bled

What can I say?

That if I ever wished you ill, I would will now that a thousand vindictive angels would fall with their blazing swords upon me. I always thought that you were braver than I am, with an intuitive, innate sense of bravery that I can only deliberate upon. And I see you being borne away now by a flood of numbers and arithmetic, with percentiles and scores, on a raft knitted of sheets of grid paper. Your hair spans the surface like Ophelia, and soon you will drink forgetfulness.

If the world was made for geniuses like you. I see in your bosom a singular struggle between what is and what ought to be, between the system of survival and the trance, the darkness before creation. The fallibility and the possibility, where there are no barriers; The book I'm supposed to read for tomorrow seems to cry out sympathy with you as its heroine, for you could very well be. I see all words drawn to you, you at the epicentre of humankind's greatest madness and revelations.

Love is not enough. I am not enough. Once my mother said to me, that she was sorry that our family could not provide for my talent, but then I think that if I had even a widow's share of what you have, I would blaze a path through the flood, and care not for the death of my firstborn children. But on the other side of the coin, if my family had the means to provide for me, I think now that I would have created another raft for you.

I watch you drift as I sit by the bank among thorns. I watch the numbered locusts descend and force back the Words. I cannot say anything of my own; I am dumb as you dip a cup out into the fetid water.

For a day, it was your constant presence. I don't think I've giggled so much in a long time. Or eaten quite so much.

You had written me such a long and heartfelt letter when I left you almost exactly four years ago. Now, you have left your mother in the coastal city and come eastward, to the supposed omphalous of our civilization. Over Serbian pastries and Malaysian foods with names I can't pronounce, we sit in Dundas square and I try to convince you that this is the omphalous of the world.

Or, this is the exact midpoint of the line between us. For these four years, I have never ceased to hear your breathing over the telephone line, when you were doing my math homework for me, when you would probably not have helped anyone else. In the past year, I have never cased to hear the weariness in your voice, my father passed away yesterday morning.

So, I find it amazing, even if you do not, that we wait for streetcars on a hot Canada Day, in a city I never expected to live in, much less to explore with you. I find it amazing that you will be going to medical school next year, and I don't even know what I want to do with my life. You seem to be one of the compass needles in my life, one which has never wavered, from the moment we drew peppers in a small, hot art classroom on the third floor.  They are shriveled now, if not dust, and now, I tell you that you brought the fair weather with you to this otherwise hot city, and count your new white hairs.

I find it amazing that you would confide in me the ostracization you felt and must continue to feel, because of your diligence and brilliance. Your pensive turns about the curses of illness, the irony in dying of what you devoted your life to. The fears of the future, in some unnamed tutorial room, where maybe again you would be the target to malice and competition. I tell you, it will be all right, though I don't believe it myself. But I believe you, and believe in you.

Your hotel room has two beds. I leave on the next Kennedy bus. In my quiet room that night, exhausted from two days of euphoria, I sleep between the sheets you occupied, and realize that dream conversations with you are still echoing in my mind.

I will hear them for the next year, or however long it will take for us to meet again.

I.

Now in the
White flames of burning flags we
found a world worth dying for, yeah
We've been battered so hard that we don't
feel anymore.

> How can he reach you in exile? They walk across a street in the U.S. carrying the stars and stripes. How does the red and yellow robes of your monkhood rise against the field of blood and stars?

The new generation tire of peace talks and negotiations. Their palms separate in the sanctuary of temple grounds, and with twisted complexion, set the fire under the frying pan.

Are these really your teachings?

> This is where your history has taken you. You can take their beating heart in a box and put it on display like Mao, you can set the Great Firewall of China and complain of unfair media coverage. Your exiled ones can march down the streets in Canadian cities, still snowbound in March, holding flags.

You can go neither way. either watch your people suffer or incur the wrath and prejudice of the world. You can put them into temple lockdown, but in reality, it is you whose hands are tied now.

> I wish you'd see that you are the third monkey to fall off the swing. I scroll down the page and see beside every flag the phrase urging respect for human rights. And yet no one suggests temperance.

> I had a chance to go to Halifax to light the torch of human rights. but I didn't go.

There has been enough written on this. this article may be too long. See Tibet for disambiguation.

II.

> It is surreal, is it not, seeing a crack right across the road, you on one side, destruction writhing on the other. Your neighbours scatter from the epicentre like fireworks exploding, or else they cling to hands of those underneath the rubble. In plastic sleeping bags you whisper through the nights, your eyes gleaming like deers caught in headlights.

How many bootleg movies about the Apocalypse have you watched through the smoke and sizzle of spicy cooking? And now you are in one.

And the funny thing is, we look through the screen and still think you are one.

> One of my professors joked last year that he believes Florida received their due divine retribution. After all, look who they elected to office. Maybe it is time to contemplate your history. Refer to part I.

> A heart has changed to a rainbow. The few long exiles who sided against you in Part I now try to curry donations in remote islands.

> I scroll through online photos and think, there is too much gray in these pictures.

Can we be saved? Has the damage all been done?
Is it too late to reverse what we've become?
A lesson to learn at a crucial point in time
What's mine was always yours, and yours is mine.


Links ---
(Screams always comes through the picture.)

blog.studentsforafreetibet.org…
current.com/items/88875652_wik…

www.thestar.com/fpLarge/photo/…

(I hate it when course texts have something to do with my life.)

A year and a half ago, he stood before us, the hub of our attentions, drawing the words from the page with his voice. As with other mandatory literature readings, it was unconnected, perfunctory. I chose not to doodle his face on paper as I have done with other authors. My creative writing professor and my English professor knew him, were a part of him, for being “friends of the cause.” Their alter egos, father and son roles reversed, perched high on his pages, to me completely, utterly irrelevant. Why would a man from Saskatchewan interest me? Why would journeys into Texas and Mexico, bringing a letter of love and faith, draw me in?

(Since then, I have understood the character bases located in my professors, their names flying from the pages. Yesterday he was reading to us again, his hands clasped behind his back, and I entered the room wondering whether he was a base for his own character, as I had imagined him throughout. A voice from the part of my mind asks whether he could be Richard.)

Since then, I have clutched at course evaluation envelopes on depressed stairwells, refusing to let the Humanities office take them. I have sent my own letters of love and faith, feared the deprecation that is reason. I have dreamed of longing at the end of the world.

He can follow the wine-red shirt across national borders while I cross the international waters by air, thinking of a particular shades of blue. He follows a psychopath into the brutal assault of foreign languages, and he thinks that he is unconscious justice and watchful reason. His attentions focused inexplicably on false security, the cruelty of pretended revelations. To have baited a Christian girl with her own religion, and all she can interpret is that Mary carried a child while still a virgin.

I think, what you have done to me was so much worse than that, but then again, it was not you. I see people who do not exist in people who do, as I lay sheets of tracing paper over reality and mark the inadequacies and the longevities. All the while, her voice whispers immorality like schizophrenia.

(There was only one other wine-coloured shirt in my life, and the owner of that is long gone. I have lost him in the crowds on subway platforms. I will cease to torment myself over him, because he has ceased to turn around to make sure that I am following.) I follow the blue sweater into the place of last things. I am not following the psychopath but the non-existent psychopath I see in you.

He loses his quarry but finds a holy man. For a moment, pursuit slumbers and he sucks up faith like air, his reason destroyed by a word he cannot remember. I remember it for him, acts it out for him, in a similar hub, except he did not go there to collect his baggage but to drop them off.  Hyperventilation. For him, faith and patterns can coalesce, and he understands the other meaning of reason.

The light is different. While it hides from him it reveals too much to me. Under the multi-directional and far-off white lights of airport terminals, where is my conversion? When you drop your bag behind me and give that look of hallucinatory recognition, and my breathing begins to understand itself? If music is like lovemaking, then breathing is masturbation. Even as she lays out cards with impossible fantasies, her voice chastises in the voice of the Criminal Code of Canada. No person shall, without lawful authority and knowing that another person is harassed (or recklessly as to whether the other person is harassed): repeatedly follow the other person, or anyone known to them, from place to place; repeatedly communicate with, either directly or indirectly, the other person or anyone known to them; "beset" or watch a place where the other person is visiting, lives or works; or engage in threatening conduct directed at the other person or any member of their family.

(I wonder what your girlfriend is like.)

I think of all the followings and wonder at their criminality. I had sent my letter of faith and love. He would have followed the subject of his dissertation along Oxford Street in London, dogging his steps, just a hundred and sixty years too late. She would have filled in the space he made in air, leaving the watching totem pole behind her. Germanic syllables hang in his wake and she sees in him a pre-Christian angel. And I would silence that voice inside my mind for the briefest instant, so I may go without being hounded into the mysterious depths of my school upon excuses. I would try to look through tinted windows and try find the devil in you, where no devilry exists.

Obsession is psychological; devotion is moral. I try to locate in me both, but I lose myself in patterns and the search for faith, and realize that I don't even know your name.

Sitting here, imagining how you look like as you ride a small Beijing bus out into the city centre, the sunlight in dapples over your freckled skin and white hair. Imagining how it must feel to have a tube shoved down your throat at the age of eighty-one, still thinking yourself hale, braving the emergency room all alone.

She told me that you hadn't eaten for two weeks, fed intravenously through the bags I used to dread when I was five, and six, and seven, in starch hospitals smelling like cleaning solution. When you used to take me to there on the front of your bicycle, I used to see the front of the bicycle wobble back and forth anddrawing a wavering dittany against the concrete. My five, six and seven year old heart wondering even then just how strong your limbs are to steer both of us, every morning, every afternoon.

I remember how I used to have dreams of you, mundane dreams out of character for me, when I would see you get out of tall beds late at night to use the washroom, shuffling old slippers through perversely magnified halls of not-homes. When I told my mother of these flashes, she would joke mingled with seriousness that she hoped you were all right. And now I have no more dreams, and can only listen with half a heart to grandmother try to make light of everything in her child's voice, fooling no one.

Ironic that I am going west to visit a friend because of her sick father, cancer gouging out his pancreas, waiting for death. In this double displacement on the chain of responsibility I displace myself closer to you but never reaching. She says, we are keeping this a secret, even from grandmother. And this is why I cannot return - it would make you suspicious. And I think, you are too wise, learned in these harsh medical facts yourself, and you will realize that death is growing in you.

Old age is only the beginning, how our bodies betray us. Now, twenty-one, I sit in front of my computer trying to digest the hard lumps of reality, and the only sensation I feel is hunger. I dig my nails into the flesh. If I am your flesh, I would reach into my body and pluck out your tumour, hugging whatever biological connection I find. And my mother of fifty-one, putting aside the diseased inheritance of her own frail body, is trying to find an airplane that will go along those same lines of biology, trying to get permission to return home, only to become confused and give up. I tell her that she has to eat enough for the two of you now. I do not know whom to worry for more.