happiness is best when unrealized. Or unconsciously felt. Because the discovery of it is so beautiful that it's worth the not realizing.
It creeps on you, so then with a sudden awareness - a different bodily sense - a calm and euphoria that everything is all right.
I'm sitting at the Hong Kong version of Times Square.. Which is actually a building with a department store with Times Square written on the side. Deceiving, but still it feels like a link.
There is a big tv screen which plays music videos. Actually I'm never sure what they are, but the music is very empowering and operatic and so I always look up and stare while people grumble past me thinking, Why is she watching the refrigerator commercials?
I like this area a lot... it pulses like a living thing, from the movement of people. maybe it's just because I have a bad sense of direction, but each corner brings something different. on one side, the chestnut man, on another a mcdonald's and american brands, on another a japanese snack store... other way sweet pork or mango drink shakes, there's the arm-less man who paints names with the brush clenched in his mouth, the fish market, the store with yellow buns in the window.
walking there's not enough time to think. just image.
gingko nuts with green hearts. the threat of rainstorms with no thunder.
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my mother called to tell me that the tree my brother and i used to climb on had lost half its branches in an ice storm. It was a very elegant tree, it still is I hope... a maple with low-reaching branches. I think we'd called it Marigold or was it Meredith? I can't remember.
'I try to think of us playing in the trees during thunderstorm season, in the yellow calm when the storm is about to come. We are in the maple tree, the one with the shaky third branch. He sits where the branches begin to spread, the tree's heart. I'm waiting on the first branch, because I know I'll have to help him get down. The air smells like bourbon and we can hear the storm and thunder that's about to come... We wait as long as we can, shaking in anticipation as the sky changes and the trees around us turn gray. Our mother calls us in, and I help him down so that we can run to the house before the downpour.'
