dilemma

dilemma n. a situation offering a choice between two equally undesirable alternatives.

I read this word so many times on the paper and never understand it. Now, when think about whether I should stay here or go back China, I understand this word totally.

It is a difficult word just like what it means. Dilemma. Knowing this word, I also learn these words: paradox, contradictory, alternative.

“If I leave this country, or say we split up, what you will do?” I ask.

“I don’t want to be with another woman.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why you don’t want another lover?”

“I just want to be on my own.”

‘“Really? And you don’t want to be with a man lover either?”

“No. I don’t want anybody.”

“Really?” I think I don’t understand you.

“Really. Look, you need me, and your love is a need. But I don’t need anything, and I don’t need you. That’s why I can be on my own.”

You say: “I’d like to be a monk. I want to give up everything: the city, desire, sex. Then I can be free.”

“We should let each other go,” you say to me.

“But we still love each other,” I insist. How can two lovers just decide to separate while they still in love with each other?

“We should leave each other.” You look at me, as it is said by a priest, a sober priest in the church.

Suddenly I feel that you have already made up your mind. And nothing can be changed. But I still remember that love song you sang to me before, under your fig trees in the garden. The lyrics and the melody are still wandering around in my ears:

It’s the heart afraid of breaking

that never learns to dance

I think you only want the joyful part of love, and you dare not to face the difficult part of love. In China we say, “You can’t expect both ends of a sugar cane are as sweet.” Sometimes love can be ugly. But one still has to take it and swallow it.

I start to deal with my immigration papers. I have to apply for an extension of my visa. It is frustrating. I need to show my bank details to the Home Office that I have stable income to live here, but certainly I don’t have any income. Everything is family supported. How much money I left in my bank? Two hundred pounds? Or one hundred and fifty pounds by tomorrow? Most importantly, I don’t have any reason to stay here, except for you. And I feel confused. I want to stay but I don’t know if it is the right decision. My parents’ opinions now seems don’t bother me very much like before. Plus, they know nothing of my life here.

I thought that you would bring everything into my life. I thought you are my Jesus. You are my priest, my light. So I always believed you are my only home here. I feel so insecure because I am so scared of losing you. That’s why I want to control you, I want you are in my view always and I want cut off your extension to the world and your extension to the others.

I think of those days when I travelled in Europe on my own. I met many people and finally I wasn’t so afraid of being alone. Maybe I should let my life open, like a flower; maybe I should fly, like a lonely bird. I shouldn’t be blocked by a tree, and I shouldn’t be scared about losing one tree, instead of seeing a whole forest.

timing

timing n. 1. the choice, judgement, or control of when something should be done; 2. a particular time when something happens.

Today I read about tense again. It is a sentence from Ibn Arabi, an old sage, a very wise man living in the early thirteenth century. He said:

The Universe continues to be in the present tense.

Does that mean English tense difference is just complicated for no reason? Does that mean tenses are not natural things at all? Does that mean love is a form that continues for ever and for ever, just like in my Chinese concept?

About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.

I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person’s entire life.

You had all this of beautiful energy inside when I first met you in the cinema. But things have changed. All our fight, all your strugglings with London, all of that has made you look like a small dried fig fell from the tree.

In our garden, in the last several days, figs fall from the tree, the fruit tree without flowers. They didn’t grow or ripen during the summer, but they can’t go through winter either. They are tiny, immature, greenish, and shrinking like an old man without a happy youth. Those figs are full of small wrinkles on the skin. They look very sad. In the morning, you walk to the garden, pick up those figs from the soil, and your palms are full of dirt and pity.

I remember those days when we first met. Then, the figs grew lively. I remember you once opened a big soft fig to show me the seeds inside. It was pink and delicate inside, and you would let me suck those sweet juice…Now it is winter, the time of dying, our hard time.

You see those tiny figs drop from the tree to the dirt, and you pick up them one by one. You come back to the kitchen and put these tiny green round things on the table, the table which we use for chopping vegetables, the table you always read newspapers, and the table which I use to study English and do my homework every night.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve…There are seventeen tiny figs on the kitchen table now. They are quiet, obscure, plain, and anonymous. They want say something to me, but eventually they are tired. They are dried up by the seasons, just like you.

I see your beauty is being diminished, by me. Day by day. Night by night.

February

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contradiction

contradiction n. 1. a combination of statements, ideas, or features which are opposed to one another; 2. the statement of a position opposite to one already made.

You always live in the middle of two realities. You want to be able to make the art work, but at the same time you don’t value it. You want to be away from London, to settle down in a pure and natural place, with mountain and sea, but at the same time you are obsessed to communicate with the society.

Sometimes, we go out for a walk. We walk in the Victoria Park, or we will walk from Broadway Market Street through London Fields. Your pale face is hidden in your old brown leather jacket, and your cheeks tell the pains with no name.

Sometimes I can’t help to kiss you, to soften you, to cheer you up. You walk slower than before, slow just like we are a real old aged couple. You are struggling with yourself.

“Do you want to come to China with me?” Again, I invite you. And for the last time, I invite you.

You stop walking and look at me. “Yes. But I don’t know if I want to travel anymore. I need to stop drifting.”

London Fields is in yellow grey. The maple trees are naked. No more children playing around. I wonder if I will be able to see this grass again, coming out in the next spring.

In Hackney Town Hall Library we sit and look at books.

Gustave Flaubert said, “In Pericles’s time, the Greeks devoted themselves to art without knowing where the next day’s bread might come from. Let us be Greeks!”