2022-01-05
The Perishing of Rainwater
Leaves like drops of dark crimson ink splashed on white paper dotted a sky thick with haze. A car drove past; the rain on its tires traced ink-like streaks across the ground, already beginning to dry. Raindrops flung themselves against the windshield, shattered, and were scraped down without mercy by the wipers. Is that ink-wash landscape on the wall beside the road really painted in rain’s blood? How beautiful this dying thing is.
2022-01-13
Ghostkiss 1
The torrent carrying everything swept past me without mercy, and I stood there bewildered, watching — even the tears that fell were swallowed into it.
2022-01-14
Ghostkiss 2
At the end of the day, walking with headphones on, I manually give today its narrative shape in the gradually swelling sound, and find myself wanting to sink into the imagined medium of images.
2022-01-16
More and more I understand what it means to say that “it doesn’t matter what’s on TV; what matters is that the TV is on.”
Zhang Ailing’s novels leave me with a gnawing ache when I think back on them — probably because of her ruthless contempt for romantic illusion.
2022-01-26
Stick a straw into a peeling electric trash can. Suck out the distorted audio waste of an anime girl.
2022-01-27
In the instant before a hand makes contact, the primary colors shatter with a clang in the dark; the buildings emerge, neon rising all around, pulling him in until nothing is left.
L’Étranger
19:01. A frail old woman grips the railing, trembling her way down the stairs. I pass by her no different from anyone else.
Every day, everyone unconsciously casts the fragments of their dim, beautiful dreams into the boundless deep-blue sea. Someday, everyone will die as the water rises.
2022-01-29
Sapphire Night
I look out through the car window at the city draped in murky dark blue, like the flooded ruins in NieR:Automata. Light streams by, but the buildings in the distance are so bleak, so solitary — I can’t even make out the raindrops drifting toward them. We pass an unfinished tower block, its crane fixed in place, its rebar standing bare; the interior is dark and oppressive, genuinely like something out of the end of the world. As it recedes from view, the tail lights and street lamps blurred by rain on the glass scatter red and yellow across the night.
2022-01-30
Squeezed Towel
Having wasted the day, I am a wrung-out towel left alone in a bathroom with modern pretensions, struggling on a wire rack — when a single small step down would bring me safely to rest on the counter. Maybe I overestimated the quality of this cheap towel that is me. Maybe it is weakness. Maybe it is wishful thinking. I don’t know. I wait — for the next time I am soaked in water, another rebirth.
2022-01-31
It feels like my imagination has been eaten away by this life of shuttling between entertainment and reality. I seem somewhat constrained to observe things from a realistic vantage point, experiencing the waxing and waning of the world as it appears in front of me rather than as it exists in my fantasy; meanwhile entertainment clings like a recurring nightmare. Maybe it started in eighth grade, when I stopped being afraid of ghosts — the pressures and anxieties of the real world have been crowding out whatever flights of fancy I had left. Then again, maybe my fantasy has simply been displaced onto this sparsely lit world. Thinking of it that way, I feel a little better.