|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| 對不起...我在離你好遠好遠的地方為你加油...
好想回家 | | |
| Chapter 1
I am trapped. A helpless victim of my own unfortunate circumstances. She had asked me to jump, twice now. “One foot in front of the other,” she ushered with haste as if she had another appointment to make. I looked over and down at the streetlights below me. The city had never looked so beautiful.
Earlier today, I had gotten out of bed in the usual manner. I tossed aside my five pounds of feather-stuffed-winter-blanket, stepped onto the cold marble floor, and immediately headed for the bathroom where I can find comfort in the uncertainty of the mornings. She had left a note on the mirror. “Today is the day.” I brushed my teeth vigorously as if scrubbing rust off an old neglected water pipe. The dentist had reminded me numerous times before not to, but his advice seemed to always escape my mind, especially today. I left the note on the mirror and headed back into my bedroom.
I had picked out the most magnificent outfit for the occasion. A white sleeveless knee-length dress which gently hugs the curves of my postpartum body. I have no recollection of when or where the dress was purchased, just that it was bought for today.
I looked up at the dark abandoned night sky. Not a single starlight in sight. Perhaps she was wrong about my destiny. And perhaps I was wrong in trusting her. But she had never failed me, and I have no reason to doubt her. She had been carefully planning this for the past 10 months and had kept me informed with any and all the change she made along the way. “I am happy for you,” she whispered. I turned and looked at her. The beauty in her arms contradicted all the evilness in the world.
“Goodbye my angel,” I said as I took a step back into the empty night sky behind me. The sound of the traffic below was briefly muted by the wind which rushed pass my face carrying, with it, the resonance of his cry. There was a moment of silence and then
I heard them scream.
I opened my eyes, and instead of seeing God, I saw nothing.
| | |
|
At some awful point in our lives, we have all experienced the agony of giving up something we love. Either for the sake of our own comfort or for a promising possibility of moving on, we prefer to refer to these choices never as forfeits but rather as "letting go". We tell ourselves that the decision is "probably for the best" or "our only way out" and that "there is really nothing we can do about it". So we willingly abandon the activities that we truly enjoyed as children, kiss goodbye the people who held our hands through our loneliest hours, and lock away our life long dreams that had once motivated our every breath. We hide behind our self-pacifying excuses and acquiesce to quitting instead of fighting against the hardships of reality. We pull our blankets over our heads at night hoping that our tears can extinguish that burning passion in our hearts and pray that eventually we will be able to look back at the 'now' and smile with a having-gone-through-it-made-me-that-much-stronger appreciation.
In essence, we are really nothing but a bunch of optimistic cowards. We are too afraid to recognize any negative consequences of our decisions and too adamantly fixated on the belief that "tomorrow is a brand new day." So, it is okay to shut our bedroom door tonight. If we are patient and willing to cry our way past midnight, happiness will shine through the window tomorrow morning with something better than anything from today.
Why? Why do we believe that? What is it about the uncertainty of tomorrow that can possibly reassure the decisions of today?
Is it that hard to see? That to comfort ourselves with the chance of a better tomorrow is only to ease our misery with anticipation.
And when we finally settle in our hospital beds at the end of it all, we will be hit by an unforgiving wave of regrets for the realization that our pillow cases are still soaking wet and the tomorrow that we had promised ourselves... will never come.
This is my thought in progress.
| | |
| “The story begins when a young aristocrat whose family circumstances forced him into religious orders came one day to a country inn. He found the innkeepers overwhelmed with grief at the death of their only daughter, a girl of great beauty. She was not to be buried until the next day, and the bereaved parents asked the young monk to keep watch over her body through the night. This he did, and more. Reports of her beauty had piqued his curiosity. He pulled back the shroud and, instead of finding the corpse “disfigured by the horrors of death,” found its features still gracefully animated. The young man lost all restraint, forgot his vows, and took “the same liberties with the dead that the sacraments of marriage would have permitted in life.” Ashamed of what he had done, the hapless necrophilic monk departed hastily in the morning without waiting for the scheduled interment.
“When time for burial came, indeed just as the coffin bearing the dead girl was being lowered into the ground, someone felt movement coming from the inside. The lid was torn off; the girl began to stir and soon recovered from what proved not to have been real death at all but only a coma. Needless to say, the parents were overjoyed to have their daughter back, although their pleasure was severely diminished by the discovery that she was pregnant and, moreover, could give no satisfactory account of how she had come to be that way. In their embarrassment, the innkeepers consigned the daughter to a convent as soon as her baby was born.
“Soon business brought the young aristocrat, oblivious of the consequences of his passion but far richer and no longer in holy orders because he had come into his inheritance, back to the scene of his crime. Once again he found the innkeepers in a state of consternation and quickly understood his part in causing their new misfortune. He hastened to the convent and found the object of his necrophilic desire more beautiful alive than dead. He asked for her hand and with the sacrament of marriage legitimized their child.” – Thomas Laqueur
This must be one of my new favorite stories: the Ocean’s Eleven of the 18th century.
It is not hard to see that Walt Disney had realigned the antique story plot to offer his audiences a children-appropriate film. Laqueur’s breath-taking femme fatale appeared in Disney’s classical “Sleeping Beauty” as the damsel trapped in her inert state, the heir of a large aristocratic fortune was tailored into a charming prince who, like the monk, was an imperfect or somewhat lacking character alone, and the inappropriate (yet surprisingly honorable) choice of union that commenced, from then on out, a life of happily ever after for the pair.
For all who appreciates the difference between “The Wizard of Oz,” and “The Wicked,” I am proposing that we have once again taken for granted that these two “Sleeping Beauty” stories are truly complete and universal narrations. And that we are so charmed by the magnificence of the revival and its romantic finale that we have completely disregarded the validity of the happening and overlooked the need to investigate and confirm what had been assumed.
In Laqueur’s story, was the female object really unconscious? And was our male subject honestly oblivious to any signs of vitality when he made love to her?
Or, more probably, was this simply a flawless scheme for both the male and the female to indulge in and then escape reason for an unconventional and unacceptable act of their time?
This is my thought in progress.
| | |
| My upbringing has been an exciting ride through my parents’ substantial rails of philosophies. One of Father’s very important outlook on life is to revert his four children’s obsession with materialism back to pure appreciation and content for only the essentials. Thankfully, Mother believes in providing adequate, although not excessive, luxury as a means of survival in the need-to-have-it modern world. Almost always, the mid-point between Father and Mother’s beliefs is where we, the children, are expected to discern and adopt each idea and expectation.
My parents’ panel of legislation is usually very open to democratic debates. My oldest sister, the representative, can propose suggestions as alternative solutions to particular occasions. For example, “I know they are not suppose to sleep over but Stephanie and Emily are going to be with their entire basketball team and the coach will be there. And yes, I have the cell phone numbers for all 16 members of the team.” Of course, my parents will give the verdict based on their ideals and their analysis of Joyce’s suggestions. Any appeals thereafter will have to be strongly supported by reasons; ones convincing enough to revoke an already finalized decision. My parents are very liberal in hearing what we have to say but are very conservative in enforcing the core traditional Taiwanese values of piety, manners, and other womanly expectations (for the girls, manly for Justin).
Surprisingly after eighteen years, I started to call many of my parents’ theories, most of which I used to deem crazy, my own. Father, a man of very few words, seems to speak only the most profound words. “Be the shore of the tides,” he said of emotions, “let everyone else move up and down with the waves; let them peak and reach for the sky then watch them hit the hard rock bottom. And be glad that although you watched them climaxed with joy, that you will never drown in the violent twirls of sorrow.” I have named this theory the “horizontal emotion line”. It is the zero degree line straight through the middle of the waves between all the highs and lows. It is the median, the average, and the standard.
“People always tell me, they’ve got your looks and your smarts,” Mother says, “but I tell them, no, my daughters and son are much prettier and much brighter than I am because they are the combination of the best qualities their father has to offer and the pristine goods I have in me.” My parents’ views of the world are my most valuable treasures. If I can offer my children half the wisdom my parents have given me, I will know that I have succeeded the ultimate challenge of parenthood. I will have planted seeds in the minds of my children and, in time, those seeds will blossom into beautiful sources of knowledge from which my parents are planting in me.
This is my thought in progress.
| | |
|
