Taipei 101, Revisited

*A view down the street from my hotel. 7-11's are virtually ubiquitous here. You can even pay your cell phone and utility bills at your friendly neighborhood convenience store.










Well, I've gone and transplanted myself again. I arrived in Taipei at 5:30 am local time after a thirteen-hour flight on a cramped and sleepless red-eye; when I got here, it was already 85 degrees outside.

It's 4:15 pm, and I have never wanted anything so badly as I want to go to sleep right now, an urge I have to fight with everything I've got in me because an afternoon nap now would mean an extra day of jetlag later. My hamstrings are spasming from prolonged immobilization in a stiff airplane seat. My stomach is disoriented and angered by the sudden change in my eating schedule. And my heart is sore and bleeding from the beating it took when it was wrenched away from the place it was silly enough to fancy a home.



But with all of the upheaval and homesickness there comes - in brief, soothing moments - the peace that accompanies the familiar. The cinder block-hardness of the hotel bed, the haphazard collection of lackluster architecture, the cacophonous tones of the Chinese language echoing everywhere around me like the emotional ringing of an atonal bell. All things that in another time and place would have twisted my homesickness inside my gut until I felt nauseous, now somehow ironically mitigating it until it softens instead to a mere quiet ache.

It strikes me that in the midst of my struggles over the past couple of years I seem to have lost my ability to look exclusively forward, to dream, to lust after life the way I used to. Now these things seem far too troublesomely like attributes of the naive and the luxuries of people who have nothing else around to sap at their emotional energy. I feel weird and uncomfortably displaced, emotions that I've never before felt while traveling and which make me wonder if I've become too rigid, too trepidatious, too willing to sacrifice life for security. All the things I've always promised myself I would never, ever be. And I wonder how I came to this.

I feel with this trip as though someone has picked me up and knocked me hard against a curb, cracking open a fossilized shell to expose a soft and too long neglected underbelly. I would prefer to complete my statuary transformation, but some small, barely audible voice in the back of my head is calling me forward with the promise of potential. Of redemption, maybe. Of a way to be better.

And so....here we go. Onward to the next adventure.