gaze around with sparkling eyes, into the echoless dark.
