Reflecting on a Month

After work I feel a particular need for peacefulness. I don't know why. But I can sense that need when people start talking on the phone around me. I become more sensitive to it. I get annoyed. Normally no one is talking on the phone, but when someone does, it sounds unusually loud. After staring at the computer the whole day I guess my mind needs some rest.

Last day of the first month of my so-called new life. Often when I reflect back at some period, I am always so astonished by how short it is while how much has happened. Perhaps it's because this kind of eventful short periods is more likely to make me reflect. The new job, the new building, another heartbreak, the sudden turn of events for my best friend's father, and of course, all the snow I can imagine in a single month, and more. Not to mention the New Year's Eve milonga. I would like to think that now that my life is different, simpler, more structured, there would be fewer things to do. But somehow, I always fill the void with something.

My weekend I mentioned briefly on Saturday. I think I mentioned the new wave of people taking the beginner's class, the so-called bootcamp. I went without any intention of dancing, since they didn't need any help. I wanted to watch the beginners. Their overt enthusiasm for tango made me happy. I don't remember myself being very enthusiastic about tango in the beginning. I just remember being nervous that I couldn't even lead an "ocho", the most basic step after simply walking. People always asked me why I started tango. Of course, a girl was involved, but it was a friend. It was one of those stories of the same theme: girl wanted to be just friends, I got upset, but finally I relented and let us be friends. Now I am glad we never dated. She was so weird, even as a friend.

Lest this start to sound like sour grapes, let me continue with tango. Why I stayed with tango is much more interesting than why I started. But I am not here to write about that either, because the answer is really long and deep, etc, and at least my dear sister doesn't want to read anything long. And I don't want to go into some rant. The pertinence of my connection with tango is that watching the beginners trying to do all these what I now consider simple moves (but not necessarily easy) made me happy. I could feel my heart smiling, especially when I see couples trying to do this together. Few things you can do on a date that is more fun and romantic than taking a tango beginner's class together. Watching couples taking their first lessons together is like watching children discovering romance, all the awkwardness without the drama.

That was it: tango without drama. Later that evening I was walking with a tango dancer who had only started a few months ago. She wanted to understand what was up with all the drama in a milonga, especially at a New York milonga, why people seem so mean, so cold. The simplest answer is that it's a social dance between a man and a woman, a lot of trust and distrust come into play, a lot of the real interactions in society get to play out before you even start dancing, before you even know with whom you want to dance. We don't all want to dance with everyone just as we don't all want to be friends with everyone, especially not romantic friends. But we can still be nice, giving the minimal love even enemies deserve.

Still, I took a pause from all this silliness of life and tango and I watched the smiles on these beginner's faces. Some weren't smiling; being Ivy League students some inevitably took upon tango as yet another academic challenge to overcome, and you can see the same face you'd find when they are trying to overachieve in their next paper or midterm. Still, on none of the faces was there the scars and fatigue of seasoned tango dancers that I see a lot. That is not to say tango is bad, just as real scars can be great signs of wisdom.

Tango is also my main means of making friends. At least for the past five years. And so it was no surprise that last night after the classes were over, the teachers and others in the club, including me, got together and had dinner. We knew one another at least a little bit. But even if we didn't, as in a festival, we would instantly bond and go to a restaurant and laugh and chat, as if we were old friends. Very few activities I can think of would allow such quick surge of camaraderie. Tango is something I hope will help me make some friends in New York, once I move there. I already know a lot of people, and it's very comforting that many of them have expressed their impatience for me to move and join their community.

Of course, New York will be for me a wonderland of museums, opera, concerts, and soulful streets in which to ambulate. But I can't really make friends with strangers in a museum (though some gay Frenchman tried making friends with me at the Met once).

While I don't want to have just tango connections, I am confident that with some people I can make other connections, not just tango. One of the teachers stayed at my place overnight, and even though we didn't know each other well, we got to talk a lot before and after sleeping. There's something about the way I talk to people that makes them open up a lot. I don't know for sure if that's a gift or a curse; making people open up too fast has sometimes made them regret it and run away from me. But in any case, I hope tango will help me get some connections in an otherwise very rough city of people at least as cold and mean as some of those found on the dance floor.

So I've survived my first month. I even forgot about the eventful food poisoning (as I have said, as bad as things can feel at the moment, I quickly forget about most of them). The next step is finding a place in New York. It already sounds a little scary. Whom I am leaving behind? Friends I don't really get to see more than a couple of hours a week. Who will I meet? I don't know. I just know that I will have me.

Things among the Snow

The sunlight starts slanting as its fiery source dips southwest. The warm welcoming light momentarily pierces through the small spaces among my avocado plants and reminds me that despite the mountains and mountains of snow around the little city, there's sunshine that both melts the snow and gives hope of something different.

A man in those funny fur hats with flaps over the ears helps a woman put on her jacket in the middle of the street, where walking was much easier if not more dangerous than the narrow, some still unploughed, walk ways on the sidewalk.

Another couple, a man and a woman, each with a dog leashed to the right hand, walk past me, enjoying that same slanted sunshine. The dogs both look at me, undoubtedly analyzing my presence as I am doing to them. Both black, young dogs. I know nothing about dogs to say what they are. I just know that dogs bite and bark.

A man, a neighbor, shovels a path in the snow so we can all cross the street without hopping and slipping over the icy mountain that divides us from the safety of the sidewalk. He isn't paid by anyone. He's in his mid forties. An elderly man approaches him; I can't hear what they are saying, but they are smiling. Life continues to be good.

There is a melting coating of ice around one of my gutter tubes coming down three-stories from the roof to the ground. I hit it so any loose ice would fall now instead of onto a tenant's head. I worry a lot, I guess.

My car is still there, in the private parking lot of the law offices. I am glad there isn't even an angry note warning me to "move it or lose it." But I won't push my luck and leave it there for tomorrow. Where I will park tonight after the milonga run to New York, I don't know. Let's see what sort of fate my car and I will have. But life continues.

I am noticing little things around my house. I am noticing how much snow there is in this city. I realize, I don't really live here anymore. It's a big deal for me to see snow nearly as tall as me, and in many places in downtown, taller. It's as if I were a tourist from Miami.

But this morning I felt a little reconnected with the house. I had a guest over, and I was able to use the house to prepare a great breakfast for her, and in the kitchen that I had designed and whose renovation I had paid for, we talked about disconnection from romance and connecting with family.

Even before she came, yesterday I cleaned up the house, mopped the floor of that same kitchen, dry mopped the rest of the house, put things away, water plants that I cared about more than I'd like to admit.

But I know I have started saying goodbye to my house. I haven't really taken care of it as much as it deserved. It's like leaving for college and saying goodbye to your parents when you suddenly realize there is more you could be doing to strengthen the connection but now, it's a little too late. Still, cleaning the house, putting things in order, simplifying the microcosm of my living space, helped.

Beyond the house, this city I am becoming a stranger to, isn't totally disconnected from me. We went to a restaurant last night after the tango bootcamp. Being in a restaurant in this city with people whose company I enjoyed made me feel a bit more connected. After I move from this city, I will of course come back a few times, and I think I will have good feelings for it, not one of longing and regret, of course, but one of sweet memories.

The friend I made breakfast for told me there are lots of cockroaches in the apartment where she's now staying. I forgot how much New York is infested with all sorts of critters. I have not been to a subway station without seeing at least one rat. I also remember having to deal with critters at my parents' house. For all this time I blamed them, thinking they were just immigrants who were too used to living with critters to really do something about them. But now I realize it's a problem in many households in New York, in a big crowded city, whether you're an immigrant or not. In any case, it was a strange foreboding for my desire to return to New York. I only hope I won't get bedbugs, like my ex-best friend got when she moved in to her new co-op.

Now I am in my living room. Another couple walks by. A young woman with short hair, walking alone. Followed by a middle-age woman with a velvet black hat with some feathery pin on it. There's a lot of people walking in front of my house. I wonder what I will see outside my window in my new home in New York.

Hopefully, I won't lose the opportunity to see the ray of sun coming through my windows.

Notice More

This morning I woke up grumpy. I didn't look forward to rushing those ten, fifteen minutes, preparing breakfast and lunch. And even less, those fifteen plus minutes of walking in that cold. My main alarm didn't go off because I forgot to turn it on. It's a program in my iPad. Well, not my iPad, the old company's iPad. That, too, needs to be returned next week. The grumpiness, however, was due mostly to yet another dream about being found.

But I knew, once I set in motion, things will be all right. So this won't be another blog that starts with a diatribe against life and eventually ends with some brilliant revelation about life's beauties. All the love in the world, etc, etc.

Finding peace, or at least searching for it, involves one little trick. Without passing judgments through a diatribe or a revelation, I just notice things. My brisk walk itself was peaceful. The street was nearly empty, as usual. I noticed the sun as a blurred globe behind the morning haze. It always reminded me of the egg yolk in one of those mooncakes the Chinese eat for our Autumn festival. Innocently orange.

Most of the sidewalks have been plowed, and I remembered my poem about the black plowed sidewalk and the blue sky above, separated by the white world. I noticed the buried fire hydrants, and I thought about the firemen who would have to plow around them, like some did when my rescuer friend and I were trying to liberate my car from the previous blizzard. I noticed a simple line in the snow made by someone I could assume I would never get to know. The line would be there until the next snowfall, or spring. Marks made by strangers, especially strangers I didn't even see or otherwise sense, somehow leave themselves also in my mind.

This was the first work day since the merciless third blizzard pounded us the night before. I noticed the presence of a lot of the MTA workers on the platform, with their walkie-talkies. I wasn't sure what they were doing, looking so concerned and worried.

Of course, I couldn't help noticing all the snow around us. It seems that most of my blogs talk about snow. Lots of snow. Snow all the time. More mentioning about snow then the philosophies of life and love. The whispers around me in this train that is usually very quiet utter mostly about, you guessed it, snow. More snow coming. If I believed in a God that cared about human beings, I would like to think that this record snowfall happening at the very beginning of my new life is no coincidence.

The train passed through a lot of residential areas, so I could see the backyards of many houses. One of them had a bench, but it was covered in snow over its sitting part. It was cute. It was as if the snow was taking its current rest on that bench where the owners and their guests have rested their tired butts on.

The port of Bridgeport is frozen, all snow on frozen stagnate water. The commuters were making ant lines into this train. I've made the seat next to me free before the first station since mine. I noticed in the past that most people don't do that, and many of them aren't very nice when asked to liberate the seat, no matter how polite you ask them. Some, of course, smile and apologize and offer. But many don't bother to make any human contact, even sighing at the lost of property they had convinced themselves they owned by default of being in the row of seats first. Only a slight judgment. In the end, this is how people are, naturally.

The shuttered factories many with broken windows, the depressing rows and rows of subsidized housing surrounded by ugly machineries sleeping under a blanket of snow, the distant chimneys billowing out steam, the graffiti that was now matched in its omnipresence only by the colonizing snow. Bridgeport is the border in Southern Connecticut between the rich and the poor. The snow does its best to level the beauty for all places.

Last night I had an unexpected invitation to sushi by a friend I hadn't seen in a while. I don't think I've even seen her this year. We didn't say happy new year, so I wasn't sure if we forgot or we had done so already in person. She was distant. She disappeared, her mind at least, during dinner. I haven't seen a more forlorn face in a while (though I should just look at mine from time to time!). It wouldn't surprise you that the reason had to do with a relationship. Unlike me, she has one, but one that was plaguing her. They say that having a relationship can be much worse than being single. I sometimes believe that. I felt bad for her. I did my best to listen and to cheer her up. Making jokes. Lightening things up a bit. I think people who are single, like me, often make too big of a deal out of relationships. I don't mean those who are desperate for one. I also mean those who are avoiding one. Being with another human being is the best way to discover your deepest challenges. But once you get in there, you may find yourself trapped for an unnecessary amount of time. My friend wasn't sure if she was trapped or she was not patient enough.

My breakfast was oatmeal. I brought it on the train only to find out that I forgot to bring a spoon. On the other hand, I brought two pairs of gloves, which happened a few days ago. I thought about the girl I went walking in the blizzard with. I remember thinking I wish I had brought two pairs of gloves that time. Her hands were wrapped in these thin gloves that soaked in the snow, which melted and then started freezing again. I didn't want her hands to feel pain.

While having my oatmeal I thought about the sushi dinner last night. There were a lot of couples in that restaurant, which was usually empty when I went. I actually recognized the woman in one of the couples. She didn't recognize me; she had no reason to. I only knew her through the woman I went to India with; "knew" as in I said "hi". But I remembered her name. My friend proceeded to say she didn't understand why all these pretty girls were with all these ugly men, and that I was the most handsome in the room. I wasn't sure how much of a compliment that was, being compared to a crowd of ugly men. But she knew how to make a friend feel good when his male ego had been flattened to a crêpe by all these unlucky women. I told her earlier that evening that she was one of the few women who never seemed to age, whose beauty seemed eternal. It is always nice to be a real friend with a woman and you can compliment her, make her feel really beautiful, without any awkwardness. We both needed in our own ways to be reminded by a trusted voice how beautiful we were.

I told her as she drove me back on the snowy streets about our common friend, my best friend who was attending to her dying father now. I told her how in love I was with my best friend for many years. She knew that, but what she didn't know was that I told her I would wait for my best friend every night, no matter how late, and took her home, without ever hinting or pressuring to go in with her. Love was simpler back then, even though there were many fights, but not enough to taint the memory of a simpler love. She knew from the beginning I wanted a romantic relationship, but she wasn't ready, not for another five years. But I was still waiting, and doing what my heart wanted. I told my friend last night I had forgotten how simple love was. But, being the cynical human being she was about love, reminded me that I deserved a woman who didn't have to make me wait, especially not that long. All right, I guess she was right.

It was nice talking to a friend, an old friend. I'd known her through my best friend for six years now. We don't spend much time together. We are very different people. But like family, you don't need to be compatible, you just need to want the other person. Simply want.

I guess that was another "revelation" about life. One more revelation I want to put in is this man, the snow man. I mentioned him in my second entry yesterday. I thought more about him. I imagined wanting a man too. Wanting friends who make me feel safe in a way that women wouldn't. Seeing this man in his mid forties, who has nothing to show in life except his expensive shoes more because he wanted to copy his father than for himself, who remains single and horny at the sight of any young woman, more than pity I felt camaraderie. I realized that, it is true, it is very hard being a man. I have spent so much time thinking how hard it must be to be a woman, empathizing them, but never felt connected to anyone in the field of how men suffered in their unique ways. I looked at this man and I remembered how we always have to have something to show. How women expected us to have a steady job. How we should dress. How we should be a "man". How we need to be admired and need to have that certain charm. Here was a man whose suffering had brought him no closer to a better job or the warmth in the company of a woman. In my mind, I gave him a hug, and we each told us in the most unmanly way how sorry we felt for each other as men.

One More Item: A Man

I forgot to add to today's blog about this conversation I had with my snow man.

That is, the man who plowed my sidewalks and the snow around my car.

I was working, but I didn't want to be rude so I offered him company to have a chai and a lavender scone I had made. He is in his mid forties. Not small amount of coverage around his waist. His teeth are more crooked than mine. There are a few scars on his face. But other than that, he is probably considered a handsome man. I could see it in his face, in his eyes. He doesn't have a lot of work now, which is why he is eager to shovel my snow. I think I pay too much for his work, but I think he needs the money more than I do.

He talked to me about all sorts of random things. The most annoying is his talk of evolution, how according to some book I have never heard of he learned all the lies evolution theory has poisoned us.

But that's the only annoying thing. I just listened, repressed all desires to rebuff, and walked him to the door. Before that he was talking about his extended family, some members of which are in the mafia. He said he never had anything to do with it, but he couldn't help bragging about how much he seemed to understand it. His Dad, he said, owned a lot of expensive clothes, especially Italian shoes (they are Italian Americans), how he dated the daughter of the man who controlled half of the Little Italy in my very little city. I met his Dad; a very big man, showing a lot of age now. But somehow, if you could look past his thinning white hair, his giant tummy, the tattered clothes he wore to help me paint my house, if you can look past his present, you can see the swagger and charisma and self-confidence in his eyes. You can also therefore understand the timidness in the eyes of his son. His son, my snow man, was trying to explain in the most repressed way possible how abusive his father was to him, how in the end, now in his mid forties, he still felt he lived in the big old man's shadow, never feeling he's good enough. And yet, he has come away from that shadow enough to be friends with his Dad. Before he left he called his old man twice, to tell him he was coming home. I guess you really can't treat your son completely like a child once he passes forty.

But one thing he said that stuck in my head. He said that while he suffered (again, he didn't use such obvious words) because of his Dad's toughness, he was grateful that the whip, at least figuratively, made him a tough man, that it made him withstand a lot of pain in life that he thought someone else with a more gentle father would not be able to bear. I know not everyone would agree. But I thought about myself (surprised?). I thought about my weakness in the face of heartaches. I look at my hands. They are beautiful, almost feminine, in the sense that they never really had to work. Not like this man's hands. Not like my father's hands. My Dad was tough. But he never made me go through anything physically harsh. He wouldn't be able to watch me go through it without breaking, himself.

This man in front of me, who was hungry for a few more dollars, who was single in his mid-forties, who never misses a chance to comment on some girl, how pretty she was (he did it again today, telling me about a girl he helped shovel while waiting for me to return from the bank). I wondered how he would handle heartaches.

It goes without saying, that it was a beautiful experience talking to a man, someone more real, with nothing to hide that he wouldn't hide from himself.

To Infinity, and Beyond!

Snow arrived, again.

My face was that pitiful interface between the frigid upheaval outside and the warm turmoil inside. It was melting the hail-snow mixture as the particles whipped onto the surface. When the gust became great, I realized my face wasn't numb enough to feel the stings of the bullets.

All that for walking in the snow. I wanted to walk in the snow with a girl, and there I got it. It was beautiful. It wasn't what I expected, not the calm romantic walk, fraught with tension and gossamer hope, but rather, two people braving through a world that was transforming into a beauty like no other. I had never walked on virgin snow; not a single footprint, save those made by the wind. And I wasn't alone.

I won't be writing much about my sentimentality anymore. I only mention this to say I was happy that life gives you what you didn't expect but with an open mind you can be happy with whatever it is.

I am not happy that my best friend is suffering. Her Dad's situation has deteriorated. I called to wish her a belated happy birthday. But we spoke nothing of that. She was getting ready to leave for her paradise island that was far from being a paradise for her. She and the family were told to expect the worse. I was sad to hear that the man I had known, gotten to know, one of the few men in the world that I had gotten to know, would never appear before me again. I have said once that this has never happened to me before: losing someone I had gotten to know, permanently.

But I was heartbroken that I couldn't be there for my best buddy. She sounded worst of all the eight years I had known her. No crying, just hopeless. I wish I could be there for her. I despised this distance between us. I almost despised myself for caring too much about my own life and not risk losing my job by joining her. Of course, the reality is that I will probably be more of a handicap for them than a help. I don't speak Spanish enough to offer comfort. But whatever the wall, I felt helpless in being the friend I wanted to be for her.

On this week's topic of "love" I felt strangely stronger having talked to her. I was even more convinced that in this world what really, really counts is love, whatever the kind. What moved me, what made me so sad, was that I loved my best friend immensely. That feeling is inexplicable but easily identifiable. There's nothing I want from her, just everything I wanted to give her. It's what I have been reminding myself all along: to love is to give.

On this snow day I worked from home. In a few days I will say goodbye to my computer. I still don't know what I will do after that in terms of writing in my blog. My morning routine will be different: I won't be able to write in the morning.

I started writing poems. I mentioned that that movie inspired me to write better poems. So far I have written poems that I almost never reread. Just whatever was in my mind. But now I have a little drawing book where I have been putting in poems and drawings sporadically since 2003. I looked at some of the drawings, not too bad. But, being a bag of memory that I am, they reminded me of many events in the past, mostly involving that same best friend. We spent a lot of time together. So much drama, even breaks. And now how close we are. Strange how life works. Strange how I continue to worry and be uptight about love.

Being at home working meant I couldn't interact with the people at work. It's an interesting place. The trading floor always fascinates me. I would never be a trader; I am not even sure what qualifications you need to be one, but such a person doesn't seem so different from a car salesman or real estate agent: aim is to make a sale, maximize profit, and push your moral boundaries, if necessary. But then when I see these people, they seem so human. Sometimes they play football by their computers with lots of graphs and numbers, sometimes they just walk around with a cup of tea, looking very calm. I walk by to get to the fridge, and I always wonder about all the multi-digit numbers that animate in my mind, all the money won and lost by these people.

I eat a lot. Well, I eat very often. I have two breakfasts, one in the train, one an hour after I start working, then I have a snack around noon, so I don't have to eat a big lunch until after the rush hours in front of the three microwaves servicing the entire floor, including those traders. And around 4PM I have my afternoon tea (usually with a biscuit or an apple). I am basically eating every two to three hours. And at home I only have a salad. I started eating salad in Buenos Aires, of all places (it is know for its beef, and only for its beef). I never ate so much salad because in the Chinese cuisine I grew up with, I never ate anything raw. If you know me, you would that for such a revolution to occur in my life, a woman was involved. I wasn't involved with a woman, though, just that the tango dancer I spent most of my time with was an avid salad eater.

Another brief chapter in my life.

I am still very impressed by the building where I work. It's beautiful, it's very environmentally friendly (at least I have been told that it won some prize for being the most friendly in Connecticut). There isn't something dreadfully serious about it, as one would expect from a place where serious money was made. The avant gard art is cheesy, but at least they aren't some Ayn Rand kind of minimalist coldness. After I found out that my best friend was leaving on an emergency to see her dying father, I felt suddenly panicky. I wanted someone to talk to, someone to cry to. But I couldn't. There was no one and the building suddenly put on a giant sign in the lobby just for me: No Crying, keep working. So I went to the eighth floor where there is a roof that has trees. I looked at it, stared at the snow, the bare trees, and the distant houses on a small hill. My eyes became watery, and I felt the building closing in on me. So strange. That feeling.

Of course, I felt also stupid. What was a grown man in a finance services building doing with watery eyes unless he had just lost a billion dollars and would go to prison for that.

I always wonder about that roof interms of a jumping board for a suicidal trader.

Tomorrow is Friday again; I look forward to the weekend. But equally, I look forward to going into work, doing work.

And for whoever you are that read this, your participation, your curiosity, your caring about the strange and minor dramas in my head, keep me writing, thereby helping me now, and in the future. Many thanks.

A Momentary Review

Three teenage girls were also getting off the train. I realized not only commuters take this train but also high school students. I don't know why that was important. I guess it reminded me of the 90-minute commute I made every morning and then every afternoon when I went to high school. I guess, I have a lot of memories that really cling on. I wonder, really, how much I am just a walking bag of memories.

My sister, Mei, the older of the two, called last night. She complained that my blog entries were too long, and confessed that she didn't always read the entirety of each of my entries, though she tried to read as many as possible! She said, and I suppose it's because she's a lawyer, she wanted to read my blogs carefully, making sure she didn't miss any details. Well, it's not like there are many details. From the very beginning I wrote that nothing much would happen as my days were quite simple, quite predictable, and I usually don't write in my blogs on weekends, when more things happened.

What is this blog? I started it to document my days, my thoughts, my changing ideas with the new year that marks the beginning of a new life. A little arbitrary since I could have said going to Buenos Aires marked the beginning. But January 3rd, when I started the new job, seems like a good starting point. And while it's true that each day has been much simpler than before January 3rd, my life is never without things to say. Perhaps that's why, as my sister slightly complained, I write "so much."

(Just so you know, if you have to read just a little, read the last paragraphs.)

I am more and more used to my job now. I am working a lot. The first week I was waiting a lot, now I am finishing a project, and learning both more about programming and more about what my team does, even what its department does, too. I haven't talked much about this job since that first week. Working on this project I also started, much sooner than I expected, to get to know some of the people. There's this chubby Korean about my age. He's married, his wedding band seems sometimes to call out to me as loud as if you were talking to me. In any case, I didn't think I would get to know, want to get to know, another man, especially another Asian. But he's super friendly, always reaching out, sort of like in the gregarious American reaching out way. He and others often invite me to have lunch with them. I try to do it once a week, on Fridays. Other times, I need to eat alone.

That's because this new life started with another heartbreak. It's not as bad as the ones before, but worse than I expected, especially when I was alone with my lovely food-borne bacteria. The sharp pain wasn't coming only from my stomach or diaphragm, but also a little higher, to my left. And yet, like the previous times when my heart was atomized, I have been learning a lot, about life, about myself, especially the shortcomings. And I continue learning. Even last night, when my sister called.

Instead of just talking about how her little boy was doing (I always forget about her girl, who's quiet but just as cute), or saying superficial "I am good. Doing fine. No problem.", we talked about me. When we talked about deeper things, we used to talk about family, really. This time, we eventually talked about family. That's because talking about my struggles with love inevitably leads to family. Doesn't it with everyone?

What touched me most about our conversation was when I asked her if she was in love with her husband when they started, in the beginning. They seem very loving, very much like the ideal or average, at least, married couple. They never fight in front of us, and I never felt suppressed tension. I never felt intense jealousy about their marriage, but I know I would be very happy if I had one like that. In any case, because it was so "average", I wondered if they were crazy about each other in the beginning. I never asked this of my family members: love. She said they were; she said they had traveled long distances to see each other, long for each other even for the smallest things. That's when I was jealous. But I would be jealous regardless of who was talking. I want very much that someone longed for me, provided, of course, I wanted them, too. What made it touching was that it was my sister. And somehow, it instilled some love in me. I got off the conversation reaffirming that I deserved someone who would give at least that: wanting me. She didn't have to sacrifice anything, cross oceans, walk on fire, to be with me (though I would, apparently, do all this and more for someone I'm crazy about). We talked about the past nine years of my life and I realized I was always following women who withheld, who couldn't or wouldn't give me this simplicity of: I want you. It is no judgment on them, but a reflection of how much I have failed to demand from life. for all these years I have settled with having someone around that I loved; I never simply moved on when someone didn't want me. I always stuck around, overtly or secretly hoping they would come around.

My sister's simpler life (in the sense of finding someone, or being found) reminded me that I needed to embrace what I deserved and walk the road of life tall with a proud heart. And I sort of did that when I was in Buenos Aires. Wait and see is just another trick of my weakness that robs me of my dignity.

But to be fair, I very much wanted a fantasy to come true. The fantasy that came so much earlier and more easily for my sister: the fantasy of having someone who thinks about me. Two weeks ago after the second blizzard pounded on us, I realized I wanted eagerly for someone to think about me and call me up for a walk in the snow. My sister and her husband probably don't do that anymore, though likely to be doing it with their children. But still, they would have. Anyone who wants me would have. This fantasy that seems so elusive to me isn't a trick of my weakness. It's a genuine desire to be loved. The problem is really when I try to impose this fantasy on reality, not wait for it. And the trouble is worse when I impose it on someone who has no interest in fulfilling it.

My first girlfriend from high school asked me what my fantasies were. I admitted I had none. (Hers was making love at the altar, how bizarre and trite.) I am not sure if this fantasy of mine is equally lame: someone to want me. But it's too painful; it has been. Two Independence Days ago, I brought a girl on my annual Independence Day visit to my grand mother, where other extended family members were. I didn't make any big deal out of it, only told my parents the day of the visit. She was just a "friend", but really, another drama companion for the year and a half before that. I introduced her to my grandmother, who obviously showed a lot of hopes for her as a source of my current and future happiness. Even more heartbreaking for me was to introduce her to my little nephew. I even took photos of them, him with his bizarre haircut, her with her amazing smile holding him. And I still can't look at that picture. That's one of the forms of the fantasy: to have someone be part of this pretty messed up family that I was born into. My grandmother was my greatest hero. My nephew embodies my purest love. And now, I don't even speak to that woman anymore. And then, there are my parents. I never wanted to show them any woman in my life. But secretly, I want to, and when I did, secretly, even secretly to myself, I want her to be part of the happiness that I was fostering with my parents.

I told my sister about the fantasy, and about realizing what danger I put my heart in by reliving this fantasy. I told her it was wrong to expect anyone to live this fantasy, to expect them to make me happy in ways I am too impatient or too weak to do. When I talked about the fantasy that involved my parents, she helped me realize my progress with my parents. I have come to see them as beautiful human beings, not demons that were the cause of all my problems. I have no angry thoughts about them. But I also don't see them as parents, just two weak old people who never were happy. I haven't still felt or welcomed their love as parents, the love I have never felt. And if you never felt parental love from parents, you of course never felt it in life. I need to find a way to get that from them before it's too late.

Enough of this introspection and dissection of my current turmoils. Some bad news happened today. I need some time to think about it. It made me think how egocentric I have been, still feeling the world lived around me. Others are suffering. My best friend is suffering.

Thoughtless Snow

I woke up to the sound of my alarm. I didn't want to get up. There was no time to think about being alone or the other lovely self-pitying stuff. The struggle was to get out of bed and turn off that alarm. Then, setting the other alarm to snooze, I allowed myself five minutes to settle in my bed, sitting up, convincing myself that I was meditating. Breathing.

Then that all too familiar sound would change my plans a little. The sound of cautious tires grinding fresh snow into icy mud. I got out of bed, thinking I had 15 minutes to get out of the house, but that sound was disconcerting. I looked out and saw that the streets were covered in snow.

At least it wasn't snowing.

But I had to shovel the snow. I would spend the day thinking about someone slipping, falling, and then suing me. The joy of owning property in the country where owning property was the Dream.

By the time I was standing behind the window of the little station, my sidewalk had been shoveled, my plan changed. I missed the 7:30 train, and unbeknownst to me, I would miss the one I was waiting for. But it didn't matter; I looked out the train tracks. A man wearing those furry hats with flaps over the ears was also looking out to the tracks. Was he looking into an imagined future where the train would arrive, late, but arrive? (And it never did arrive.) Or was he, like me, looking at the snow.

When I left the house after shoveling I thought I saw one or two flakes. Now I saw many big flakes falling, very carefree, not in a hurry at all. And I imagined myself being one of them. Coming from high up, making, what, a ten-minute journey down to earth. I would be born without a reason, just part of some consequences of laws of physics regarding atmospheric behaviors. I would see fog at first and eventually, once I had passed through the womb of Mother Cloud, I would see land below. I would see my siblings, all born of the same mother, from the same womb. We weren't in a hurry, but we also knew where our destiny would be, and we could see it, too. Our journeys would differ slightly, the paths slightly crossing, but most likely, not. And I wouldn't feel lonely because I would be just a snow flake. And I would grow some bit more, depending on the trail I took. I could get lighter, or denser. It wouldn't depend on me. I wouldn't have to worry. I was just a snowflake.

The snow became thicker. The flakes became smaller. The individual flakes didn't get smaller, just that the white curtain before me were made of increasingly denser flakes. It seemed that they were in a greater hurry, as if reflecting the anxiety in me and my compatriots of this little station, who were waiting for a train that was now seven minutes late. Between my eyes and the first building before me, was an ether that was becoming saturated with the white flakes. And as if each flake was a word, each gust a thought that whipped them into sentences, my mind started to wander with this ether in its midst.

I thought about the movie I saw with my tango buddy Saturday night. That one that, among other events of the weekend, reminded me of the power and simplicity of love (this, I am aware, sounds rather cheesy, but, oh well), the one by Bellini. I was impressed also by the ideas the movie expounded about poetry. In an early scene where the main character was lecturing about poetry to his class, he said something like, be picky about the words, think over and over again what better word you can use, because it's pickiness that lends beauty to your work.

I write poems, too. I recently have been writing poems more than once a day, while usually it's once or twice a month. As I have mentioned in one blog entry, if I write often it's likely because something is crazy in my romantic life. Although it's often something unpleasant, there have been times that I wrote a lot because I was excited about someone. Or even, a few times, when I fell so (temporarily) in love with a tango dance I had to write it down, a few times. But now, I write, partly, because I think there's something beautiful about writing poems. It's another exploration to a beauty, it's another flower I can plant in my garden. It's a challenge to find the right words, the right flow of words, but it's a discipline with many rewards. In the movie, the main character, in responding to his daughter's inquiry on why he had become a poet, said that he wanted since he was a child to be able to make others feel how he felt. I make that a goal with photography: to make others see what I see. I am not here to inspire, to impress, I am here to make you see what I saw, make you feel, how I felt. I am not even close to that goal, but now I want to make a similar goal with writing, especially poetry.

To be sure, at least at this stage, I still need inspiration to write a poem. The difference is that once I get the inspiration, I will try to be "pickier" about my words, more demanding about what I want to say, precisely, explore precisely how I feel. Nonetheless, I still need the inspiration, and so, I guess, it is still true that the frequency of my poem writing still reflects some turmoil in my personal life.

Now I don't even see the snowflakes anymore. They are too small and flying down too quickly. They are in a real hurry to join the thickening white blanket engulfing me and this train I didn't expect to take. It's the one after the one we were waiting for. That one never came, but a different one came and took us to the main station where we found the one I am sitting in now. That "rescue" train didn't intend on rescuing us. I wasn't sure why it even came because I had never seen it before. Things happen. They just do. I try to make sense out of them, and sometimes when I succeed I feel better, but feeling better or not, things continued to happen. I try making sense out of things usually in stress.

I can't let go of things.

Can I let go of New Haven? Last night I was looking through, briefly, rental advertisements in the two New York neighborhoods I have become interested in. I thought about the practica tonight in my own little city. I thought about the three ladies I like dancing with. I thought, wow, there are only three, and one never goes to this one, one is still finicky about her mood of dancing, and another I wish I could dance with but, well, dramas of life divide us from even speaking. Dramas, too many, present or old, in this little city. But they make it neither easier or harder for me to let go of this city. The snow, neither, as it also happens in New York. Drama will follow me to New York because the pot of soil that makes the plant of drama is me.

Understanding love doesn't help me very much in letting go. Letting go of people that I no longer talk to. I still think about people I have long let go, and I wonder why I still care. A friend of mine lives by herself with a whole houseful of cats. They keep her company. I've seen some of them. They are a character. She told me she doesn't usually feel lonely because there's always so much to do in the house. She's suffered a lot, with a marriage, with its man that abused her and her children to no ends. And although that was in the past, the legacy of marriage, I imagine, accompanies you to eternity, if you're not too careful. I wonder if she has let things go. What things? Things that she hadn't let go.

I can't let things go. But I have to.

Once I leave my little city of nearly nine years, I wonder what I will retain and how much I will leave behind. In thinking about the people I've had to let go but not completely in my mind, I wonder what the connection is that has still not been severed. It's not about them being good people, or at least good people to me. Perhaps it's about something they have given me that I haven't stored away in a black box, cutting my ties from it, and letting it wander in the foggy river of memories. Perhaps it's because I wish things hadn't ended that way, that we could have at least had some cordial connection. These people were more connected to me than are my family, in the ways that I thought mattered: intellectually, romantically, in terms of spending time, discussing, or not needing discussion. But in the end, they left me, or I left them, I don't know. In the end, families don't. And friends, even those I forget to talk to or who forget to talk to me, are always somehow connected to me. But those who have been put on a boat, or went on a boat that disappeared into that fog, they still leave me with a sadness that no snowflake would have the misfortune to taste. What did they leave with them? A connection to me I never understood? Or just false hopes I had put on their shoulders and that they had already jettisoned it into that bottomless river?

Into the Chill

The warm draught was welcoming, very much so. I, along with a half dozen other commuters, had been waiting in minus 1-degree temperature (-18 C) for the train that had arrived seven minutes late. Those were seven extra minutes of being in ice hell. My fingers were in pain by the time time I arrived in the unheated waiting area, and I had to make a fist of each hand inside the pathetic gloves. I thought about my socks. Those woolen socks were no match against this New England morning cold. We waited in the waiting area so in our mind we think it's warmer even though, without any wind pulling down the thermometer, there was little difference between the area and the outside. I heard the humming of some electrical equipment next to the ticket machine, and I convinced myself that anything with electricity produced some heat. I thought about penguins and wondered if the seven of us couldn't just huddle together, with me being in the middle. The wait was progressively becoming agonizing as we didn't know what was happening; such a small station didn't have anyone to inform us of anything. And so when I saw the train's engine coming quietly, without the usual whistle blow, I couldn't help but feel some degree of euphoria. And that euphoria was felt all over my body when the warm draught poured out of the door as passengers were leaving before we could get out.

For this Monday morning I had decided to take the later train from the little station closer to me. I wanted to sleep a little more, squeezing out any precious minute to add to the incredibly short four hours of sleep. I always want to get to work by 8:30, which is the time my manager told me that he expected people to get in (even though he confessed he never did and that I for now didn't work for internal clients that came in that early). But for this Monday, I had to make an exception.

I went dancing last night, and got home after 2 in the morning, and I didn't get into bed until 2:30AM, despite all my efforts to get to bed immediately. I knew the next morning I would have 15 to get from the bed to the house. But then I couldn't sleep.

We will see how I feel at work today, after just four hours of sleep. It is too bad the best dance night for me is Sunday. I can't wait to move to New York so I can get an extra hour and a half to two hours of sleep. But when I couldn't sleep last night, I wondered what it all meant, this needing to sleep. This failure to sleep.

I woke up after a bunch of dreams, or maybe all the same dream just broken up by my worried mind. What was I worried about? Those dreams, or that dream, said something. This morning I woke up feeling grumpy and sad. Mornings do that to me. I didn't feel this way because I only had four hours of sleep. Or that it was very cold in my room. Or that I saw the temperature reading for the outside on my alarm clock. I think it was because of the dream, because of what I've been feeling that engendered the dream. For some reason, and I hate when my mind does that before I go to bed, I thought about the unpleasant subject of going to bed alone. The prospect of waking up alone.

"There's rose upon your pillow…" was the line from a duet a woman had given me, a popular song from her country. I tried to joke and make it light by saying to her how one could sneak a rose on someone's pillow and leave while she's still sleeping. But of course, being the sentimental me, I wondered if one day I couldn't make that happen for someone. The song, of course, is a sad one, about separation, about saying a goodbye that is too premature.

In my dream there was someone I knew, someone who made me unhappy in real life but in that dream, she did the opposite for me. I was cautious, weary that it was another one of life's tricks. And so when I woke up by the insistent, impatient ringing of my alarm clock, I realized that it was the tricks of dreams, tricks to make me believe it was real. So I got grumpy. But putting aside my grumpiness, I managed to rush my breakfast and yogurt for my afternoon snack and run out to catch the late train.

Before you think this is turning to yet another self-pity rant, let's make a balance. Saturday night, after ranting about spending a Saturday alone, a friend called and said her plans had changed and wanted to watch a movie over the Internet with me. It was strange how life was like that; when you've given up on it, it gives you a chance to re-evaluate. But really, I think, the lesson is more that we can either make the best of things and see that whatever happens is a good thing in life, or we can constantly be disappointed because we have expectations on how life works. I tried to accept that my life on weekends were lonesome, but deep down, of course, I wish my friends would be "reasonable", and come to the conclusion that since they don't get to see me during the week, they should make plans with me for the weekends. I think too much about what other people should be doing, fantasize too much about the ways in which I want life to be beautiful.

"I love life" was a graffiti I saw when we passed by some house by the train tracks. I wasn't sure if it was an anti-abortion message or just someone who really loved life. Loving life, in the context I am writing now, means you really accept it for what it is. The theme of love is what I want to counter-balance my apparent self-pity with. Funny how it all came together. Last night, prior to the dances, there was a class that went too long, so that when we arrived I caught glimpses of it. The teacher was talking about "love" all the time, that tango is about love love love. It drove one of my tango friends taking the class crazy. She felt she didn't learn anything but that somehow tango was about love, when the groping squeezing man she had to endure being a partner with wasn't really helping her with that message of love.

But tango is about love. My tango buddy was touched when I told her that when I dance with a lady, I feel I am dancing with the love of my life, that I want to make her happy, make her feel free, comfortable, but connected to me. She responded by saying that she was usually too busy worrying about her dances. Of course, I worry, too, about my dance when I dance with even beginners, but still, every half a minute, I remember I was lucky being given a chance to dance with this beautiful human being.

The movie that that same friend had invited me to see on her computer appealed to me in many ways, and one of them was the strong message of love. For a woman, the main character went all the way to Bagdad that was being ravaged by the American invasion of 2003. He didn't have to think twice. He did all he could to get to Bagdad to keep the woman alive, even though she wouldn't know it was he who was there all day and night for her, when not risking constantly death being outside looking for help for her. It's a fairytale, of course, but like the poetry that the main character writes and professes, it is through exaggeration and simplification that we rediscover the meanings of basic concepts in life, and in this case: love.

I told my friend at the end that I was sad even though the movie was upbeat and beautiful. I couldn't explain to her why, then. I was sad because I realized how much the world doesn't understand the simplicity of love in real life. How much I have forgotten it myself. I complain about being alone on weekends, when really, I had interacted so much with friends and family and beautiful tango dancers that I didn't even have time to make food for the week. I complain because I have turned love into such a complicated matter. I have made it about me, about how others could serve me. My best friend told me once, after I had calmed down from being heartbroken (again!) that I should really consider looking outward, that I should stop thinking about myself. I couldn't really understand. I always believed that we are the most important people in our lives, we were the center. And it took me some time to realize how my belief and her exhortation were compatible. It is when we fail to place ourselves in the center that we try to make other people do it. It is when we can't focus our love on ourselves first that we expect others to forget about themselves and focus on us.

And then I thought about the image of me being friendly, being open-minded, laughing, being beautiful. My tango buddy told me that I was a really beautiful person, generous, charming, and very fun. It's funny that for someone who demands so much time from his friends I found it very hard to believe her. That's because instead of doing what I demand of my friends, she came straight to the source of the problem: that empty seat of love in the center of my world. She wanted to put me, force me, to sit back in there. I have done the same for my friends, but I often forget to do it for myself. Too often. But last night, I felt I was back in my throne. I was happy. I was in the mood to connect, to be a good human being for everyone around me. I think they, strangers or friends, deserved that from me, and most important of all, I deserve to live like that. And that how I live like that depended only on me. Tomorrow morning I might wake up feeling lonely again, being sad and angry that I had no one to give a rose to, no one lying quietly next to me. I do wish for many things regarding love and companionship, but for now, I need to sit back in that throne before I could accept guests.

An ex came to my room one time (I can't remember why) and saw the flowers I had given her once. The story was that instead of letting the roses I had given her die and rot with flies, I would take them home, hang them upside down until they dry, and then put the fossil back in a vase. She commented that it wasn't exactly a smart way to get over someone (her). She didn't understand that the fossilized roses never reminded me of her. But rather, they reminded me of how much love I was capable of giving, the real kind that didn't require something in return.

It's scary to love and feel the risk of betrayal, of empty reciprocations. But to love is really to live.

Another Saturday

At some point in my childhood I started dreading weekends. Weekends started becoming times when I couldn't see my friends. They had "real" families to do things with. I would be stuck at home. So probably I started dreading it when I started disconnecting with my sister, the older one, the only person of my age I had been hanging out with. I don't know why we stopped spending time together, but it was around my high school years that she and I stopped spending much time together. Maybe even earlier. Maybe in junior high when I had friends and crushes.

But again, those friends had their own family things to do. My own family, in my memory, at least, was always busy. But even if they weren't, they didn't do anything unifying. There is no memory in my tired mind of the family doing anything together, ever. And so when my sister no longer was my companion, I dreaded the weekends. I had no one.

Today is the first of the twins that form a weekend, a normal weekend, as opposed to the last one which was long and extended even further by my novel experience with food poisoning. And today I have no one to spend it with. There's a part of me that says, here's your opportunity to be with the most interesting person in your life, You! Then the conservative members of the parliament chuckle and say without veiled sarcasm, "But you've been by yourself the whole week, unless you count your interesting coworkers as your companions. Play golf?"

Letting the slinging of bitter words subside in the background, I went to do what I haven't been doing for two weeks: shopping. Really, I haven't gone on a major shopping trip in three weeks. And by shopping, I mean food (no more material things, striving for simplicity, remember?). I didn't know how I could have spent $169 on groceries, just groceries. I hope I will really eat them all before they rot.

Then I remember shopping with my best friend a long time ago, when we were starting to get to know each other.

The sky was blue blue blue, and even though it was as cold as last night when we drove to New York, I felt warm. Not sure why. The weather did make this boring shopping trip nicer. I was going to go to Trader Joe's, but instead of turning left, I turned right, remembering that the Indian supermarket, the only one in Southern Connecticut, was right there. So I went, and having found no legal parking space, I made my own (illegal one). I figured, in India, nothing was legally clear, so why not repeat that now in front of this Indian super market. I wanted to get just some tea for my chai.

When I went inside, my shopping trip became a trip on memory lane.

Let me preface by saying that it is a blessing and a curse that I remember things all the time. Perhaps it's because I am very sentimental. An incipient writer in high school used that word on me one afternoon (as I "remember"); at that point I didn't know that "sentimental" could have a negative connotation. Some friends say it's good that I remember all these little sentimental events. (Usually when I remember things like family and childhood.) Then there have been others, most likely some girl who had romantic troubles with me, claimed that I remember too much and for the most trivial matters.

Regardless of blessing or curse, entering that India store brought up memories. I just wanted some Assam tea grains for my chai. But when I started listening to the Hindi spoken, my heart woke up from its stupor of waiting for the shopping trip to be over.

I realized I no longer remembered the meanings of many Hindi words, but I recognized many. I turned to look at the source of the sound; it was some big celebration, probably New Year's Eve celebration, with big names like Sharukh Khan and Amitab Bachan. You might not know who they are. I didn't know who they were until I started taking Hindi and watching Hindi movies (these were the newest star and the oldest, respectively, of Bollywood).

I remember those closes.

I remember making Indian food because of India.

I remember watching our Indian cook make food for us in that stifling hot apartment.

And of course, I remember everything about India.

Last weekend, at the Nocturne, I was talking to a tango friend during the Cumparsita (that's almost always the last song played during a milonga). I suddenly found myself talking to her about the complexities of my experience in India. I wonder if I scared her off. I never really had anyone to talk to about. The girl I went there with (and for) wanted to talk to me about it, after we resumed our connection, but then, we disconnected again. When someone asked me how was India, I could say very little. It would need to be on my own initiative, because it requires that I be prepared to break down the barrier between me and that person. For some reason, that night, when the Cumparsita came up, the barrier temporarily went away between me and this friend, and I told her in the three minutes of the Cumparsita, how horrific and beautiful humanity could be, in the same place, even in the same person.

Instead of getting just the tea (and being a good quasi-Indian, I had to make several calculations on what the best tea was based on cost), I wanted to get other things. I suddenly wanted to make a traditional Indian dish, something you don't find in most Indian restaurants. Something cooked from my memory, from my still bottled up jar of searing feelings. And all the while, the Hindi words continued to pour into my head.

While the experience in India itself was fraught with problems, for some reason, being there made me happy. Picking through the exotic vegetables made me happy. Knowing what most things were made me happy. At the checkout a big, tall white man had a shopping cart full of "Microwavable Curry Chicken" made me giddy. Really, an entire shopping cart full, so there were probably about four dozens of these TV-dinners. It made me giddy that he was the only white person there. It made me giddy seeing that a white person was buying all this Westernized goods branded by an Indian company. And it made me giddy knowing that a lot of Indians would also buy this fast food, just not at such ridiculous quantity. What I have forgotten at that point was that I didn't stand out any less than he did, if we stood out at all; I wasn't really Indian.

Then a grumpy old Indian man told a clerk, who was bagging for the customers, in Hindi to open up the other register for him (without, of course, waiting for the two people standing behind me, or for me, to go first). I couldn't imagine someone doing that at the Stop and Shop I had just driven from.

So does that mean I miss India?

I don't know. I wasn't thinking about it. I was thinking, in addition to the memories, about what a coincidence it was that today, before leaving for my shopping trip, I got an email from my India companion. She forwarded a list of possible jobs to me. It was odd. She knew I was looking for a new job back in September. But that was also when we stopped talking. And when I wrote back to express my gratitude, in as few words as I could string together without sounding false and impolite, I got an instant response from her email server, indicating that she was overseas until February.

So before I went to Stop and Shop, I thought, perhaps, she had gone back to India, to finish the work that we couldn't finish when we were there two years ago. I didn't give that much thought, but perhaps it was enough to make me remember to get tea and make this little detour to the Indian supermarket.

The connection between my short detour and my remembering how lonely my weekends had been for so many years is not obvious, I know. I was in my living room sitting in my 8.5 year old futon, watching the last bit of twilight blazing and then fading behind the downtown area. I accepted that today I would be spending it alone. And the old dread resurfaced, and I felt helpless, in addition to feeling that dread. Helpless that I was going to have to spend this Saturday alone, helpless that I would have to feel the dread, helpless that life has determined that I would spend my Saturday in such a way today. But unlike the boy from the late 1980's, I knew one way to deal with this feeling of helplessness was to write. Not to write in order to complain and complain, but write about disconnections, about things that mattered, about what identifies me, even if I can't write it in a coherent manner. So I wrote another poem.

And I write this now.

Last night I told my tango buddy on our way down to the City that in the end, life reveals its simplicity when you love. Love your family, your friends, your special someone, and above all, love yourself. My sister, the one that I disconnected with in my teenage years, is now a mother. She actually read some of my blog entries and learned that I was sick. She told me she and her little boy, my favorite boy in the world, had started praying together for me, not just for my food poisoning, but in general, for my happiness. While I don't think her religion should be my way of expressing my love, she and I would implicitly agree that in the end, all you need is love. In my loneliness I forget that. In my loneliness I get angry, resentful, and I blame others for not being with me, to rescue me, and eventually I would make my way back to myself and blame me for having committed whatever sin it was that landed me in this prison of my own skin.

But love opens that up. Love was what I had seen in some of those eyes in India despite having to live in an environment thick with hatred. I look at the people I have difficulties with, and I try, in my quest for simplicity, to love them. I told my tango buddy that even if we don't have the capabilities to reach out and show these people our love, we have the capacity to love them. And so, like for this girl that I went to India for, I recognize that I have the capacity to love her, be grateful for everything in our experience together, even if I have no illusion that we would reconnect again.

Reality and Its Imaginations

The reality is that I made it to the train station without rushing, and with five minutes to go. The reality is that it is snowing again, the city is again sleeping under a slowly thickening white blanket. The reality is that the morning is repeating again, and repeating the same sensation of tranquility with this white blanket that covers everything, including the rottenness of the previous layers of blankets. The reality is that I walked past the big and small mountains of gray ice balls piled up under a fresh sprinkling of its brothers, as if the dead is being reminded of its former glories as the living.

But wait, that's not reality. That's just my imagination of ice being sentient beings, with sentiments of longing, regretting, remembering. The reality is that I walked down the stairs to the tunnel in order to go to the train, without running, unlike the previous many times. I walked past the downstairs Dunkin' Donuts (there's another one in the main hall). And in the tunnel there were buckets lain down to catch whatever leak was coming down from the ceilings of the tunnel directly below train tracks there were accumulating snow. And passing by these little buckets were also other people rushing to catch this New York bound train that would take them to their first destination in about two hours.

And during those two hours, reality would continue to unravel itself to us. I have written many times about admiring the snow-covered landscape in the morning, its beauty, tranquility, and most relevant to my current new life, its simplicity. I don't think I have ever ridden in the morning while it was still snowing. It was as if we had the same picture as from those previous entries but now, with a gigantic Photoshop program, we increased the whiteness overall. It is also more peaceful because when it snows, people don't go out much, even though it is still a working day. And the train itself isn't as crowded as usual.

I had the past visit me this morning. My body, my mind, somehow, realizing it was still snowing, unconsciously (can the mind actively unconsciously do something?) thought of ways to delay my start of work. A voice, very faint but apparently the commander-in-chief of this attempted mutiny, asked if anyone would really be going to work in this most seemingly "blizzard". Maybe the train didn't even work, or was delayed. Maybe they are letting people go to work late, or not at all. And even if none of this was true, including calling it a "blizzard", maybe I "deserved" to take the train at the closer station that would get me in later; after all, that was what I was taking in the beginning, and they would understand since I was a commuter.

But the reality was that despite having lost time to check on the Internet to show that nothing of that voice was true, I walked without hurry to the main train station and got on the train with many minutes to spare. I even had a quick breakfast and thought about the things I needed to buy this weekend. Maybe reality is showing me that after nearly three weeks of this so-called new life, I have changed in the way I wanted.

Reality is just one of the sides of the yin-yang. While the other side sometimes tries (and sometimes succeeds) to get me in trouble, causes retrogress, it often is the motivation for joy. Imagination: that's always been a cornerstone of my life, my will to live, even if that will was misguided. It is the brother, if not simply a different manifestation, of passion. Where the gears of imagination automatically moves the dynamo of passion erupts.

Well, not always erupting, but you can see the difference. Yesterday I witnessed a great example of how imagination works in my life. I was at a meeting that directly involved me. It was not a boring meeting; it was motivating; I was excited. It involved a brief overview of this year's goals. The reality was a nicely lit conference room, with a view of the edifice of competition and the Long Island sound beyond the highway in front of us. It was a clear blue day. I had been programming the whole day and was thankful for the meeting to get my eyes away from the computer screen. Like I said, I wasn't bored. I wasn't engrossed by it since all I was doing was listening and ingesting the information. But I wasn't falling asleep as I had been in nearly all the meetings in my previous work.

But then I found myself in a different world. I found myself being a writer, writing about something involving the building, the highway, the Sound beyond. The plot, the characters, the upheavals of emotions were all slowly crystalizing as my trainer was discussing how important our goal was to the objectives of the group we worked for. And he became part of this story. This man who spends his only spare, personal moments looking at golf courses, his, I assume, only passion, whose wife works a few floors up, and who, as I saw sitting so close to him, has grown weary. His face was less shaven, more wrinkly; he was scratching himself while working; his eyes tired. Winter? No time to really take care of himself? I don't know. He was in my brief imagination of a story that I would write.

And I thought about Norma. I don't know why "Norma"; I've never met a Norma, but perhaps I wanted someone normal in my life. Not sure what I meant by "to be in my life". I imagined she was an old woman sitting in the kitchen of an apartment, with a broken glass a few feet away from her. And a young man, was it me?, was making his daily visit. He would comment that she had broken another glass, to which she showed no regret, blaming only the gravity of time on her frail senses. And it was using this daily visit as a vehicle to the stories I wanted to tell, about her past, about her regrets, her experiences that at her old age apparently had no effect on her, therefore, have degenerated to merely raisins of memories. She would talk about missed opportunities, failed struggles, and the overall crushing weight of life that somehow still allowed her to live on. Maybe this colleague of mine served as a character in one of those raisins. The young man, on the other hand, had only the same complaint all the time; it was about some girl, always, and his bad luck with women. The old lady would always listen, managing to put away the weights in her heart, and never failed at the end to tell him everything would be fine, without giving him some ranting advice that people usually did for really their own benefit. This was the deep reason, known to the young man or not, for which he always came to visit and to listen to the never ending saga that surprisingly had a different flavor and twist each time.

My imagination ended there. I caught myself being distracted from the meeting. I caught myself imagining based, actually, in reality. Although I admit that the food poisoning was quite a normal thing for a lot of people, especially if you count those in the developing countries, I take every opportunity to explore my emotions, often exaggerating them. So that night, those 24 hours, were tough, and the loneliness during that struggle, especially at the cliff of this new experience of self-induced vomiting, helped me conjure up this old woman, who would embody all the bitterness formed in and precious opportunities lost between me and the people I have met and parted. Imagination and reality, can't be separated. I am happy with reality, these days, minus the same struggle that the imaginary young man has. I am happy to see even the three buckets trying to catch leaked in snowmelt from the train tracks. The snow has stopped and the sky is turning to this beautiful light blue as the sun melts away the icy clouds. I like this reality. But to take reality one step further, my heart bounces up and down more through the dynamo of imagination. Imagination is a natural part of me, and what drives me crazy about writing, even the sentimental poems, and about photography and tango, which I should write about another time. And the reality, a step back now, is that things are good, very good. I get to have a beautiful reality to live in while letting my imagination materialize in it, even if it isn't my profession. And as lonesome the road of living in this reality is, so far, I am happy I have more than just golfing to motivate me to live.

Power of Languages

A woman started speaking French behind me. I was surprised because when she was speaking English to her companion, she had a very Afro-American accent. Yes, I am a little narrow-minded. But apart from that, her voice took me a moment back to a place that I have temporarily tucked away: traveling. In Buenos Aires one of the questions I had for myself was why I travel. I don't think I have held on to a definitive answer, but it seems that my heart always want to travel. I understood much of what she was saying, at least parts that I could hear as she was respectively keeping a low voice. Her voice transformed my current setting to some warm countryside in Southern France, where I was once.

Languages do that to me, especially those I have known for a while, and French I have known since I was a teenager. "To have known" means the same way as to have known someone; I don't claim to know French. Having lived in Southern Switzerland, my only exposure to French immersion, didn't help me gain a firm grasp of the language, though it was three months in an English-speaking finance firm (the only finance experience I had before now). But I don't mean any need to know the language. A language takes my heart to places where its people, its colors, its aromas, bring a unique sort of excitement no other stimulus can offer, not books, not movies (unless the movie is in that foreign language). I don't remember specific places, even though I've traveled to France more than any other country. It is more of an imagination of a general setting. It is a sensation more than a specific piece of memory. It could be the imagery of Italy, of Germany, or of other countries I've been to, whose language I have come into contact with.

I don't say this with any regrets of having chosen a path that won't let me travel for at least a year. True, I will have to take vacations (unlike in the previous job where I could store up immense amount of vacation time from one year to another). I am not looking forward to taking vacations, actually, but rather just working and learning. Nonetheless, I know in my heart there's a patient spot waiting for the next place where I would hear a language, even if it's one I have never come to know even a little.

But knowing a language makes a difference. I don't mean for pragmatic reasons of traveling, not about traveling at all. I mean making a difference in my imagination of the sort I am speaking. Before last semester I didn't know much about Arabic. Now I get excited whenever I see Arabic letters, whether it's Arabic or Urdu (which I know more) or something else using that script. I feel more connected to this spot of my heart because I know more about Arabic, or whatever new language I will learn next.

This was how my morning commute started, if you don't count the rushed walk to the train station. I barely made it to the train, again. With less than two minutes to get from the entrance of the station to its other side where the New York bound train was eager to leave without me. I had less time than I comfortably wanted because I decided to make a chai. It was the first morning chai I made since that disastrous incident that nearly crippled my computer, which now still acts really weird. I didn't know what to do for breakfast, but I was inspired by the poem I wrote before I went to sleep last night (late, again, of course).

Yes, it's the reverse: reality being inspired by my own poem, not writing a poem inspired by reality. Before I went to bed I wanted to write a poem, but not one that was rooted in any negative emotions. Many of my poems, and God knows maybe most of my poems, are inspired by some negative energy; they serve as catharsis, messages to the world, something, to channel out that negative energy. For that reason, a sudden spike in the frequency of poems usually, though not always, indicates something is going wrong. Last night, nearly an hour after my bedtime, I wanted to go to bed with a good poem. I sat there, trying to clear my storm-beaten mind and and soothe my time-beaten heart, and thought about what made me happy. The first thoughts were not nice, and the temptation to complain rose but disappeared quickly. Then I remember making chai. It reminded me of India, the people there. It reminded me of the friends that I loved serving chai to, who would eagerly wait for the brewing to finish. It reminded me, above all, how much I like making food, especially simple food, and food that allows a lot of creativity. So I wrote a poem of making chai as a salute to life, to the beauty of life while I confront its reality of complicated shades. An appreciation for life, not as a gift from God or Mother, but as a making of my own.

Right after I wrote it, the biggest fan of my chai wrote to me. She rarely writes to me, so the surprise was doubly great. She told me how much she appreciated my poem, which she must have read only seconds after I published it. She reminded me how much she appreciated my chai, and by extension, my friendship. She was one of the people who offered to help me during those horrible 24-hours of food poisoning. But what's more, she was the one that spent nearly an hour with me trying to get my car out. Although our friendship, unlike many I have with women, wasn't marred by any complications of romance, we stopped talking for a while once. And because of that break, I have an extra appreciation for how precious she is to me. And for her to show me her appreciation so soon after the publication of my poem reaffirmed my belief in the beauty of friendship.

For a long time, perhaps forever, really, I didn't know how to be friends, not with men, and not with women. When I was a teenager, and before, I had friends, nothing complicated there, then. There was never a need to think about "what is a friend?". When I was even younger, a little boy of peasant and city background, I had girl friends, and I never really thought about them as girls, just friends. But since that first time I sat next to this really cute Puertorican girl in sixth grade, I realized girls would gave me something different than guys had. Things would never be the same since 1984. So it is a little ironic, just a little, that this half-Puertorican girl, not any less cute than the one in that prison of Brooklyn public school, helped show me the beauty of friendship.

In some ways, it's surprising what my journey, or wrestling, with the meaning of friendship with women has illuminated my general relationships with women. For very long time, since perhaps that day I sat next to that girl (her name is Theresa, with an H, as I remember), I think I have just wanted any woman to be my girlfriend. Any would do, it didn't matter if she was unattractive, bad for me, not a good person at all (didn't realize until later that bad women existed), or that I really only gotten along with them as friends. For reasons that would take a book to describe, I just wanted a woman by my side. So the surprising enlightenment is that by learning to be friends with women that are good for me, that are made to be my friends, I now gained a much clearer perspective on which women I want to be friends and which I want to be girlfriends (and which I shouldn't have anything to do with). It's no longer resigning to have all the women I meet being my friends, neither is it like in the past, desperately having each of them being my girlfriend. When we have rationally found a good place, not really a middle-ground, between extremes of life that don't make us happy, I think, we have reached a level of wisdom.

So with this slightly arrogant assessment of my own sagacity, I salute to my friends, especially those who had to put up with this really rough, and still yet terminated, road of discovering the meaning of friendship, of love. And on an equal footing, I salute to languages, especially the English language that allows me to express to my friends, to the world, from my heart, my deepest appreciation and attempted understanding of the love offered.

After the Break

After four days away from work, it was good to be back. That's a good sign. I haven't looked forward to going to work in a few years. I'd felt quite lost, as it seems, at the dusk of my years in academia. No motivation, and sometimes, even contempt, enough contempt to deliberately stay at home, "work" at home for minimal time needed to get the minima requirements met. That allowed ample time for me to grow other skills and talents completely unrelated to my work, but I think it also caused some atrophy in my attitude toward work, in work ethics, which, believe it or not, I truly believe in.

No matter the amount of atrophy, I am glad I feel great returning to work. Even better that I had no sign of that stupid sickness left. I heard that other people when they got food poisoning they are stuck in bed for a few days, hence the (misused) word "flu" in "stomach flu". I was lucky to be out for 1.5 days.

I drank the remaining bottle of ginger ale, one of the two that my friend bought me along with other things. It made me smile a little. For one thing, it reminded me of this terrible night that now seemed a distant memory. I can remember how painful I felt, but I can't remember the pain. I am like this, for better or worse; I can't stand pain, can't bear it. Since I was little I feared the needle, or the knife (imagine I had to start preparing and cooking food since I was six), and dreaded being shot (by enemies of the state or by the state police, both feared equally by Chinese citizens). I can't stand heartbreaks. I sometimes think I am such a wimp; I know many people who could bear breakups much better than me. But then again, I've known since college that people were capable of committing suicides over love, perceived or real. Like physical pain, I quickly forget the pain of the broken heart; just remembering the painfulness of the event. In any case, the bottle reminded me of the pain that I should or should not have been able to bear better, but in any case, I've forgotten. The other interesting thing about the bottle was that it was diet. I never drink diet drinks. And this time it was, like all other times, due to a mistake; my savior friend bought it probably without reading the label or caring whether I cared for diet or not. I chuckled and drank it with delight. It didn't taste as bad as I remember diet drinks tasted, but I smiled because it reminded me how wonderful it was to have someone save me. Especially someone, as I have written previously, I didn't expect to offer me help, and much less, from whom I didn't expect to ask for help. I smiled for him, and I smiled for the little brave step I made toward connecting with people.

I am writing on the way back home now. I look out to Bridgeport in the night; there's nothing but darkness with patches of amber mercury light reflecting off the ubiquitous frozen ice-snow. In the distance, also in near total darkness, is the infamous I-95. I can't really see the highway, but I know it's there because of all the slow moving red taillights of poor commuters who are trying to go home but somehow always find themselves joining the rush-hour club. I commuted to work by car for 1.5 years after college. It was a 40-min commute that could sometimes stretch into a whole hour, from Framingham (no one knows where it is) to Somerville (it's a suburb of Cambridge, which is a suburb of Boston). It wasn't pleasant, the stress, oh the stress. You can't read, you can't walk around, and you always wonder why traffic is so slow. Having a car is such a bother; I am glad I will be selling mine soon. I pity those invisible souls secretly dotting among the red lights blinking and moving slowly. I wonder about their lives. I guess if I keep taking this train for a while (which is not true, since I will be moving to New York soon), I will actually "be" with the same people, more or less, for that duration of time, and in such sense, we are getting to know each other. While they are fretting over the traffic, or chatting on the cell phone, they must notice a fast-moving commuter train every night they are in that individualized tin box of theirs. They must wonder, one of them, at some point, who's been in that train every work day along side him or her. In this way, are we not connected?

You must think I am crazy. I am trying to contrast this to something a little more obvious and trite, but for me, rather alarming, if not sad. If I were taking some random train as a tourist in France, for example, passing along some highway full of commuters (not sure if there are many commuters driving in France), I know I would never see these people again. "See" I mean be so close to them. Never again. And so they mind as well never existed. I don't really see them; I know someone must be inside those cars, at least one person, to be effecting the locomotion of the vehicles. Some soul are out there, so close to me, but I can't see them and never will be with them. They therefore don't feel real. Whereas here, I don't see anyone in any of the cars out in the distance. But I am sure there's a minority of people, at least, out there, I am "with" every workday around 6:25 PM in Bridgeport. And this connection makes me wonder about them, how they feel in general, are they nice people, are they approachable, would they like my baking if I shared some with them.

To test how real this connection is, imagine, after having ridden this train for a year, ten years, more, this same journey, and one night I see a fireball surrounded by many emergency vehicles, I think I would be many folds more concerned than if I, as a tourist, saw the same incident on a French highway. The two points here are that 1) Connection is built partly on familiarity 2) Our value for a given life is based in part on our connection to that life. You can disagree.

So today was a good day at work. I had only about 5.5 hours of sleep. I actually went back to bed after turning off the alarm. I sat up, just to make sure I didn't fall asleep if I lay down. I stayed in bed not really for the lack of sleep; my back was all wet. I wonder if that was because of the end of my sickness, a true break from the fever. I went dancing last night, and I would feel a little weak after three dances. It was a small risk to take, but smaller than the risk of breaking my legs walking on the frozen pavements. My car was and probably still is entombed in ice after a day of icy rain on still fresh snow. So I walked. I went because a friend wanted to film two guys dancing. I thought it was weird but would be happy to be one of the guys. It didn't happen because her camcorder ran out of juice, but I got to say Happy New Year to the little community of dancers that I haven't danced in since leaving for Buenos Aires. I was surprised to see so many people. So after the dance my body attempted to get sick, I guess, but decided over the night to break the fever and let me be. The routine recommenced 10 minutes after I got out of bed, for real, and it was good to be in that routine again.

Snow Night

I am in bed again. Feeling much better. The nausea is dissipating. It's raining outside. Or is it snowing? Sleeting? I imagine it's disgusting and dangerous to be walking outside. But from the warmth of my bed, looking out through the raindrops of my windows, listening to the occasional sound of tires on snow, I feel a little more peace. The upheaval of last night is now a receding memory. The slight aches of my muscles, my back, are a slight reminder. I feel a little guilty for doing nothing. I wanted to work but sitting up in front of the computer caused my head to ache again. I am drinking Gatorade my friend so generously brought for me on such a dangerous day to be outside. I feel special.

The snow outside, the bluish ambiance, the two amber street lights, reminds me of that night I was returning from work. It was snowing, but not a blizzard; it was the snow between the two big blizzards. I saw a police car, the only thing moving, slowly making its way through the tough streets of Bridgeport, one of the saddest cities in the Northeast. I imagined a story.

I imagined my Dad waiting at the Bridgeport train station. He rarely has any expression on. And on that night, in my imagination, it was no different. He was standing there, his gloveless hands held crossed over his belly. He doesn't usually wear gloves even though he carries them. He doesn't like the feeling of them. And if you look at his hands, you might make yourself believe that the inch-thick callous would work well as an insulator. He was a high school teacher back in China, but they also made him do a lot of manual work during the Cultural Revolution. He did a lot of manual work after coming to this country, before working as a clerk. So I don't know where his callouses came from. Perhaps simply from being stubborn at not wearing gloves on a wintry night like this.

The snow was falling slowly, big flakes, but not a lot. The platform was deserted except for his presence. He stood under one of those greenish lights, mercury, is it?, makes someone's face look very sickly. He was standing next to the automated ticket machine.

I imagined the story because I was thinking about relationships that didn't work. My mind had been engulfed in my own struggles with one relationship or another that hadn't been working. And I imagined the relationship of my parents. They weren't in love, but their marriage at least wasn't arranged as their parents' were. I am not clear on why they got married. Maybe they liked each other. Why do people need to fall in love in order to get married? Their marriage has always had problems. But it lasted all the way till now. It lasted because my Dad could swallow anything. Unlike me, he had the patience of a saint; you could slap both his cheeks and he would smile if that was what was expected. My Mother never slapped him, but she had always been a difficult person, for everyone.

But in my imagination, I thought they had a fight, and she left him. She was working as a nanny, or a caretaker for old people, in Bridgeport, some seventy-five minutes from New York City, where they had lived. What inspired me was the quietness of the setting. My Dad's eyes moved a little when he saw the police car slowly navigating through the snowy streets. But the rest of his body didn't move. He was afraid of the police, and taught me to be afraid, too. The Chinese police would get you for saying things they didn't like, and the Americans would get you because you're an immigrant. His eyes turned back at staring at the distance, the dark chasm between his New York bound platform and the other one. He was waiting for my Mother to show up. Occasionally, a piece of snow fell from the eaves above him and made a splash on the platform edge in front of him, making no sounds. He didn't move. He wasn't even thinking, let alone worried about the confrontation that we might expect. He was almost falling asleep, as it seemed. His eyebrows were graying, his thinning hair still mostly dark, uncovered by any hat. He has little whiskers on his lips. He used to teach me how he removed hair, before I had any facial hair myself. He used two quarters and basically plucked out his facial hair, the little that most Asian men had. I never bothered to show him the razor; he wouldn't find it useful.

Then the sounds of steps. A stranger? Yes. In my imagination, it was a black woman all bundled up, not unlike the black woman that sat next to me the previous morning after boarding from the same train to New York. She, too, had no expression; no reason to show anything on this frigid day. My Dad didn't notice her, or at least, remained a statue. She threw him a look and walked past him toward the center of the platform.

More steps, this time my Dad stirred. After more than forty years together, you know very well the fingerprint of your partner's steps, regardless of the surface walked on, the shoes worn. He wet his lips a little with his tongue, as if he had woken up from a stupor. My Mother showed up at the top of the stairs, looked at him with as much disdain as she could, but not a sign of surprise. One time in a hospital bed my Mother told my Dad that she wanted a divorce, and he simply said nothing. She now looked down as she approached him, while he smiled. It was that shy smile, where his eyes, swollen with age, got even narrower. Age has also made his back hunched more, but when he smiled like that, he hunched even more, to show humility.

He had a plastic bag in one of his bare hands. I have never seen him carry any bag besides plastic bags. At least my Mother owns a fake leather handbag, but my Dad has always used a plastic bag from some store in Chinatown. He gestured the bag and said, "Some hot pork buns, if you're hungry."

"How can they be hot in this cold weather? Are you stupid?" darted my Mom. The smile didn't fade, but the shoulders moved up a little to show acquiescence. She took the bag, anyway, looked inside, touched something, and said, "They are not hot."

A pair of yellow lights appeared behind them in the distance. The black woman was pacing slowly, interrupted only by the acknowledgment of the coming train. The city remains quiet. The police car has disappeared somewhere. Around this pair of aged immigrants and a stranger there was just the withering industries of America's past glory. And yet, the peacefulness for a moment made us forget the negative evaluations of the present. The dilapidated buildings, shuttered stores, abandoned factories, empty parking lots, all sleeping under a blanket of old snow and a fresh new, white one of the current shower. In the distant that you couldn't see, was the big body of water that separated Long Island from the three strangers. At the southwestern tip of that island was where they were returning to, after, I imagine, a few days of separation. Just a few days. Because my parents, however different they are, however incompatible they are, however much they shouldn't have been together for so long, remained as one. As she timidly munched the cold, white pork bun, she kept quiet. It was this mutual silence that bore the words of yet another reconciliation. They didn't know what would make them happy. They never really knew. Having children was too complicated. Having cable TV to watch all day didn't get them closer to happiness, even though they were able to see what life was like in their home country that was changing by the second. But now they had their silence, and it was enough to erase whatever that caused the angry and bitter words between them a few days ago. Yes, my Dad, being so quiet, seeming so gentle, could come out very ferocious; perhaps it is this contrast between a peaceful man and an explosive one that could hold down my Mother who always complained and never was satisfied.

So the police car in the snow in Bridgeport inspired me to think about my Dad. I count myself lucky that he's still so healthy. For someone who has experienced so much social upheaval and personal struggles, it's a wonder he is sick with something. In the end, his quietness, which could be unexpectedly pierced by anger, matched really well the peace that was being enforced but also possibly broken by the police car roaming around, looking for trouble.