Watch Me

“The asphalt road rolls up and down like it’s pasted on top of ocean waves. Walking down this little highway in the mountains, I feel like a boat. This year, I turned eighteen. The few brownish whiskers that have sprouted on my chin flutter in the breeze.”

- Yu Hua, “On the Road When I Turned Eighteen” [Translated from Chinese]

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Dear Alex,

You’ve excised for us last night an authentic word out of deep wound, rouse us from our sedated complicity, vax’ed or not, and hemmed our broken hearts in dramas from Oscar nominations to your own family room.

"Do you know how many plainly wrong and purely evil people I speak to in a day?" you’ve asked, tongue in cheek. I love playing with text so indulge me please with an honest cut into your words, "purely" "evil".

I stumbled last week into a road trip as an 18-year-young traveler from the pages of famed Chinese novelist, Yu Hua, to becoming bed bound in the Oscar-winning film, "Amour" by the Austrian director, Michael Haneke. Both giants, Yu Hua and Haneke, had an authentic word or two about our love affair with illusions, exposing what pure evil cannot do to us.

Pure evil cannot swallow up our anger or imagination. It makes me puke first and finally at my craving for poison, anything I can take to medicate fear and denial. Is this what pulls us into movies and manuscripts of our stories re-told and projected for the Oscars and pillow talk?

Now I can see him loosening his collar after a day’s full work, her flopping on the couch, a few burps from supper. Then screen flashed and your mind charred by the viewing of your real self in high-definition color.

Yours, 

Kate

PS. I’ve watched “The Power of the Dog” before Christmas, still haunted.