E tenebras, lux dormiens

The ties and bonds

Sometimes, I always kept forgetting to inform the readers, and sometimes I always kept holding this information in. I should not hold it any longer. Starting next Monday, I shall proceed with my parents to the originating island of the English language, Great Britain!

Onward, to London! What jet lag we suffer, we shall put off and up with only for London! The inspiring, towering city of London!

And yet, am I excited? I should hope as much, I have not lost enough sleep in dreary anticipation. All my thought and duty are much too focused too far in the future. Shall I transfer? If so, to where? Shall I stay in California or move out to the misty place of New England? Shall I ever learn to find contentment, where contentment may be found? If so, if it was right here, right now, could I stay content?

Also, another thing: my cousin George, who reached the tender age of 8 in July, is moving away. His parents and he lived in a house quite close to us, but because of the unrelentless pull of new housing, and money making scheme of real estate, his parents decided to buy a new house, and use the old one for renting out to whoever are interested.

I will miss him. What character moving away from me, whom he considers, almost, his brother, may build in him, I must remind him of this one lesson: it still hurts to move away, to separate, to never be able to come to my house ever again because he lives too far away, too separated by distance, traffic, clime, and heart.

So he will have puberty away from me, the least that I know. He lives just one hour away on a good traffic day (which is almost never). What turmoils his hormones may endure, I will not be there to make my observation. How he may grow up, I shall have no pleasure to be his guide. If only he was not an only child . . . If only I was not an only child.

We shall soon see what he makes of it. It is rather that he has experience a true conflict, between the excitement of a new home with his own room (the old house did not have enough space) and the separation from the extended family that he is already familiar with, and the separation from his school friends here. We shall soon see.

Yet it highlights my own choice very clearly in contrast. It makes me more than ever wish that I had taken the choice of going to that UCD school, so that I could have been the first to separate, to live on my own. It was partly because I did not want to part with George, among many things that I now found out composite my decision, that I chose to stay in the Bay Area than to live away from home in a dorm.

If I had known that Georgiana and Jeff, and so many other people would have no compunctions about moving away, about participating in such glamorized mobility as touted as the beauty of capitalism . . .

I suppose that being able to move around is a good thing; being able to move to live in a better neighborhood is a right you must have; being able to live away from your parents is a good thing. But inevitably, such separation from familiar surrounding forces you to develop new ties, and developing new ties has never been my strong trait, for I would prefer to preserve old ties, to preserve, to remember, to reminisce about old friendship and the old days of innocence that I was once contented to live in.

To be broken from this into a sobering reality is what every child must endure.

We shall soon see. We will see, we will see. We will wait here and see what happens. Someday, when I look upon these writings (if they are preserved by Blogger) and I will see how much I changed, and how much I haven't, and wonder how much my perception is biased toward a more positive or a more negative view of myself in position of the world, and the world in position to me.