its very hard to believe that two years has passed since i have written in this little part of cyberspace.
in those two years, i have hardly had the wherewithall to read these words. it was too sad for me to go back in time and only have memories. today, exactly two years since my departure from my beloved taiwan, i decided to take a little trip down memory lane. sitting in a restaurant, alone (which i never do), i sat and read every single post, closed my eyes, and just drifted in and out of time. what a trip it was! my face was soaked with tears by the time i had finished, but i was also smiling. every memory came back so clear, as though it had all happened yesterday. as if it had only happened five minutes ago, one minute ago...as if i had been narrating what was happening during the very moments in time that i was reading. i was so full of happiness and nostalgia that i could have absolutely split in two. it was a very therapeutic thing to have done, but it also pulled out a sadness in me that, no matter how hard i try, i will never get rid of. it will never be 2009 again, i'll never again be 22, that particular time of my life is over.
the past two years of my life since coming back from taiwan have been a whirlwind (where have they gone?!) but they have also seemed to drag along like molasses coming out of a mason jar (has it seriously only been TWO YEARS). i adjusted relatively well at first: i was so happy to be able to go salsa dancing whenever i wanted, i could go to target 2034832948 times a day if i felt like it, i could sit in the same room with my little sisters, i could watch television with my parents, my friends were only a car ride away rather than a plane trip. i fell right back into the routine of my job, driving everywhere, paying rent in us dollars, etc. things were so normal that it actually kind of scared me. the adventure was gone. still kind of is. i have scarely been able to find the time or the willpower to write much of anything in the past couple of years...for lack of desire, obviously, but also because of fear. i had nothing to write about! the words couldn't be found! i sounded like a kindergartener! i'm too busy to write! too happy! too sad! I HAVE NOTHING TO WRITE ABOUT!!
for someone who considers herself to be a writer, this has been a torturous two years. i went through a henious ending of a relationship that silenced a part of me. i got bogged down with my job and the need to be perfect at it. i tried to spend more time with friends and family. but for someone whose soul is completed through her writing, two years of not writing (for whatever reason) leaves her...well...soul-less. i have often found myself thinking, "wow, that would make a great story" but never letting it out of my head onto paper, or starting a poem only to crumple it up and throw it away, disgusted with it. the truth is, i can lie all day long and say that my inability to write comes from so many things, but if i am honest, its because of fear. a deep, dark, scary fear that my life isn't exciting anymore and doesn't warrant being written about like it used to.
all summer long, i sit around and read (one of the many perks of my job). because i am a huge nerd, i have gone through each book on my (huge) bookshelf about 10 times; the one i never get tired of is my ratty old eliot anthology. i never can seem to read his stuff the same way twice, and that's what i love about it! my all time favorite is "the love song of j. alfred prufrock" (if you've never read it, get thee to a barnes and noble and please do so. its great...but i digress). anyway, j. alfred is basically like me. he is afraid of himself, afraid of letting himself let life escape him. he is frustrated with losing the essence of what life is: he "measures out his life in coffee spoons" and rolls up the bottoms of his trousers because he fears that he is old. i'll spare you my english-teacher-esque analysis of the poem itself, but suffice it to say that eliot somehow went into the future and wrote so much of that from what i seem to be feeling right now. maybe i'm the only person who sits around on a saturday afternoon reading eliot anthologies for fun and maybe that's part of my problem...but i look back to blog entries from two years ago and see the same sentiment. my biggest fear is to look back when i am truly old, about to leave this life for the next, and wonder "where the time has gone?! and what exactly do i have to show for it?" when reflecting on the past two years, i'm afraid the respective answers to those questions are "i'm not really sure" and "not much."
my fear seems to have gotten the best of me. for the majority of my life, i have written every single day. stories, poems, narratives, whatever would leave my head and go onto paper. meant for an audience, written only to be smiled at by me and then thrown away. when i was in taiwan, i never had any shortage of topics about which i could write. even things as banal and mundane as what i had for lunch or what the weather was like or what came on tv seemed interesting, like i should write them down, like i should share them with whoever wanted to read them. now, back here, they seem almost embarrasing. "who cares if my favorite tv show got cancelled? who cares if they are bulldozing my street to put in a new sewer system? i don't even care about any of that stuff!" the truth is, i think eliot wrote prufrock into existence to serve as a warning to us. sometimes, banal is exciting. life is what is it made to be. even though i'm not wrangling live squid for dinner anymore, or getting lost on trains, or haggling in chinese markets or looking into the sunset from the top of the world's tallest building or shopping in 7-11 every two seconds, i am still alive! i am still living! and life is still exciting! i think i have spent the last two years learning and becoming okay with this fact. look at me, i'm even writing about it! who knew.
culture shock is hard and, like mrsa or the chicken pox, once it has entered your system, it never goes away. i still feel it everyday. i get so frustrated when no one understands a joke i tell about taiwan, or when a word refuses to come out of my mouth in any language except chinese, or when its my turn to dj a car trip and the only music on my ipod is chinese pop and no one wants to listen to it. it makes me sad to walk into a 7-11 in america and not hear the open-chan theme song, or to buy a ticket to the movies and not have an assigned seat. it reallllly makes me mad that i can't hop on a subway and go visit my friends in other cities. but...i'm happy that i can hug my mother when i want to or call my sisters on the phone and they are in the same time zone; i can communicate 100% with everyone and (not much) is lost in translation. there are THREE targets in my city :) i can salsa dance every hour of every day if i want (and i usually do). the last two years have really reinforced everything that i learned in taiwan: all of life is a give-and-take and really, no matter where you are or what language you're speaking or what you're eating for dinner, there will be good and bad. you'll always be missing something, someone, some time in your life. and THAT IS OKAY. its ok.
take a deep breath, it is okay.
so, here i am again...soul in tow. dumping all my thoughts out, either onto a real paper or into my little corner of cyberspace, makes me feel like me again. life is still interesting, exciting, and desperate to be lived...just in different ways than before, and in different ways than it will be in two more years. like most of life's more meaningful lessons, it was long and painful, but well worth it.
"and indeed there will be time
for the tellow smoke that slides along the street
rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
there will be a time, there will be a time
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
there will be a time to murder and create
and time for all the works and days of hands
that life and drop a question on your plate;
time for you and time for me,
and time yet for a hundred indecisions,
and for visions and revisions,
before the taking of a toast and tea."
-from the love song of j. alfred prufrock
