Saturday, April 28, 2007

姿慧 finally responded to my emails.

It was weird at first when I contacted her right away and she didn't respond to that, nor to subsequent emails. I entertained the possibility that something in my perception was horribly wrong, that she really wasn't thrilled to meet up with me again after all these years.

I was about to chalk up meeting her as another of the big jokes in my life. She did send me a mass emailing, though, so I knew I was on the radar somewhere.

My natural reaction in this sort of dynamic is to let it go. Easy come, easy go. But something just didn't feel right about just letting it go. There was too much unknown, it couldn't be. I wasn't going to let go, I wasn't going to let this one go. Something was telling me this was too important. If this was going to be another joke of a relationship, I wanted to at least know why.

And she finally responded, and I don't know what these feelings are. What are these distant tremors, these resonances of a relationship that have roots somewhere, but never came to be. What is this when I compare them to the people I've actually known, the relationships that actually happened?

Nothing? Fantasy of the unknown?

Putting it that way, it's definitely not a bad thing. Definitely no worse.

I don't know what I want anymore. I don't want anything. We don't even speak a common language. We've never spoken a common language. We've never spoken. That's the common language. Even if I study harder with the motivation of communicating with her, that will be our common language.

My spine is leaking again.

Photostroll, Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN:

Xinhai Rd. Actually that's Tingzhou Rd. coming up from an extended underpass, between Xinhai Rd. which is split, and I'm shooting from Roosevelt Road. I think of it as Xinhai Rd. because Tingzhou Rd. keeps going up and becomes the Jianguo Elevated Expressway. Since I'm surface-bound, I stick to surface road designations.


4:59 p.m. - Another shot of people gathering under Roosevelt Rd. while above others cross the Jingmei River. 
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 2:43 p.m. - Taida campus main boulevard. Long zoom and serious lens foreshortening on display as that boulevard is a good quarter-mile long.