The family next door has lived here since 1954. The ones upstairs moved in a year later, but when the original owners died, their children had the place stripped and refurbished into a studio, now inhabited by an American or European expat whose only encounter with me is the cacophony of her sex life at one AM in the morning. Thanks to their foresight I too have a place to live, though my landlady is far less enterprising and kept the room more or less the way it has always been.
Over the years, the content of my neighbours’ fridge had outgrown their 5 by 4 walls. This is a heritage building of sorts, so no remodelling is permitted. Their lives now spilled out of their rooms into the yard like gutted fish. There is a quaint, dilapidated charm to it all. Wires crisscrossed above narrow walkways. Bedsheets dangled earnestly above potted plants, hoping to catch that slant of light late afternoon. Buddhists hang prayer flags in high places so that the wind would carry the blessings to all. No mantras are printed on these flags except the weathering of lives. The occasional lingerie flapped in mockery.
Life happens unexpectedly here, in the moments between the rituals of a monotone life. I moved in a year ago and a blink away, just before I started my last job. At the time it felt like for the first time ever, the dots connected, my life made sense, and I found a group of people who shared my calling. I had a bit of savings and could for the first time live in the heart of town, in a place the carried just enough resemblance to my hipster fantasy. “This place really doesn’t reflect the calibres of a dateable, late 20-something man,” my friend had said upon her first view of the place. That was the point: a symbolic rejection of the prescribed good life, a reflection of my anti-establishment, trailer-dwelling, weed-addled hippie soul.
It served as a contrasting backdrop to a more mundane, workaday job that would have kept me occupied for 12 hours a day, and would migrate to a cafe on Saturday morning and a pub at night – this served as a nice container for a bed, which is my definition of home. A home is good enough as long as it fit all my possessions – cloths for a week and two laptops, the entire material evidence of me in a suitcase.
I had just come out of a major depressive spiral that ended with me trying work myself to death. It was an elaborate and dramatic suicide plan with a Faustian twist: that I would offer up health of body and soul, in exchange for worldly success or sudden death. I received a little of both but not enough of either: made some money, none of was mine, and experienced a breakdown, which did not kill me. Freshly unemployed and temporarily financially secure, I set out in search for the idea of a life. I started in Shanghai and headed towards the town of my birth. I stopped by every town where I’d intimately known the train station and airport and nowhere else, the entire Sigur Ros discography as my soundtrack. I had an idea of a life, that I would live in a place with a little whimsy, devote my time to something good and make good money from it, have a few people to love and entertain on Saturdays, and wake up late on Sunday reading in the sun. After yet another metaphorical death I was free, and unlike the last time, now I had the times to search for it.
I spent exactly 176 hours on the train and came back exactly where I started.
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