Work Text:
I’m here in your hometown.
I’m here, in Tainan, but you’re not. Your mother’s coffee shop isn’t here, either. I heard it closed down earlier this year.
In my mind, I know that somewhere in this city, a part of you remains. The kind that’s physical and tangible and undeniably here . Your family is here. Your footprints, left behind in the dust. A bedroom waits for you to return.
But I can’t see any of it. There is nothing for me to cling to, no way of knowing if you’re with me now.
Do I have you still?
I go out to search for you, tracing a path that you might have taken. Peeking into the backstreets, threading my way through the afternoon traffic.
I walk everywhere, because there’s no subway, because the buses run sparse, because I never know if I might find you tucked away in the corner of some alley. There are a lot of those here. The city’s flatness is unfamiliar, most buildings barely scraping three or four floors. But like sprawling roots below, narrow streets twist and twine their way into an intricate maze on the ground.
Everything seems to be connected. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that there is no sense of separation between things. I make my way down the street and see Japanese colonial era facades and old Dutch trading companies and a house that could belong to my grandmother wedged in the middle. There’s a school next to the temple next to the fort next to my hotel. I step through the back gate of the temple and find myself on a stranger’s front doorstep.
I walk, and walk, and walk. Just to touch the earth you’ve touched. Just to tether myself to you merely by standing where you once stood, irrespective of time passing.
And in some ways, you are still here. You are still everywhere.
I think I see your shadow among the lanterns at Shennong Alley. I catch a glimpse of you speeding past me on a bike, along the canal. You slip by me to squeeze into the Narrow Door Cafe. We pass each other on the stairs leading up to the roof of the Hayashi Department Store, heads ducked and hidden underneath our umbrellas.
Once, through the window of my taxi on my way back from Taijiang, I saw you standing at the edge of Sicao Bridge. You were gazing out at the sea, the sun in front of you setting over the water, setting your hair aflame.
On impulse, I scrambled to ask the driver to let me off at the end of the bridge so I could run back to meet you, but by the time I got there you were already gone. The sun dipped beneath the waves, and then it was just me, standing there at the mouth of a river, there at the edge of an ocean.
I was never good at hide and seek, but these what-ifs are the only things I have with me. You understand, right? I need to let myself think I see you everywhere just so I might feel your presence surround me.
Sometimes I think that I think of you too often.
It rained on my second day here. I heard that there hasn’t been a typhoon in three years, and that last year the city went almost three hundred days without rain. They say a typhoon is coming now.
When it rained, it poured. Thundered in the way that made me feel the rumble in my chest, thudding under my rib cage. Reminded me of the time I was caught in a storm with rain that came up to my knees several years ago. But it washed away the summer heat, taking all the smog and haze with it, and then I felt like I could see that much more clearly.
Night had fallen by that point, so I collapsed the stem of my folding umbrella, shaking out the water. Clutched it like a bouquet of flowers that I might gift to you later.
And even if you’re not really here, even if I don’t know a single person in this city — everyone looks familiar, somehow.
Is it because they’re your neighbors? At one point in time, they fed you or they played with you or they chatted with you while you bought something from them or maybe it was all of those things.
They left a part of themselves with you that you continue to carry, so when I look at you I look at them, and when I began to know you I began to know them.
Or maybe it’s the other way around, and you are the one who’s left a piece of yourself behind. The time you gave when you listened to someone play traditional music on a saxophone next to the Green Tunnel, or your rapt attention when you paused to watch the old man paint posters at the theater, and he thanked you for stopping and seeing him. Or a grandchild’s love from when you told the grandma at a roadside noodle stall on Guohua Street that her food was delicious.
Like a seed sprouting from the heartlands of this place, you are everywhere.
Before I leave, I’ll take a walk along the coast in the evening. Bask in the golden sunlight reflecting off the pools of the salt flats. You won’t be there, of course. But that’s okay.
You were there. You were here.
I am here.