Letter sixty-five - Day eighty of your vacation

Dearest J,

I realised this morning that since Oct 3, 2010, no matter how beautiful a morning sky may look, however good the morning air may smell, where I am, or may go - each morning will be tinted with a thin air of sadness.

So be it, it can't help itself.

I exchanged a few messages with one of your friends, one who seems to speak similar language as us, he said to me today:

When you meet that special someone all that scattered dots in your heart just connects , it just connects .. and everything makes sense.. it is a real fear that everything after that will be a compromise relative to the prior, the one ....


What a terrible thought to think that life will cease to make less sense for me without you around.  It has...if restlessness is a disease, then I think I have contracted it.  I live from day to day, floating from every new excitement to the next, a gasping at each discovery of a beautiful new song, savour each mouthful of good wholesome food, catching my breathe from watching every wonderful performance...amused at Thursday's games, etc.

Every experience is real and I embrace them all with my heart, I try to live these experiences vividly.  Yet there is a surreal sense of 'floating' to it, and there seems to be an undercurrent of restlessness boiling underneath.

I finished reading a short novel today.  Cher Siang gave me the book before he left for his Big Apple trip.  It's a collection of short fiction, translated from Japanese to Mandarin.  It's refreshing to be reading from page to page non-stop, I haven't been able to do it for a while.

This story is told from a young down-trodden Japanese royalty's eye.  Divorced from her first marriage and now she and her ailing mother live in a village tending a farm, surviving on little money left.  She had a drug-addict brother who later on killed himself to escape his hopelessness and his refusal to continue on this pretentious society.  The plot narrates her battle in her defense of her family's dignity and her own as a survivor of the war.  Her journey explores the meaning of life, culture & intellectual revolution, love of a mother...the ending is poignant, tragic to some, hopeful maybe.   She had a brief affair with a married man, and left him when she was conceived with his baby.  To her, she was meant to live by her own principle and the rest didn't matter.

I always like a slightly depressing story.  I hope to read a couple more fiction after this book.

Christmas, another Christmas, this weekend.

I think I will go and eat something sweet now, maybe chocolate.  The air in this room is too still.

I miss you.

B