Sacred

Roaming Taiwanese society makes one pause and wonder what it’d mean if you, instead, grew up here. For whatever reason a more inviting thought than Japanese. Maybe the sterility of Tokyo sealed off the thought.

Though what would it mean to have a persisted slot in the machine? Comes with the comforts of crowding about imported Korean hotpot style and bars, lanterns, auspicious crimson, dragons sculpted a block away from one of the largest global shopping centers in my experience. A phone lit up seemingly constantly, as long as you do your due diligence in the fireplace from kindergarten to corporate. Maybe one’s own restaurant. What else could you have? Well, not a home, unfortunately.

I’m not sure if the people are here happy, but the distinctions between each state of the deteriorating republic back at home¹ leave the same disparity. Just not as microcosmic; Taipei delivers such effortlessly. An abandoned building scrunged in mold only a block away from the defacto par excellence of modern architecture, suited guards. One street more you’ll enter someone’s seeming living room with vegetables on two stood-up tables to make money. Scooters zoom past.

It’s hard to spot the societal differences looking down from the 89th floor of Taipei 101 other than the superstructures, the “Big Egg” dome or beautifully towering memorials. So the same one peers down below the Columbia Center for the persistent rain and Seattle haze, Seattle freeze, and a lingering distance between Floridian sidewalks and its tenants, its burn scars along the knees — though as easily Banqiao and its cross-sections. Same structures, but you feel the breath down your neck in different ways.

So I’ll trace along the rest of the tourist path, assured that as long as I stay in this lane, I won’t have to think about the suffocated youth doing their best here. It’s not for me to contemplate. Not even back at home, funny enough; too divorced. There’s a large division between touristing a place and living, but it’s funny to feel as though your form is more rigid in a distant place. Though for a moment, where you’re sweating by the conveniences.

As with our climb by each sway of gondola, mountains open up, redrawn in accents and snakish asphalt peaking between the subtropical fauna and sprawl of branch, as veins of the leviathan, and I know it’ll strangle everything of every land. If we strike at the ore deposit we could bargain on the lapis lazuli to tea tray glamor, jade for dagger; I’ll never know what it means to forge identity under the imperial bathhouses.

One could’ve had a proper shift of phases. Accumulated checkpoints to where one wouldn’t have to evolve from adolescence to barbarian and cannibal in a year’s time. Though it could’ve been the same in the essentials: talking past and staring out while the years pile on. You could share the same laugh, at least. A lot easier to look at an unpolluted night sky.

All these starry towers and settlements to visit, whole island twinkling lopsided, east coast exhales overcast and should your form rival a red supergiant, you’d extend each solar flare as tendril to wrap up one’s rocket plume the same as cotton candy, into a cat’s cradle, or a witch’s broom — some coherence between all the migrations. Is this enough to prove I was cognizant going through the airport motions? Obviously not.

Buskering isn’t the point here. Roaming about and wondering what it would’ve meant to stay in lockstep by the grade, rails set in. Childhood friends remain a metro connect away. Some prior day it could’ve been enviable, but maybe it’s crippling. How quickly we take the sharpie and draw little hearts next to the crow’s feet while the Sun remains obscured.

That’s all I learned roaming the other half of the world. That since nothing is sacred anymore, the only response is to make sure nothing is sacred; the binds you yearn for press thorns diagonal. To have grown up here is to nurture different scars. No matter how you’re “spared” shows as weakness years later: nervous ticks swiping up empty feeds. It’s best to wither all the deadspace between your definitions and reality. Standing stranded while the late crowds flow about each shopping center, night market, I know abstractly it’s a lonely city. The mist completes the painting.

These places received so warmly, most appreciated. I can see the smiles between the standing bars or the outdoor shopping malls. But all one may learn is to continue to live as the heretic, hold nothing, piece apart any remnants of an existence and sense of ownership. So one shall hike up to the temple.

Sure, you could wonder how the pink wires shall curl and click behind skull, a cow’s lick of a lobe and theorize the permutations, but it seems we all share the same destination.

The less there is to be comforted by, the better off you’ll be in the upcoming transition.

When all that’s left are the ruins.

Footnotes

1. Not to imply there’s a perfect form of republic ever waiting somewhere, someday. In some ways everything is working exactly as intended. ↩