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?