[Travel Notes]

為什麼用英文？
因為——就在邊上啊。

We love beginnings. Births. New years. Christmases. Endless excuses for something to start over for. Journeys. It seems as if we take unique delight in the possibility of starting fresh, no matter what kind of collapses, heartbreaks or despair doomed to mark it later.

I, like all weak yet still hopeful animals, can't help but feel a tingle of delight over the new term. Not much, because cold, ridiculously good sense tells me plainly of what this really is. Exile. Or escape of a sort. Another broken-winged attempt at freedom. The burden of luggage doesn't speak of the bittersweet pain that induces independence this time, and I was left scared of invisible cages and traps.

Back when I was sixteen they had to let me travel alone for the first time. I fell in love with trains on my way back. Constantly have I missed it afterwards-- for the first time there was time all to myself, and I was able to stay pleasant and pleased all the way back. There was no reason, no reason at all, to be unsatisfied, even if I was still quite naïve about the ways of the world.

Many journeys have taken place after that.
For all the nostalgic spirit in me, memories have never been my type of ghosts. I rarely let myself remember all the other journeys while travelling, not even the happy times. Father said, with a strikingly familiar, cheerful tone (one I'd use myself, at inconvenient times), that this all would become lovely memories eventually, and I felt a despairing urge to laugh at that. Not that I think Father's wrong-- my streak of optimism takes after him, after all, among all other qualities that keep us in pain but surviving-- but it occurred to me then that I would never be able to separate the dramatic, funny aspect of the journey from the hair-pulling, suicidal gloom of it, not when the dominant force of depression has been there the whole time.

And don't I know it's more than enough to know it once.

I think of journeys Father took in his youth, and the ones he was forced to take after my birth. Two years ago he accompanied me to Beijing (or Shanghai, I don't really remember) to attend An Important Contest, and when I told him I could very well travel on my own, he said he knew, and that he merely wanted to take a trip down south afterwards. So off he went, all the way down south to the lakes and rivers I know he had always wanted to see, but put off for all those years for a reason I wish I didn't know so well-- Father is extremely picky when it comes to travel companions, and would rather stay indoors for ten years than go with awful company. It is one of the many traits I inherited from him. And it was a true journey of freedom, the first time I've ever seen him travelling for his own fun.

And I think of the choices we are both forced to make. Father is a man of steel will, a silent, cold lion that has hidden his wit and romantic streak for twenty years. I am more exposed to the world and humans, too much so for his liking, but being the man he is, he never says a word. It was both an natural instinct to know and a bitter lesson hard learnt for me that it is no use trying to change those minds that differ from your own down to the core, and I cannot imagine what Father has gone through to know and live by that principle. But some people never get to understand that, and as a result we both have had to make deal with it for twenty years, and more to come.

We take different paths, though. Father chooses to shut and shield himself, far away from the forces that  know no better than to judge, forgiving in solitude. I choose to fling myself at the unknown, whether it be love or hate or heartbreak, struggling not to resent, not to harbour pettiness, because I still want to believe in happiness, a simple faith that's been shattered, smashed to bits, and restored without the caution it's supposed to need.

Hence our journeys part.