After some time I will have to admit that there is not really a core storyline behind my many moves in the past 10 odd years. For sure, I have planned each of them meticulously, with a certain stringency that a good, steady life is not supposed to entail. However, at least in this moment, in one of the 4th-floor rooms of a stroad-side hotel in Danbury, Connecticut, I cannot really ascribe a character to the outcomes of my plan, all the while the years increasingly speed by. In Munich, I have a weekly routine that basically zigzags between the office, the Asian supermarket at Rosenheimer Platz, and my apartment, that is soon going to morph into one between the office, the Chinatown at Flushing, Queens, and my apartment. More words or even sections will appear on my LinkedIn profile, which, no matter how hard I tell ChatGPT to furnish with a better variety of English, remains quite dull. Yet, everything else that I have once held dear, the literary things, the metaphorical objects, and abstract emotions that are only felt in deep thoughts, has not managed to influence my LinkedIn profile but vice versa. Reality, or at a more personal level, realist thinking, seems to have definitively won out. Paraphrases include empiricism, pragmatism, maturity, the way it is, rationality, and FIRE. But I do not even know when the battle was fought, or what exactly is the side that has lost the war. Maybe the losing side has become the winning side, or maybe there was no battle at all. Regardless of what it was, all of it has happened in an instant of the 10 odd years, the youth of a single person.
In retrospect, there has been a great irony, one of a journey that had started in idealism, fantasy, and pursuits of things that go beyond the mundanity of what used to be my day-to-day life, and a journey that only started because it was at all costs, somehow ventured into an unknown place that feels eerily familiar. It has a different character of course, like how Germany is different from China and from the US, lifestyles, cultures, traditions and all that, but the struggle of living a life without knowing what end it has, and the toll of this thing I still don't get, "adult life", are largely the same, if not weighing down more heavily than before. Russ, my future boss, after hearing me saying that my original destination before going to Germany was the US, remarked, what a detour that was. And indeed, what a detour that was, and what a detour everything was. Maybe it is not that everything is a detour, but that nowhere is home. Most insidiously, the existence of home could be contextual. It might have only existed, amongst many other things, when I believed in them. Like a neatly built sand castle on the beach, it readily melts away after one or two waves of reality. But, after having spent 28 years being alive, and more than 10 years trying to find some sort of corroboration of what I had believed in, the search and rescue effort perhaps needs to come to a close, or at least be shelved. In my life thus far there aren't many such things as successes and failures - things happen and I am a good pupil.
Only in rarified moments, I shut the bathroom door, put my AirPods on, sit down on the toilet and listen to punk rock of which I used to be an avid fan. In those moments even the punk rock feels a tad dry, but still, two or three minutes in after the warm up, I bang my head a little.
