It is quite the best I have felt for a while, more than a month to be exact. I still need a little nap from a 4-hour sleep the night before but even that was not a deep NREM sleep in the middle of the day as happened so often since I got back from step2. The day certainly grows a bit longer today, and the light is a bit brighter. Suddenly from thin air, I felt hopeful again, as if something critical actually changed. Nothing really has changed, except a certain amount of transmitted chemicals in my brain that was quite in disarray for so long.
I am proud of myself that I survive. That even with all I know about depression, decide that I always have a chance with life.
I grasped the old poem notebook that I hid somewhere in my luggage, still humbly quiet as I started it about... fifteen years ago. Of all the things that I decided to leave behind in the abyss of memories, I took that notebook along with me to the US, just to keep it away all these years. Between the pages, still are there a couple of drafts hanging from ...2015, which I could not force myself to finish. Well, today is THAT good day!
As I started writing down in my shaky hand, these flowers are quietly blooming in my mind. The flowers of the old forgotten seeds buried down in the tangle of my sorrow, now bit by bit sprouting and spreading their wings. For the first in a long time, I caught myself hearing the voice of the Vietnamese language again, as my old childish ideas rose along inside. The musical voice with tone and rhythm, sentimentally up and down, the emotional result of the small people being oppressed for most of their history, the hopeless dreams, young helpless love...
For a brief moment in space and time, I feel myself truly at peace, the peace of conversing to oneself, of giving yourself true attention. I hear the quiet, for a long time. Writing is my meditation.
I grabbed my phone, scrolling through notes from some time ago. There were medication and formula for the time of working, there were ideas that if I had a chance to do, I may die in peace...and there were poems, unfinished poems of the miserable days in Vietnam. They are sad, they are devastating, they are sitting there, in a grimy dark corner of my memory, things that beautiful but hard to revisit. It is unsettling to flip old stones when you have not yet been sure where you are...
Nevertheless, I read it. Sentimental rhythm from years ago, longer than I could remember it. It has that music, the Vietnamese sound. You can't translate it, it'll lose all that music when you change the words, let alone change them to another language. The idea is not just in the words, it is in the music of the poem. You can't say about regret with the sounds of political speech. You can't say you love someone with the tone of describing a shiny new sports car. Though I have not yet regretted my own miserable life back there. I certainly have missed my old self of sad poems and desperate romance. Depression cut my life into short pieces when I can do different things as different foci of personality. My dad used to say "don't worry! Your soul will not be lost, you just need to forget it when you have to." And I surely did. Today, it got back and I still have not eased the amusement:
