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I grew up in the tropics. Honestly, I’ve only seen snow maybe once or twice way up through my twenties.

And I guess I was lonely, as anyone would be, who wasn’t? Feeling severed from everything, even my family. Uncles and aunts as strangers. I focused getting good at talking out of a hope that maybe if I said everything right I wouldn’t have to deal with it.

As of today it’s quite ironic to spend all that effort only to think that, in the end, there’s nothing to say. Existence is self-evident; and if you analyze every thought, melancholy perforates its impermanence. Though this could wrap up as another asinine tomato can that action is the refuge, thought the enemy, maybe it’s the attitude. The disposition beyond words.

When I read old Chinese poets or imagine my robe dragging past the pavilion, plum blossoms dotting the wooden path, so I could see the appeal of mastering calligraphy not for the expression, but for the form itself. What it details is only secondary, whether as witness to the exchange of dynasties, ceremonies and odd modifications, adjusted to the taste of the dowagers’ capricious flits. Do you think we could listen, for the moment, of the scattered gossip and rumor?

Perhaps one day I would grasp the knife’s edge, firmly let the rubies drip into the bowl of ink porcelain: let me emphasize, that day, as we transport the third prince to his now dug grave that, while I won’t live the same way, I am still giving every part of my essence to catalog what happened. As secondary.

I parked my scooter at the mountain base, mid-summer day. Fitted with some mosquito repellent, swiveled in a right backpack pocket, I can finally visit my savior. Though half the walkway rotten you can see some orange highlights, as the park ranger’s distant guiding embrace: “watch your step here”. The cypress and pine leaves came as mounds, and in the ground they preemptively hurry to their autumn colorings.