Lost in Beijing
I want to sail away on the stone boat of No Name Lake with you, away from the noise of the city beating like a heart beats against your ribs. I want to disappear into the beauty because there is nothing else to do in the face of beauty, clear like the lakes inside stars, while the wild grass strikes no deep roots, offers no beautiful flowers or leaves, yet drinks in the dew, and imbibes the flesh of the dead.
Then there is the kind of lesson the cold teaches you, the gas in the flat not yet turned on so you head outside into sunlight on the street on your first day and feel warmer but are instantly lost though I didn't panic knowing all along that I had to be somewhere, no matter what, and along the way somehow I wanted to hold the ninth-century inlaid porcelain vase, but it was not allowed, the expert told me. He held it in his white-gloved hands as if it was alive because it was alive to him and it brought him back to an ancient time and an ancient people that he could feel like silent talk roll through him.
Some kind strangers finally found my way, and even guided me to my sixth-floor walk-up’s ground-floor entrance among buildings indistinguishable from one another to me. I was glad to be back in the flat, however cold it still felt. I put on extra clothes and when I still shivered in the middle of the day, I wrapped myself in a quilt that brought beads of sweat to my forehead and eventually through my shirt, but I loved the warmth, like a promise someone keeps after a long time of betrayals and coldness of the heart. Alright, I wasn’t sure where I was but I felt safe, wrapped up in two quilts on a flat reed bed in a small room with a window that looked down into the empty courtyard of all my desire.