On my last day in Taipei, we had started showing each other pictures of our family on our phones. We being festival volunteers Lily and Daniel and myself.
It has come to this.
“You’re strange,” Daniel tells me. He meant it as a compliment. “I think I’m going to miss you.” Likewise, man.
I almost didn’t make it here. I missed my flight on Monday, thanks in part to the epic disruption APEC smugly wreaked on all our lives. Come Tuesday, though, it was all sorted out, but at the expense of a forfeited ticket and with only three whole days to take in as much of Taipei, the city, and Taipei, the film festival, as I could.
But time in other countries turns to jelly, the way it becomes slower and faster at the same time. And Lily, it turns out, was the consummate guide. She had mapped out a wall-to-wall, and off the wall, itinerary that had us steering clear of the beaten tourist tracks and instead taking in, among others, the new Tsai Ming Liang short, an artist space with a balloon floor, an election campaign headquarters that looked more like a design boutique, a 24 hour bookstore, a calligraphy lesson, a secondhand vinyl shop, a Hou Hsiao Hsien exhibit, Hou Hsiao Hsien himself, endless walls of vibrant graffiti and an odd detour talking about The Act of Killing on the rooftop of a bar run by a beer gourmet named Brandon who had bicycled around the world and had the book to prove it. That night at the bar alone would have sealed this trip. But on my last night, we went to a gig at a local livehouse (the Taiwanese term for club) called Sappho where a young fusion band tore through a scorching cover of Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly. If Mumbai was all seduction and opulence, Taipei was pop-up and agog.
In a world where life is measured by what you have to show for living it, this has become the only currency left to me: the soaking up of experience for the sake of soaking up experience and the soft, often sentimental, traction of strangers you meet and connect with and who are gone before your friendship calcifies into permanence.
This is not the life I was used to. Soul-delay and displacement, brief encounters and magical thinking. Half the time, I feel like a ghost haunting myself. But I don’t want it to end. It will end, of course, but knowing that can be its own phantom power, too. If nothing else, it blurs the future enough that I don’t live in it as much.
Not that I don’t fear the future anymore, its inevitability and the disease it carries. Every night, when all the noise dwindles, I give in to my anxieties. This is, I suppose, the inescapable fate of the chronic, aging over-thinker. But the cosmos has thrown me a bone. All this started from an irrational fear that I was going to die soon, and two years since my inadequate prophecy, everything remains in blissful function. My dead-of-night bartering these days is ultimately out of some greed for continuance. I asked for renewed vigor so I could keep working. Because, at fucking last, work has become a font of joy.
I feel myself getting older but also sort of growing older. I hope that this is somehow enough. I hope, too, that when all this ends, it will end well, away from the crowd and with grace and composure and a lack of complaint.
We left Sappho with the lush, sexy strains of Feel Like Making Love still ringing in my ears. Lily asks to have one last cigarette in the rain before we parted ways. She was going off to meet her boyfriend. Daniel was taking me back to the hotel.
“You tired?” Lily asks me.
“No.”
“You’re lying.” She laughs.
It was half past midnight. I had been up since 6. We had been walking since 2. I had an early flight and needed to be up by 5. I was tired, sure. But I also wasn’t lying. This was, I realize, the time of my life. I wanted to be awake for every minute of it.
