75. At night

Almost the end of the year. The one so many talked about, with the Beijing’s Olympics in it. But I’m happy to be elsewhere to close this bracket. To be with you in Shaanxi province, where the air in perhaps drier than in the Chinese capital, but also filled with dust and the remnants of burnt coal. It is crispy cold outside, unfortunately no snow to soften the view. Just sharp gushes of wind against dirty cement walls and sandy roads, huge ugly buildings sprouting disorderly like the sudden malformations of a pallid earth, with lots of wide new highways leading nowhere, blue veins designing tired paths on an old wan body. For a long time still, they will call such infrastructure and architectural disasters progress and wealth. These crooked hallucinations nurtured by one’s soul caring mostly for size and surfaces. It will take a generation or two to give a rightful name to this disagreeable abundance. And to fix it, I hope.

But as said, I’m happy to be here. Because you’re here too, my grandchildren, whispering into my ear at night, oblivious to how unlovely our surroundings become by the day.

In the darkness of the bedroom, I forget about defective urban planning, and monstrous ideas of grandeur. I focus on Lilliputian proportions until I can clearly see the shine of your laughter, your bellies giggling while your tiny feet climb on my back, your fingers diving into my white hair, the waves of the blankets carrying us through the stories and fairy tales populating your minds. And we hold hands all cuddled up on the mattress pretending we’re on a raft drifting away on an ocean of mini-dreams, treasured secrets carried by soft currents, winks, and utter fondness. We float and waltz in our hearts, navigating across the memories of the day, the games and clownish feats worth remembering above all.

For what else could there be in my opened palm, if not for your limpid voices dancing the night away? What is possible, but your joy to launch mine, the old and the young for a straightforward moment quite the same? What things, but uncomplicated, intelligible ones rising like a hymn, unaffected by tortuous quests for pomp and fashion? We’re only us, tittering with a kind of minuscule, but vital happiness in lieu of brainpower. Filling our senses with drops of pure laughter. Baby jokes for little irreplaceable thoughts. Miniature signs to escort us to moments of reveries. Scaled down fleece blankets to envelop and protect your dearest yearnings.

In a world of mad gigantic undertakings, we salute the infinitesimal beauty of your childhood, and the staccato sounds coming from the crisp bursts of enjoyment that I hear again and again, sparks crisscrossing an intuitive destiny as you roll and bounce over fluffy pillows.

It is the end of the year. And we enter another round of complicity. When more newly learnt words will appear every week to explore and outfit our relationships. Weaving a tighter canvas for our sails. More expressions to help us decipher all we are made of, tears and delight, questions and concerns, quests and responses. All things of interest. Our uncertainties and hesitations. As well as options and decisions. Words in varied, flexible languages forming extensions to codes of conduct for our heartbeats to follow as they mark the time we’ll keep spending together. Longer phrases to dispatch fuller vibrations along the lines of what’s communicable. Human beings attaching themselves to one another and practicing undoing knots and the dense entanglement of feelings.

The coming year like a possibility. A transferable exchange, punctuated by apprenticeship, a supply of untried comments, a flurry of designations suddenly pronounceable and offered, uninhibited. Regenerated ways to change once again what we want to say.

A year of creative perlocutions. Testing the extent of communication, its diverse manners. How bodies of words cope with the explanation of their meaning. How they structure a system to present unbounded sensations. And still manage to carry solicitude beyond an acquired eloquence.

A year to retrace all histories. Retelling the days, hoping to transform their events into shared experiences, translating oneness into support and cohesion. Stretched arms to receive companionship and unambiguous signals for much needed self-composure. A supple skin over the text of our awareness, dressing up narratives to safeguard and fortify their anatomy. Plenty of new words frolicking in our conversations mostly to wish us well, but also to patch up unsettled zones, the multiple versions of accounts that get confused when words appear to no longer be sufficient. When a verbatim report of what troubles us cannot properly render the accuracy of doubts. When stories and newly invented combinations disappoint, lacking in effervescence, the verve of our incomplete understanding difficult to morph.

We then need to move on, seek other movements within speech, articulate differently what is the same for all of us: to be at odds with the very syllables meant to give us a voice while we find it so hard to express what we've tried to comprehend about the world. A universal motion that always moves time forward into even more unknown territories. And it is to be there together, aware of being unprepared despite all our new words in so many languages, that we relentlessly talk to one another, forming a bond as if a net to catch the ideas that escape us. Helping the undisclosed to come full circle, and to reassert its own tacit nature, but now with much love and the sort of enlightened virtuosity we expect from truly benevolent intentions.

Happy new year,
Laolao