Changes on a linear scale make people measure and compare. Recalling the trip with my closest friends to Taiwan three years ago, I can't help but evaluate how much I've moved and grown. Do we still laugh at the things we laughed at? Do we still hurt like how we had hurt? Are we becoming the people we said we wanted to become or are we at least on the road of becoming them? There's a lot of smudged details in the ways I recalled these memories and they are getting blurrier each time I stir around looking for them in misplaced cabinets. But were we happy? We must've been.
There are memories that are fading away now. I am slowly forgetting how to write poems. Living a "normal" life distracts me from poetry just as much as how poetry distracts me from a normal life. It's like soldiers going back and forth between war-zones and homes. I find the transition hard to adapt to, and switching between these two worlds requires great effort. Poetry liberates me and yet I endeavor to contain myself and rationalize my thoughts in my conscious state on a daily basis. Looking back on memories and talking about them are very different experiences. Visualizing or thinking about them is like indulging yourself in the world of poetry. Verbalizing memories, on the other hand, is very much like writing poems in the midst of my normal day.
Before kindergarten, my sister and I had lived with our grandmother and our uncle's family back in Hainan because our parents didn't have time to look after us in Hong Kong. My mother came back once in a while to visit us in the old house in Baipoli. There was a balcony in each room of the house and the one in the laundry room overlooked the main entrance. It was on the third floor and every time our mother called home telling us she landed safely, we, my sister, cousin and I, would sit on the balcony holding the railings and anticipated her arrival as if she was coming home from war. "Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" We yelled at the woman coming through the tall gate who had luggage and was wearing a pair of stylish shades until she looked up and waved back. While my cousin was expecting the gifts my mother bought her, I was looking forward to going to bed at night and fall asleep with my mother and my sister on the big bed side by side. It was Summer and even if the thunder woke us up, we would drift back into sleep again forgetting what our helpers had told us of how the monsters and ghosts would appear in our nightmares if we didn't go to bed before 10.
When we came back to Hong Kong for school, we still visited my uncle's family every Summer. Each time we went back, we would stay there for a month or two until the break ended. The two families would travel together for two or three weeks, and on the other days where my father had to go back to Hong Kong for work, the grown-ups would hire private tutors to teach us English and Math on weekdays from 8 to 12. I forgot how many years ago it was from now, but one time our family went to Sanya together for two weeks. It was a distant past but it also felt like it's within the reach of the stretch of my arm. The place was like a paradise with beaches and resorts. Before the ocean was as polluted as it is now, we could see small fish swimming in the clear water here and there. My dad and my uncle challenged each other to catch them and they bought a big net and headed towards the deep end of the sea. A giant wave crashed over the shore and a while later, the two challengers came back panting. "The fishes are too fast! And the wave washed away my goggles, the net, and Poon's swim cap. Thank God we still have our underwear on!"
After the beach bound, we had dinner in one of the restaurants in the hotel. As we were walking to the table we reserved, we observed the decorations of the place. There were small fish tanks or bowls, as how I prefer to call them, on each of the dining tables. The fish inside were small and colorful, exactly like the ones we tried to catch in the sea, though we would set them free right after. "They swim so fast, we couldn't even touch them!" My uncle exclaimed to the waitress. "Do you feed them?" My mother asked. "Oh no, there's plenty of them in the sea; we don't have to," the waitress replied as she was handing us the menu, "and besides, we don't know what food to feed them."
Another Summer in Hainan, which I forgot how old we were, my sister and I had gotten much closer with our cousin. We didn't live in Baipoli anymore; the place was rented out. My uncle's family moved into a new house near where he worked. The three of us were much older back then, and we would hang out in the playground at night after the streetlights were out. We borrowed a basketball from a family friend whom my cousin always hated. We flung the ball at the basket despite the many times we had failed. It was fun because nobody was watching and no one was there to laugh at us. Some days before dawn, we would stroll along the court observing how the players dunked. We had to pretend to be doing something else because we didn't want the guys to think that we were watching them or sending them the wrong signals, so we stood on the benches and pretended that we were trying to catch cicadas in the trees and bushes. We had no empty bottles or any containers to hold the cicadas so we cupped our hands and trapped it carefully as we walked 7 floors back home. I lost mine in the bedroom the same day I brought it home. For the following two weeks, it kept squeaking and singing of lost places at night. We had been looking for it in the room but we couldn't locate it by its sounds. Some days when it didn't make a sound, I thought I heard it squeak. It only turned out to be my own imagination to fill its absence. I couldn't remember what happened after that but I think about this piece of incomplete memory a lot. I am addicted to the vagueness of some distant memories because it adds so much more possibilities to my narratives.
Before we make sense of it, memories are just a personal collective of how we think we experienced certain events. Like I said, looking back on a certain memory is just like indulging in the world of poetry. These fragments have an elusive and episodic nature, and to assign meanings to memories and to create values of them, we need to, first, acknowledge the consciousness of our being. To verbalize or to write about a memory is to construct a framework in which these fragments can fit. And it's exactly like writing a poem. Memory serves as the basis of human existence, and therefore it is also inevitable. To make meanings of my present self, I need to be immersed in my own past, then select, prioritize, or even neglect each part to compose a narrative. These memories are coming back piece by piece now in retrospect as I am asking myself the questions I asked myself three years ago in the Taiwan trip.
We were sitting in a circle inside the hotel room after a long day of adventure in Taipei and we started to talk about the little things as well as some bigger things, and eventually we were at the topic of love and life and values and beliefs. We saw one another's past scars and even some wounds that were still open; we saw how they had made us the people we were and the people we wished to be. I remember when we were discussing what love meant, one friend, a Christian, said the Church told them that being in love was like losing half of your heart. And each time you fell in love, half of your heart would be given away; so it would become smaller and smaller as time went by. The fear of getting hurt wasn't what the Church was teaching them. It was warning them about what came after that – losing yourself along the way. When we think of love, we don't just think of the feeling. When we think of love, we think of the entire picture we perceive of it. We think of the future, the setting, the people, the type of lifestyle we imagine to fall in love in. What is love, really? Five confused girls sitting in a circle, miles away from their hometown, couldn't figure it out back then and had kept asking themselves the same question year after year. I don't know if they still wonder about it now, but one of the girls still contemplates it sometimes. And she is pondering over it more often than ever now.
What is love? Is it the lovely words we say to each other at the pier where we both spent our teenage years? Is it songs being sung over and over again in the shower? Was it love when we talked about our dreams in that messy bedroom of his when the both of us were piss drunk? Is it forehead kisses and holding hands? In which moments did it exist when we spent the whole day together? Does it occupy any space in our body? How do we keep it and how can we lose it when we don't want it anymore? How much void is there in love and how much substance does it accommodate? Does it have a future? Is it a living thing then? Does it matter how I pictured my kind of love and how you described yours? It's funny how much more we question love when we are in it than when we are out of it. People pursue love. We want to catch fishes when they are swimming all over the place in the sea. But when we've captured it, we don't know what to do with it. How do we keep it alive? What do we feed it? Or do we even need to feed it at all? Can we live with what we've done to it or are we proud of our displays and proofs of victory? Are we the fishes or are we the ones catching them? Does love really eat half of our hearts away? Who is exploiting who? And who is it to decide what the repercussion is? Was I just being delusional or did the cicada really squeak for the entire Summer I spent in Hainan? Sometimes our mind makes up things to fill up the void of something we've just lost; it's a kind of defense mechanism. Sometimes humans need a significant period of time to get used to a new situation. And it can be terrifying because we could confuse that with the real thing. Poetry and reality. War and home. Memory and narrative. Love and solitude. An echo's echo will just keep coming – and that's why we need to seek the answer of love from the initial state; the real form.
We haven't been to Hainan for almost four years now. But I still remember the time when we screamed at the top of our lungs through the balcony railings. I still remember how my mother would cool us down on a hot Summer night with a paper fan and tried to stay awake until we had fallen soundly asleep. I still remember the angel in my nightmares and the thunder that didn't scare us a single bit. They say that love is a battlefield. They say love is a battlefield because it is cruel and gruesome. I say love is a battlefield, not because of how brutal it is, but because it teaches us to jump on grenades like a soldier would do to protect his comrades. Love may be a peaceful and cozy picture in your head. But to me, it is a battlefield, a war-zone. And for those I love, I will sacrifice.
