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March 17, 2012
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slap dash

Syar and I send each other regular bursts of static re: travelling, third culture kids, heimweh, anywhere but here - the thing I keep talking, living, breathing, working towards, the spirit of whatever this blog is devoted to capturing. This post on wanderlust is equal parts interesting and infuriating - it’s beautifully written but bless your parochial socks, ladies, and ease up on the ‘everything is exotic!!’ vibe. Digging this comment, though:

My comfort zone is the liminal place, where I’m either just arriving or on my way out. My real challenge has been learning who I am when I’m staying still and building the kind of community everyone else seems to want to escape from. 

Welcome to the last two years. Wanting to leave can eclipse the here-and-now and swallow up your entire life, if you let it. So I learned to let it go. And now even with my thesis deadline, and the boredom of hermitude, and the faint sense I’m sacrificing so much for the dumb and unknown, things are really effing great. I have my health and travel money and beasting self-confidence. I have giddy crushes which feel reassuringly stupid, and I have the arse-end of a terrible summer, and I have memories of people at events that led to tears and joy and love. And I have closure with the city, finally, and with myself. 

My departure date is too soon and there are loose ends to tie up and favours to beg and words to write, so many words. I am writing out everything I already know and it’s an awful mess of sarcasm and rage and scorn and sincerity. Not enough thoughts and too many feelings, but somehow it works.

I’ve been playing around with the naming of things. Today I invented jetflag as a way to describe feeling forever out of sync with the places you move through, and knowing you have to keep pushing through it. I’ve been looking for the next adventure since I first came back two long years ago. Thanks to Sydney I’ve learned how to be content; now I’m ready to learn how to thrive. 

Tags: human beiiiiiiiiiiing

Photoset
February 22, 2012
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1. My mother went on a month-long trip to China to discover a fragment of family history we never knew existed. I’m editing the lines a cousin transcribed from the original characters decorating the ancestral home, and it’s fascinating how much the ‘Couplets’ passage contains echoes of a well-loved Brautigan poem.

2. What little I know of my grandparents comes from picking through broken anecdotes and Javanese slang - stories of lost fortunes and the diaspora, swapping names, grandmama’s husbands (her first true love was a Japanese soldier lost at sea, her second man a bitter alcoholic, then my grandpapa who loved his children dearly), half siblings, a tumbling brood of thirteen, old-fashioned manners and a warrior’s heart, nunneries, doubt, secret romance and court-martials and my mother leaving it all behind to start a fresh life with my father. (Which is a whole different story.)

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Here is memory and experience and time and loss, always the loss, stitched into our veins and our bones and the uneven tread of bare feet on rough ground. I’m heading to the motherland for the first time in almost seven years and it’s equal parts terrifying and exciting, but more importantly it feels true. A lot of the time our feelings contain an artificial quality, a sense that someone else has already felt this hurt or betrayal or deep-rooted sadness and done a much better job of it, so why should we bother?  We’re a generation of pale imitations.

Oh, postmodern sensibilities. I don’t know where I’m going with this except I’m processing a lot of feelings and they’re manifesting in odd little ways, and I only really want to talk to travellers right now, and the only person who really gets it is leaving the country. I find I love this city most when I’m about to leave it, and that says more about me than I’m comfortable with, and I have better things to write about… like, you know, my thesis. But there’s a flowering in the scarred sanctum of my heart (meanwhile the sun slices through stuttery rain) and right now we are warm and okay with being alive, and here is a smile, here is colour and texture, and this must be how it feels when ‘luckiness’ translates to ’fortune’ and it really means sincerity.

Tags: what is going on here