My original plan was quite simple - two years ago I had written fondly of a serene, salaried life which I then did not have - a sturdy corporate job that needn't be glamorous, an apartment to call my own, and a couple of places around the town to hang during my free time. I have achieved all of them - I now work for a DAX company in Munich, and my apartment is at the very center of the city. The surrounding area has a healthy dose of genteel vibe. Late at night sometimes it would be foggy so the traffic lights, the LED signs of the various eating establishments will sort of hazily blend in with the background darkness of the night - it often looks quite picturesque, almost dreamy I dare say. And my walking in them, my existence amongst them, when examined outwardly, will seem poetic. But I, like or unlike other people, have a tendency of never being appeased. Probably it's the lingering youth, or the set of foolhardy believes I maintain deep-down, or the fact that I'm in general a fidgety person, as a result, over time my plan has gotten more abstract, and thus, less attainable. With all of the worldly items crossed out, the rest are difficult to even describe, let alone to accomplish - ethics, love, altruism, acknowledging but not kowtowing to the passage of time, the smooth transition from the current me to the future me, having the proper level of sarcastic undertone to myself and balancing the tradeoff between the respect of knowledge and the respect of people. I can't cross out these things by making an action plan of what and how and when; and strangely from pondering these goals I no longer find the consolation which in my more desperate times I used to.
Lately, it has also gotten harder for me to portray the things that happen to me with the same clarity and poignancy as it was previously. If in the past things had gone either well or terribly, now they merely cascade down on me like odorless puffs of air - it's easy to ascertain the fact that they exist, but I have not been capable of assigning to them an apt, moving character. In this apartment I live in, which isn't dissimilar to all the other apartments I had lived in, I'm warmly surrounded by random things in random places. I'm wearing a facial mask in preparation for my trip to Shanghai in four days, and earlier I was working in the office, and even earlier I was asleep. Outside, the December Munich sky is ruthlessly dark, just like the December Bremen sky or Berlin sky - the places that have now become faraway places simply because I haven't been there, and inhabited by faraway people that I once was acquainted with but no longer am. Its darkness has nothing special within it; and the living ones under the darkness have nothing special to add to it. Wind occasionally and fruitlessly rams on my window and the cars, varying in their brands, shapes, and compositions graze against the road in a constant but usual roar - an evening bore, one might say, but according to Chesterton, "there are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people". Fair enough.
Though I haven't the idea of an interest - what is it consisted of? It seems to me interests are only of 2 types - a disregarding interest that takes place at the expense of other things, or a more reserved, appreciative interest that is only rekindled after experiencing life's great unearthing pains. At the moment I had neither of the interests - I lie for granted on my bed without an inkling of a war, and without harboring any grand resentment towards my life that can only be alleviated by drinking a beer. I simply lie on the bed, with a portion of my torso touching the bedsheet in all of body's trite familiarity. The night is steadily inching towards an utter silence that nights are associated with. The scant sounds and clamors are becoming even scanter. Happenings during the day, when people were still a bit more cheersome, are being slowly diluted away. It is often tempting to think of such a void as what's revealed after all the hustles and bustles are peeled off - that in this sort of a dark, uneventful, existential crevice, a truer facade of life is somehow represented. But there isn't a true facade so much as there isn't a false one.
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Sitting invariably in the airport with two hours until my flight would depart for Shanghai, I'm again listening to Chopin's Prelude Op. 28 No. 4. Not that I have the need to mourn for a loss nor that I want the bland waiting hours to be cast in a particular light so that it becomes less bland - the prelude simply calms me by bringing me a certain kind of reassurance amidst the sort of underpinning naivety and futility of it all - of traveling 20,000 kilometers multiple times, or perhaps, more generally, of my capability to see things realistically and then of my refusal to then believe what I see. But, increasingly I'm confronted with the fact that there exist a set of conditions in this world of which one can never be reassured, one can either choose to accept them or to detach from them. Such as the ephemerality of the beautiful things, the stern silence that often follows them, and the reason people would sometimes drink alcohol. I have had the courage for neither - I sit sluggishly in the airport seat, with my feet shooting out from underneath. I look around at the bright swaying intermittent lights patched up against the wall and the exuberant or subdued faces all around me and suddenly begin to feel a bit stymied. I have never quite been able to understand them so much as they have not been able to understand me. I merely drift along, with the phantasmagoria of various gold-tinted pursuits: happiness, meaning, gratitude, money, becoming good at useful things, etc, glimmering on an invisible sideline, cheerleading my strand of life as I nonchalantly walk on it.
