| Missing Taipei... I have this mixed feeling about Taipei. It reminds me everything about me today. It is a city I love dearly, where I spent my youth. But it hurts, today, just to think about it. That year, I decided to leave for another city for higher education, just because I wanted to see the world beyond Taipei. The price I paid for that decision is he. I lost him. And yet, the city that makes me pay turns out to be my savior, my shelter, my hell and my heaven. I am so afraid to stand in the same city where he stands. I am scared to live under the same sky with him, to watch the same very star every night, knowing he is watching it at the same time... So I choose to run, run away from Taipei. I move to another land, another city and change my name. I disconnect myself from everything that I hold dearly in my heart, just to survive. To a place where no one knows about me, no one cares about the past but future, where I can not be found. Where I can be hidden, faded in the crowd and become invisible. I often wonder how it would be if I stepped into the coffee shop that Saturday afternoon. I chose to walk out of the door when the coffee lady told me he was waiting for me inside, sitting at the very same table that I always sit. How would it be today if that letter came 5 years earlier? What if I didn't run away from that city, that island and change my name? I wonder how it would be today. I guess no one knows. Neither simulation, nor forecast analysis can predict how life would be today, if... I still miss Taipei. Its groovy spring, humid summer, hot fall and windy winter. Its summer afternoon thunderstorm that washes the sky clean. The city that hurts me so bad that I am scared to death to return. I am still scared to return, even after so many years. Knowing he is at the other side of the city, watching the very same star. The love, the hate, the sorrow, and the anger, that fuel and build what I am today. How irony this life, this world is. The one that you love the most usually is the one that hurts you the most. |