Kaohsiung, Taiwan

To my parents, everything is about finances, and right now I'm a gamble, a risky investment.

I'm not a product. They didn't go to a store and put down some money knowing exactly what they were going to get and what to expect. That was my upbringing. They put in money to raise a child, and a child was raised.

Now they're pumping in money with a hope, but no guarantee that they will get what they hope for. Despite what they told me to my face, they didn't even try to hide it from other people that they don't want me to enter a monastery. Now they're pumping money into completely unrelated schemes that will magically make me not enter a monastery.

I try to make sense of it as I book a flight to Japan, not even thinking about the cost or shopping around. Buy a Japan Rail Pass. Book two nights at a guesthouse in Kyoto; other nights that I'm not staying with Madoka in Tokyo may be in random cities across Japan as I make use of the unlimited travel on the Shinkansen from the Rail Pass.

Spend, spend, spend, all charged to them, and the justification and refusal of guilt comes from reminding myself that this is their investment. They're paying for a chance that something will come up and I won't enter the monastery, and willing roulette ball that I am, I roll and roll, where the wheel stops, nobody knows.

I fully intend to end up back at the monastery. They lose. There's Madoka, but although I think there have always been feelings between us, and I've occasionally thought and wondered about us, we have a history of nothing happening. Nothing short of a dam breaking open would change anything, and the dam on my side is pretty sturdy.

I want to be back at the monastery by the time the monastics return in mid-April. If I stayed in Taiwan into April, I would need to leave the country again to renew my visa again. Also my parents are supposed to be here at the end of March/beginning of April and I wouldn't want to be here at the same time as them. Too weird.