Spring Cleaning

Currently Listening To // Come Close // Common feat. Mary J. Blige

Part of the fun with being messy is the possibilities of finding things you thought you had lost. While frustrating, it makes life just that little more surprising when you find what you thought you had lost all that time ago.

Rummaging around my computer desk in an attempt to establish a semblance of order, I found an old piece of paper with a mental outpour that I wrote while on the train home after work. Thinking back, it was a Friday night, and from what I wrote (and the writing with which I used), I was most likely slightly toasted too. Like drifting in and out of sleep on a slow train home, here are my some of my (sub)conscious thoughts...

Sitting in an empty subway station, my mind is slowed by a cocktail of alchohol, fatigue and stress relief.

Waiting for a train to take me home, I'm forced to slow my life down; I reach for my headphones.

Listening to music as constantly as I do, I begin to understand that I use music as an escape, vicariously living through lush chords, sharp beats and soul-infused vocals. I replace produced problems with my own.

Flicking between tracks, I hear love, I hear hate. How do I reconcile the two, what I feel to be right, what I know to be right?

I stop chopping and changing, and Jay Chou takes me back to the streets of Taipei. The sounds of the traffic, the smell of the food, the taste of an exotic life. What makes me so enamoured with Asia?

Am I looking for something, something to 'recharge' my "Asianess"? I let my head shake; I feel like nothing more than an Asiaphile. I just happen to have the right skin colour.

But in my heart of hearts, I know that's not the whole truth. I don't abuse my culture, I don't think of it as a seperate, abstract notion that can be picked up and put down. I smile in the face of hate and ridicule. I accept there are shortcomings in all of us. I don't turn a blind eye, nor do I blind myself with so-called "Asian Pride".

Am I making life harder for myself than it should be? Am I struggling just for the sake of saying I struggled? Instead of making love to my life, I might as well be going to a prostitute; the result is the same...but the intentions are all messed up.

Pulling into my final destination, I try to call someone in the hope that they will take me these final few steps. But no one hears me reaching across the tracks and streets, so I brace myself and let my mind keep redialing an image of a candle in the window as I stumble.

Slowly.

Home.