Muse

If it was love, I had no idea. If it was romance, it was more than just a grown man with long shaggy hair, a nomad from the highlands, a bastard son of the Tibetan plateau and Mongolian steppes, corrupting a young girl who'd returned to her motherland after leaving at a young age, assimilating to western culture, acquiring a foreign accent.

Every time I say, "I think of the highland praries, as my home" what I'm really saying is "I still think of myself as 'yours.'" Maybe it was the thin air at those high altitudes but what I gave up in those five days traveling north and west will never come back to me. I will never have it again to give up to someone else. Though there were others before you and after you, and probably long after you, no one can possess me that way again, because there was finality--even for a 17 year old.

You told me about Kokonor lake and the pilgrimage your father took you on to the Mahadeva on the island in it, and how the rivers we were passing were sisters in search of their princes much farther south, when they'd go their separate ways into Laos, Vietnam and India. Who cared you were years and years older than me. You saw yourself as as a poet amongst warriors, and you saw me as a warrior amongst sheep.

When I occassionally dream of you, and it doesn't happen often, I can't be sure you were ever real. These memories are torn at the edges and lose focus the more I concentrate. I haven't had any contact with you since almost six years ago.

What I do have imprinted in my head is the night you told my mom you were going to take me around Hongyuan so I could experience the local life a little bit better. So we went, me in the back of a cart, and you pedaling past the 800 year old buildings that were protected from the cultural revolution by distance and remoteness. When I looked up like you told me to, I saw all the legends you'd been telling me. Up here, ten thousand feet above sea level, the stars told the myth of how the milky way was formed because the smoke from a pipe was so strong, it floated up to the heavens and tied the celestial bodies together. These were your fathers and your grandfathers and one day you hoped to ascend there as well.

But that was only half of you. When your grandmother was pregnant with your mother, she took their last yak to the tulku to bless the birth. The tulku accepted this gift and gave your grandmother a dzi bead that was passed down to you and hung around your neck. You rarely it showed it, and it's normally tucked beneath your shirt but that night, you let me touch it. There are five eyes, you said, pointing to the markings, it is a dzi mig nga.

And later, on the back of that cart, against thousands of years of your history, my history, interwined and crossing each other in one moment and who cares that I was young and you were weathered. We weren't talking about love, weren't talking about how we knew we'd never see each other again. We never gave each other information and if we did, what could we do? You barely read Chinese and I barely wrote it.

Afterwards, you took to calling me Sarangerel because I shone even with all the stars in the sky and I laughed at you because it was too corny but so much less so because of who you were, because of where we were. I'd listen to your songs and poems, about your Sarangerel and you say, can't you hear, Mongolian is much better sung, it is still not a good language to be written. And the ballads would pour out, loudly, proudly from your vocal chords long perfected by the mountains of Kham.

You loved listening to me speak english. These weird sounds coming out of my mouth, and you'd try to match it. It was worth it you said, just to hear me speak English. You never took tourists around but we were a special case, a favor you owed to someone who owed someone who owed my aunt. So I'd recite poetry in English and you'd pray for me in Tibetan, serenade me in Mongolian and you didn't want me learning a PRC stained version of your languages so you'd have me say "tashi dele" the right way.

It's not that I didn't meet anyone else in China that year. Not that they didn't make that trip memorable in some way. Not that I don't still think of them sometimes, like the UBC engineer who was a Canucks fan and allowed me a couple of mornings of waking up next to someone who let me ramble on about hockey in a country that neither knew or cared for my favorite sport or the German globetrotter who was biking from Shanghai to (hopefully) Tel Aviv.

Nor is it that I think you never had another Sarangerel or even Tsetsegmaa or Khulan but here I am, six years older, writing about you. And I wonder, but not often, whether the six years wiser version of you ever sing about me?

A piece of paper I kept in my wallet for 4 years and lost 9 months ago

Maybe you reminded him of a girl he once knew, back in the '90s, when he was still at Swarthmore. Sophomore year, maybe junior year. A social anthropology major with cinnamon hair and mocha eyes who he used to see all the time in the library pouring over dissertations by Phillippe Bourgois. She'd often hunch over her books on the third floor, near the corner, at the lectern on which someone had proudly announced with a sharp object: "I had sex on this desk!" He'd had a brief encounter with her once, when she dropped her retractable orange highlighter. He'd picked it up for her and for a nanosecond, as she took it from him, there were no molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and argon between his fingers and hers. And the way you sat there in the cafe at St. Mark's, your body bent forward over the table between you and your friend reminded him of her silhouette and he couldn't help but feel that same urge to rub shoulders with you. Just to share one succinct note of arbitrary courtesy.

Or maybe you reminded him of a girl he roomed with for six months who he found on Craigslist a few years ago. She used to breeze in and out of the apartment like a western zephyr, carrying an air of simple delicacy. Some nights though, she would come home and not even be able to make it to her bedroom, which was farther back than his. Instead she would collapse onto the second-hand sofa that was in the apartment before either of them moved in, and curl up into a fetal position before passing out while still wearing the same bohemian top and long patchworked skirt she'd thrown on in the morning. When he walked past the couch, he could smell on her a mix of the rosewater soap she used and the scent of fruity cocktails and he'd wonder whether as a roommate he was obligated or as an acquaintance he was expected to comfort her, give her a shoulder to cry on or at least carry her to her bed. So it was the same, when he walked past your table on his way to the bar for the last round for him and his buddy that the bouquet of floral essences fused with the three bellinis you've had in one hour wafted towards him and gave him another chance at rising to the occasion.

But most likely, you reminded him of the receptionist at William Morris who had the most amazing mop of fiery red hair that cascaded about and singed the edges of her face. He'd always suspected she'd come to the city because she wanted to be a writer to document the stark contrast between dreams exploding and defering here at the center of the universe. He'd figured she wanted to be a poet by her lyrical messages she sent to remind him of his appointments with his agent. That particular day, before his chance encounter with you, he'd stopped by the office and spoke with her for a few moments before her coworker or maybe boss or maybe secret lover behind closed doors spouted out a few curt words before disappearing out onto 6th Ave. Her face fell and he crumpled, he really did because he felt there was nothing he could have done for her. But a few hours later, a few miles south, a few beers downed, here you are. The same flash in your eyes, the same biting of the lip and droplets of salty disappointment, waiting to be saved.

When you realized what he'd written, he was already gone. You never even saw what he looked like. All that was in your memory was a young man in a brown coat, dropping a folded piece of paper on your table and walking out the front door. Your friend looked on as you took a break from your weeping to unfold that flyer for beads and strings and fanciful things. On the back, written in black pen, with the word "so" underlined three times, was the following: "cheer up. you are so beautiful."