A memoir by Tiger Song

Notes before reading:
This is a memoir, for it is a recollection of my interpretation of significant events of my life. It is not fictitious. Anything out-of-world described were dreams that I had previously recorded on paper. Some of them were lucid dreams, in which I could control, and some were dream states in which I was the creator, spectator, and main character.

The story takes place of the protagonist in a gym taking a high school standardized writing test, and as he is sitting in his desk he begins to excavate the memories seared in both his conscious and subconscious mind.
The protagonist of the memoir has deuteranomaly and protanomaly, which are collectively known as red-green colorblind and he generally has difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, browns and oranges.

Symbols & Motifs:
 This piece is essentially about the protagonist’s struggle to identify himself as an individual, which he believes once he is able to, that state of existence will be transcendental like eternal freedom.

The protagonist believes that the only time when he is free is when he is reminiscing about the past, therefore he believes that he is eternally free, because by indulging in thought, he is creating memories for the future and the past in which he can always revisit and feel free.

The color blue symbolizes the subconscious, and the protagonist can identify this color very distinctly, to a point in which he can perceive its existence without looking.

The blue grass land represents the transcendence of the protagonist, and the subjective world of morality on which the protagonist is comfortable treading because he comes to a realization that there is no line to be drawn on what is right or wrong, only thinking makes it so.

And Joaquin Phoenix, well… Joaquin Phoenix.

During some asshole’s test also known as the SAT, I stumbled upon a philosophical inquiry on whether it’s better to be loved than not. Was this phrase something I should know? It was out of my reach, for I lived in a little box in a little world with little people. It bothered me, so I ended up pulling out a thick book out of my backpack and buried my face in it, in search for answers in my mind. It made me less conscious of myself in the gym with 208 other test-takers. That is when I am able to escape from this little world in a little box full of little people!

[A Mundane Monday Conversation with a teacher on November 31st, and of course, he was very bearded.]

“Life is not a manuscript… right?”

Two nods and a chin scratch.

“You don’t get told what to do, you kind of, just do it.”

I nod. I give an uh-huh, and another two nods to affirm his two nods.

We’re f***ing bubbleheads!

“Right… Right…”

“What should I do?”

“Just accept it. That’s all you have to do”

That’s all I can do.

His emerald eyes to this day still remind me of the green lake in which the dragon lives, and Joaquin Phoenix staring into the abyss of my soul.

[Conversation End]

Anyway, I was sitting by my desk in a gym with 208 students, right? Staring listlessly at the prompt with the clueless look that you get on a Sunday morning (or afternoon), after a night that you recall to be the best night ever, but not actually being able to put your finger on exactly what made that night, so remarkable.

The prompt:

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

[Conversation on a very Saturday midnight, walking to the station with animate objects]

“See… I don’t get the point of partying. I understand that people go to parties because they’re stressed or whatever, but people that go to parties all the time, that I don’t really understand. Like, there’s no one that says that ‘I’m going to grow up to go to parties all the f***ing time’.” His hands are moving furiously and his eyebrows are digging into his eyes and he is speaking in a somber voice that made me very uncomfortable.

…
“Well, people go to parties because they want to enjoy that part of their life in high school. It’s part of what people do. People go to sleep, people brush their teeth, and people go to parties when they’re in high school because they find it fun. Whatever, right? I don’t care. I’m happy for them. I personally don’t go to parties, but I don’t have anything against it,” I say, matter-of-factly.

He hasn’t been to any parties. He’s Introverted, smart, privileged, and competitive.

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t have to actually go in order to know if I like it or not. It’s like asking if I’m gay…”

I laugh a little, a little discombobulated, but actually trying to find reasoning in his madness.

[Flash back to a Sunday morning in a coffee shop]

“You see; I don’t want work for a corporation. I want to have a soul.”

“Whoa, whoa. You just went from being open to things to being a corporate member, isn’t that a little too big of a leap?”

Silence never felt as silent that day. I could literally hear it ringing by my ears like bumblebees lost in the sky.

[Conversation end]

[back to the midnight on Saturday, or Saturday midnight.]

“I’m not asking you to visualize a foreign object that’s about four inches deep in your rectum, alright?”
He cuts me off, “But you know that’s it painful, without actually having to visualize it.”

[Conversation end]

Back to the desk. An out-of-body-experience (I felt), the more I blanked (the greater my imagination expanded), the more likely I was able to transcend. The unadulterated state of my imagination is infinite, like an eyeball traveling from the depths of space down to the kaleidoscopic cells of a pedestrian’s body. I am that pupil of It when I am alone with peace, when time becomes effortless and eternal. A feather floating in the air, basking in the spring wind and the green sky. Gentle as the mother’s dying breath, and fresh as the blood of the newborn.

(On the question of existence)

And that’s what I find to be so incredible, in this world, yet so ordinary. Civilization and evolution assigned value to object and concept. I mean, the way we assign monetary value to material, gender to life, and religion to spirituality, is all in all, systematic. We always have to define something by transmuting its form, thereupon diluting the originality, creating our own subjective definition of the object. Take the nothingness in our world. Nothing equals nothing. Why should it be something? Why can’t it just be? Why can’t we just be (nothing) particles floating in the busyness of our universe? What happens to us after we die? Do we live in a multi-dimensional universe in which another plane of existence solely existed for the purpose of existing?

A feeling of setsunai dawned on me. The Japanese adjective ‘setsunai’ translates to ‘sad’ in English, but like most words that get lost in translation, the meaning of setsunai is very different in Japanese. Setsunai describes a physical, heart-aching, gasping-for-breath type of sadness. Because when I read the prompt “Tis’ better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” I felt like I understood the prompt so much that I didn’t understand it at all, like a weird dream that I can never shake off my head in the morning.
(The deepest secret nobody knows? The root of the root, the bud of the bud, the sky of the sky?) Is love an external thing, or is it completely internal? Could we be predisposed to feel?

What is, love? 

Love is procured from nothing to something.

This realization made me put away the book as wings sprouted behind my back. One was virgin white, the other was pure black. Green blood dripped from the ripped parts of my Nirvana T-shirt where the wings protruded. I was polluted. When I looked around the gym, all the students stood up at once and stared at me. It took me a blink to realize that all of their looks were covered with nothing but skin. No eyes, mouths, or lips, just all pink. Faceless, dull, inanimate upright objects.

Escape!

I tried to fly out of the gym!

I was shot down by a shotgun and left with a bloody wing. When I fell, I didn’t fall on the waxed floor where basketball players squeaked their shoes, I fell on a cloud of blue grass. When I tried to get a whiff, I caught the scent of the blood on my wing that smelled like smithy raw iron. I got up and did a 360 survey of the area, only to find nothing but a stretch of blue grass. I walked for two hours, and suddenly, something appeared out of nothing.

According to my vision, it would be best described as an endless hotel corridor. I wasn’t afraid nor was I the least worried. I felt at ease. I walked through the corridor, and as I pierced through it, I felt joy surging through my body, like stepping over the threshold of your home, taking off your gloves and slipping off your shoes on a cold winter day.

“It was so cold that we couldn’t even feel our hands.”

And as I stepped in her cozy home with the orange atmosphere of lights, it reminded me of the lack of warmth in my own home.

“It feels so warm! You know that feeling when you’re really cold and you like, enter the front door and feel super warm?”

Transcendence. I didn’t want to say it, but that was the only word that popped into my mind.

You know what? F*** beauty contests. Life is one big f***ing beauty contest after another. I mean, you got high school, and then college, and work? F*** that!

[Back to the corridor] Billions of particles of vibrational energy surged through my body and I felt my vision narrow the more I walked. I was charmed by the endlessness of the corridor and so I kept walking, walking, walking… step by step, step by step… step by, step. The blood on my broken wing drip-painted the corridor carpet as I began to feel very nauseated.

When I reached the end of the corridor, I spotted a brown grocery bag with a book in it. I had to rip the bag in pieces to reveal the book. It was a 300 pager for sure, and when I leafed through it, it was completely blank. Nothing!

Suddenly, a pen dropped out of one of the pages. A black bic pen. I picked it up and started writing in the blank pages. I wrote: If Mozart can do what Handel did when he was five, then I can do anything in this world. Keep walking and you’ll find a boulder and ahead the steepest hill of all hills. But you’re not running this time, no, you’re not running. You’re going to roll that stone up the mountain if you want to find that your wing, and fly.

I do. I want to fly.

No,
I must.

I pushed and I pushed and I pushed... I rolled and I rolled and I rolled...

Beads of sweat formed and dripped down my neck, blisters and splinters spread on my hands, and with all I can muster, I heaved a raspy sigh of desperation.

I watch the boulder roll all the way back down.

No, I must!

And again I pushed, I pushed, I pushed! I rolled, I rolled, I rolled!

Thousands, beads of sweat formed and dripped down my neck, the blisters and splinters split open, pus and blood oozed and colored my dirty hands red and yellow.
I pass out.

[When I awoke]
“Keereesuh!” Every student in class stood up in unison and said, “Konichiwa!”

“Chak-sah-kee, mina-san.” Everyone sat down and went back to their chattering.

It’s funny how I remember reading online about police officers who have reported incidents about time slowing down during intense combat. You know, the mid-air gun shell in slow-mo, matrix type of bullshit. Time didn’t actually slow down though; rather, their perception of reality became distorted. Well, our ancestors must have had a knack of time distortion when they saw the single person who changed their lives, because that image of her in my mind is so vivid, so pure, so untouched, so unforgettable! She wore a fuzzy sweater, and it was total killer. As if you had sheared your poodle Fluffy and draped it all over. I ran up to her as soon as I spotted the split among the crowd of people.  In between catching my breath, I complimented her looks with an unwavering voice and asked for her age instinctually. Everything fell into place like hair between the teeth of a comb. She reciprocated with love, as the sun but as delicate as the moon. She was the ocean. She was the vastness that I feared to explore. But I did, I plunged into it and tried to make a sense out of change.

[A year later]

Every now and then I would have a dream of looking in the mirror. I see a new reflection. Me, a distant Me, yet I feel as if I had known that Me very well in another world (in a bigger box, a bigger world). Strangely enough, from the point of separation to now, in those dreams of me looking the mirror, a distinct blue mark would appear on my neck. It’s invisible to the naked dream eye, but I can spot it as clear as the green sky from the blue forest down below. Because I can sense it. I can perceive it through energy in a world where everything is telepathic, and where communication is a perfect waste of time. It’s a mark of isolation, desperation, and obsession. It is my subconscious mind. It is that which makes me truly me because through suffering, depression, anxiety, comes realization and liberation. And that feeling is infinite, boundless, and undefinable. It is in itself, itself. An entity that cannot be defined, energy that cannot be swayed, and love, that cannot be despised.

(On the question of existence)

I believe if I were given the dilemma of losing either my emotion or memory, I would choose to lose my memory without doubt. Because it is not memory that haunts me, that is not why I would choose to forget. It is the inseparability that makes me choose the lesser of the two. I truly feel that my decisions are shaped by my emotions, and that is madness. It is the fact that I am more afraid of being understood than misunderstood that makes me frail. 

The look on his face when he said, you know who he is?

A French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was.

“How can those who live in the light of day possible comprehend the depths of night?”- Nietzsche

I wrote in my concluding paragraph: It is never a mistake to love, but to repress your desire to desire, is self-destruction. And when I put the finishing touch on the sentence, I felt like the silhouette of a man jumping from the dock into the ocean on midnight, vanished away in the darkness.