Late summer musings

It’s a period of solitude, that started with my dad’s illness. My dad felt pain - located somewhere between his lungs and over his belly - since the time before I left. I remember it was March, when he would wake up early in the morning complaining about it, and rubbing his hands on his chest, before having breakfast. He went under a full body check at the hospital and… the doctors said that they couldn’t understand where exactly the pain was coming from, yet that he was healthy and there was nothing to worry about.

But then, one day, after I already moved to Taiwan, I received a message from my mom - a late night message where she asked me if she could call me - a message that cut through my guts. My dad’s heart had stopped and I didn’t know it yet: she was, once again, refraining from giving me the full picture, in fear of scaring me. Dad’s heart had stopped, but since he had already entered the hospital a few days before, the nurses could intervene immediately and save him. He was lucky. After the fact happened, he rapidly fell into a state of severe discomfort, which lasted for about fifteen days. I remember during that time I found it hard to fall asleep. I would empathize with him, imagining myself alone at night, in that silent hospital room - wondering on the thought of tomorrow. We all got scared and, then, relieved by the projection of all things that could have gone wrong. His birthday occurred during hospitalisation. At the start (when we travelled together, a few months ago) my idea of a birthday present for him consisted of a copy of the moral epistles by Seneca. This is a collection of letters written by the Latin philosopher to a friend of his and covering a variety of topics, including among others the morality of slavery and, most relevantly, the issue of accepting one’s own death. Of course, this gift would have proven to be of terrible taste after all that happened. And so I thought of sending him a tablet instead - a much more material good, that he could have made good use of during the long, tedious days of recovery that awaited him.

The illness that struck my dad put me on a bad term with my spirits too. When I found out about what happened, I first sought refuge into the attentions of the first available person: a girl that I started dating at the time, and that quickly started to catch feelings for me. It was nice to pretend to be in a relationship again. For a few weeks, at a time in which I felt alone and lost, and my mom cried on the phone, I almost believed it myself. We would go shopping together, have breakfast together, hug in bed. Then, like every other time, something suddenly broke. And it stopped.

I noticed that I’m starting to develop some fatigue. I tended to think that I could not be scratched by these short, almost insignificant human bonds. But actually, each time I feel more tired than the last one. And I wish I could stop somewhere. The week I started to go back to office and my routine changed, I’ve had a sudden realization. It was not just the fact that I craved and looked for sex almost daily, but the way I knew I would treat people before and after intercourse, that slowly forced me to put forward the hypothesis of being addicted to it. I’ve never had sex with so many people as I do now, and yet I’ve never craved for it more than I do now. Somehow, the easier it gets, the more readily available it becomes, the more tempting the thought of having it again. Sometimes I wandered around the city before dinner time and fantasized to have sex later that night. The possibilities here are indeed almost endless. But the point is that all these possibilities leave nothing to me: that is, I decide to take nothing more from the women I meet than what their bodies can offer. Bodies that look all similar: they are almost a copy of each other; every one of them with a slight variation, a sort of whim of God, that always promises a new experience - a promise that each and every time remains ironically unfulfilled. When we lack something, we tend to attribute to our feeling of void all the weight of the emptiness and dullness of which life is permeated. But the truth is, once that something is achieved, we soon realize that the original object of our desire was not meant to make us happy in the first place. This is perhaps why studying Chinese brings me so much joy: because I am very aware that, by the time I’m dead, I will still be a long way from having encountered all the tens of thousands of words of which the language is composed. In a way, it is a language that can never truly be mastered - not even, mind you, by the Chinese themselves. And just as in loving a human being, the passion is all within the chase.

I’ve recently - and by chance - started to use Kakao again to chat with a Taiwanese girl. Reading those old chats - a taboo that I eventually couldn’t help but breaking - really felt like reading words written by a different person. Listening to the sound of her voice in the voice notes - an experience the vividness of which was denied even to the most creative and imaginative authors of old - felt like the gelid touch of an ancient ghost, whispering to my ears and on my neck. And skimming through our words was like taking a stroll through a dead garden, the garden of our relationship. Every flower was still there, intact, unchanged, yet dried of all of its vital lymph, and drained of all its splendid colours. The emojis, like masks of embalmed corpses, were still frozen in their expression, that goofy projection of innumerable emotions, of infinitesimal breadth, the complexities of which are all by this time long-forgotten.