The World is Shaky, I am Crazy

The world is always shaky since I was born. I just never realized this fact until now. When I immersed myself in the water, puddling the incomprehensible chunk of flexible solids that filled up the space around me, I understood the world above was a separate entity that was no more than an illusion, a fantasy.

In that world, I first experienced that the emotions a monster called NIAN (Chinese, translated as "year" in English) brought. I was still a fetus. My parents went back to my dad's hometown for New Year celebration and that was my first introduction to the idea of family, to the unshakable ties that bind me. The tradition of going back to dad's hometown for every Chinese New Year continued for the next fifteen consecutive years. I roller-skated with my cousins for most of our days at the Old House. We wandered to rural fields and heated mud to bake chicken and sweet potatoes. We watched women weaving bamboo chairs on the streets. We played fireworks. I rode on my father's neck to avoid the attacks of domestic animals. I ate unforgettable five-taste ducks that my grandpa made. It was a time when my creativity burst, a time so free that I could not perceive anything as new or strange or abnormal. The days passed by without notions of time. There were only waking up and being asleep. And I became a wandering madman too immersed in reality that I could not feel the tightening ropes on my body put on by NIAN.

When did I become aware of this monster, you are curious? Well, it is with some sacrifice of the loose ropes I gained this conscious. During my first remembered fever, my mom read the story of Chinese New Year to me. On a white bed I sat up with a body that I could not support. I opened my eyes and only saw vast expanse of whiteness in front of me. Then mom's worried and harsh voice went, "a monster called NIAN came to a village every year to hurt people and people used firecrackers to scare it away." The storybook's blue and red imprinted on my mind, accompanied by a certain calming warmth conveyed through mom's irritated voice. I imagined the monster knocking on my ancient Chinese wooden gate and trying to get something out of me. I faced it with tranquility and said to it, take whatever you want.

But it did not take anything away from me. Instead, it put something on me and I do not remember if I accepted it willingly or not. Maybe I was not even aware of his action. The tranquility I had was so powerful that it blocked my own conscious. So the monster came every year and gave me a reality which was too true that it empowered me with stillness and made me unconsciously give up the battle to fight off the tightening ropes.

Fifteen ropes, I counted. I was drugged by the monster for fifteen years. All the creativity I endorsed, all the tranquility I thought I owned, are unshakable ties that are attached to the four tips of the universe, ready to flip it around. If it was not until now when I read "the furtherest distance in the world is also the shortest distance in the world" and so the shortest distance in the world can also be the furthest distance in the world, I would still be drugged by my illusional strength and the beauty of reality. You see, the world is not real anymore. When I thought I had everything, I indeed did not have anything. When I thought I was simply myself with nothing more, I was indeed not something but something tied with the tight ropes. What is it that I am in?

I put down my head in the water again to carefully feel the delicate difference between the two worlds. If the world above is an illusion and a fantasy in which I unconsciously lose my freedom, what is this incomprehensible chunk of flexible solids that is surrounding me? Is the chunk suffocating me with its apparent transparency which instead is a vast expanse of whiteness? Bubble, bubble, bubbling... The world is shaky.

I am crazy.