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Having the experience is only a tiny part of it; reflection and then the distillation of said experience alongside the reflection (preferably amusing or enlightening) into mere words is a much larger part of it. It being the telling of a story, the assumption of the elusive character of interesting-and-i-am-my-own-person person.

Have wanted an excoriation. The scrubbing of pumice against dead-skin-cracked-grandmother heels, or steel wool on chemically paint-stripped ugly wooden furniture. Have wanted to feel clean and clear of the past, of mind clutter and attic-brain dust. Of mistakes or impressions of mistakes or hallucinations of impressions of mistakes. What's holding me back? What's holding us all back?

Needing to write...something

"You cannot have certainty and you don't need it." --Psychology Today

Can someone live by that? Can every moment be rife with possibility, heavy and thick with it? Unaccounted for, unforeseen, unpredictable. Possibility. If we surrender the battle for certainty, we lose the security embedded within it and the shelter wrapped about it. So, we surrender a battle we could never win. And, we gain...everything.

I asked him how he knew psychiatry was what he wanted to do, and he replied, dropping the mannerism of doctor/psychiatrist/counselor/suave-gray-tailored-suit-van-der-Rohe-Barcelona-chair-sitting man, "I didn't know...In medical school, we did rotations and you find what fits."

Then, what hit me and resounds still: "It's not a perfect job, but it's not a perfect world."

Cigarette #100

So you did it again, after all these weeks. You thought you were through. You told yourself you were, in so many words, in so many ways, so many times. As if repetition created truth and illusion bred reality. Yet the world felt perfect again the moment you inhaled, you could breathe a little easier, could live a bit longer with yourself and who you'd become, could imagine a different time and could almost feel the wind of a different place raising the hair on the back of your neck and the goosebumps on your arms. You exhaled.

You turned your head so the smell wouldn't soak completely into your hair, you'd forgotten how the smoke smell stayed and stayed and stayed, especially on your hair, on your hands, in your mouth, on your yellowing teeth and rotting gums, in your blackened lungs, on your blackening heart. You inhaled. The trees looked friendlier for a second. You exhaled.

You left guilt for another time, a better time, perhaps when you could get him out of your mind, his smile, his laugh imprinted in your brain, although you didn't want it there. Had never wanted it there. You had more important things for that space in your head that he now occupied. You had watched your carefully constructed card-house plans fall to pieces the second he smiled at you.

And of course it was too late now. You inhaled. Lowered your hand to hide the object of your shame, the faint glow of the embers pulsing with the wind like a heart. Like your heart as you thought about his kindness, his intensity, his laugh. You exhaled.

You could almost see him now, could imagine him besides you, a cigarette ever dangling from his mouth, the white of the paper pristine against the black of his full beard, so strange on a face so young. He looked much older, which was partly why you couldn't resist the inevitable attraction. You inhaled.

Kaohsiung

The airport was so familiar, the smell of pollution and cigarette smoke that hit me the moment the automatic doors yawned open even more familiar, and the language--the beautiful, careless sounds of Taiwanese--most familiar of all, resurrecting the bittersweet half-faded memories of another life. I'd spent so many months here before, but now it was four years since I'd last seen this place, this city, since I'd last smelled the thick blend of industrial chemicals, moped coughs, run-down cars, thoughtless construction that formed invisible clouds for us to push through as we walk on sidewalks and across streets where the cars never stop for people, not even for children.

And that was just the city. When the car pulled in at last to my grandparents' building, all four floors of it, I could feel the little child who sits, always, in some forgotten chamber of the mind begin to cry, because I was not a child anymore as I stood staring at this building which I would never again skip into, never again play fishing in with stuffed animals, never again...

The next morning proved to be another test, feeling like a child again amidst giants.

Hong Kong

And on the last day in Hong Kong, a beautiful Christmas day, the weather was a perfect thin-jacket sort of weather with a suggestion of natural clouds instead of the usual smog obscuring the sun. The streets and elevated sidewalks were lined with seemingly endless numbers of Indonesian and Filipino women, in small clusters, in large groups, with a single friend, with cards, or presents, many with dishes of food, or with nothing but their purses, on cardboard, or pieces of cloth splashed across the cement to transform even the dirtiest looking sections of the walkways into comfortable picnic grounds. The phenomenon was fascinating. Wherever one looked, the dark-skinned women were there; the quick beats of their language filled the air, and a woman in Statue Square yelled into a microphone in a foreign tongue to masses of women for whom it was not foreign at all.

Here was an entire subculture and subclass in one of the most prosperous cities in the world that consisted of immigrant women who worked 16 hours a day enjoying one of their only holidays of the year with their friends. Set apart by their skin color, their facial composition, and their language from their more affluent native employers, they nonetheless found joy and a reason to celebrate on the day of Christ's birth. The poetic beauty in that was hard to ignore. The city had closed long stretches of streets in Central, whether for them or not I cannot say, but they took advantage of it and here, too, they sat, exchanging humbly wrapped Christmas presents, sharing potlucks with delicacies from their homeland, or simply chatting about nothing and everything at the same time with the people they considered family in a land where they had no husbands, no brothers, no fathers, and no sons.

Later that day, we left by plane and flew to Kaohsiung, a place I could very well call my third home (after Fremont and Honolulu) and a city I had not seen in four years. But that I will leave for another time, when I have more time, for it's past 1 AM now and my leg is quite numb...