Rambo-Bad boys by Yoshitaka Amano

That year, I woke up with a rubber soul. I wrapped my feelings in aluminum foil and placed them neatly into pink Rubbermaid boxes. I froze them like a 38-year-old single female freezes her eggs, hoping that one day, they will be put to use.

I never understood why everything just became a giant blob of scar tissue. Technically speaking, there are always reasons for the comfortably numb; the usual cause and effect: a painful break up with the love of your life, death of a dear family member, an overdose of opiates. None of these applied. And even if there were reasons, I imagined that I had buried them under the Tree of Denial and forgotten about them.

It scared me that the only thing I could still feel that summer was fear. Fear that I was indifferent to dreams, my own death, a grown man’s tears.

Yesterday, I sat on a bench near that terribly rectangular reflecting pool behind the North York public library. The same bench I sat on nearly every day that year in an effort to avoid the desolate confines of the academic prison. On that seat, I have many memories with Orwell, Salinger, Malraux, Eliot, Rimbaud and some others. It was the same sunlight, the same breeze— and for once, in such a long while; time seemed to slow down just a little bit and the world around seemed to stop changing like a movie on fast forward. There was the beautiful illusion that the outside could still be static, a solid ground on which I could stand on rather than a jet plane that I can barely hold myself on to, carrying me god knows where. This made me realize how much I have changed inside. How I am able to be moved again (and perhaps too intensely) by the simple details of life.