growing larger into a smaller space

from a journal entry a few days ago:

right now the rain is spilling across the sky, cascading waterfalls of sound through the living room window. my grandmother sits hunched at the old dining room table, sculpting watermelon into perfect pink triangles that my sister and i devour in loud and satisfying slurps. the sugary sweet dissolves into a trail of stickiness down our chins. i feel as if i could be nine years old again.

the other day i realized that i’m yet again falling on the underside of the constant undulation of life – that inexorable state of unfeeling, the terrifying limbo of nothingness. i’ve questioned - how has korea been? i’ve answered - family and shopping and acting polite and walking for miles and eating my favorite foods. i’ve noticed - wanting to reach out and touch everything and everyone i pass, but confusedly keeping my eyes to myself. i’ve wondered - at the disconnect between my current life of chauffeurs and valets and security-guarded apartments with that of the old woman who squats by the metro station day after day, surrounded by her ocean of vegetables. i’ve marveled - at how the huge river that constituted the landscape of my childhood could be so much smaller, how the buildings don’t reach up into the clouds anymore, like beanstalks i could climb to the magical singing harp and the giant’s trove of treasures.
but really – how has korea been?
just like coming home. an instantaneous transfer of my routine reality. an unexcited process of being. simply: here i am.

i read a passage in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (my last reference to the novel, i promise) that made me feel fiercely and suddenly that i needed to break out of this pattern:

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

today, while running on the treadmill, i fell back to thinking about some of the beautiful times i’ve lived through with dear friends, and caught myself turning around the idea that i’ve lived so remarkably that it’s nearly impossible to expect an elevation. after such friends, after such delights and conversations and people and places and sights and sounds, how can i ever help but compare everything and have it come up as less?
and yet here i am – sitting cross-legged at my grandma’s old dining room table, listening to the rain splash across the window and on the street and onto the passing cars and people – and mixed with the drone of the korean news coming from the old television set and the occasional rumble of thunder, i wonder if i’ve ever heard anything more beautiful. it’s easy to turn the photos of my life upside down and to pretend that i am falling, like alice in the looking glass, growing larger into a smaller space. it’s easy to let life become tiny – to try and stuff it into your pocket and twist around the bits of fraying yarn that encompass your memories, believing that nothing could ever be so perfect again. and it’s true – nothing can ever be the same again, but isn’t that the beauty of living? isn’t that the beauty of always waking up ecstatic at the first snow, year after year, and never failing to want to dance barefoot in the spring rain, no matter the place and no matter your age? isn’t that the beauty of this moment, as opposed to all the billions of other seconds that have encompassed your life?

so why is it necessary? for me to go up onto the roof of our twenty-four story apartment in the middle of a thunderstorm, just to feel the wetness and take photos of passing cars below, like a bird up on a giant cement tree - or to skip from that level all the way down to five, letting the motion sensor lights flicker like a christmas cascade at the shuffle of my feet?
why is it necessary? for me to still get excited when it rains, to jump up when my grandmother calls out for dinner? because i’m afraid of the moment that i won’t care anymore – that i won’t get dizzy and giddy all at once at the prospect of shooting upside down and backwards down a rickety old roller coaster.

because there is a need or a desire to reach out of oneself in order to see who or what will reach back, grab your hand, and go a ways in any direction. and in the end maybe it doesn't matter so much as to why we want to dance in the rain or scream like kids when running around, but that we do it to begin with, so that we don't forget how to feel or how to see, read, make friends, mend hearts, or (wonderfully and tragically) to love who we are.

(or said my dear friend narwhal, in a beautiful e-mail that came as an answer to many hopes and prayers.)

i don’t know how it is that you can spend every day, an entire life learning to feel less. or how you can travel across the world and barely find the energy to lift the corners of your mouth into a feeble smile. i don’t know how it is to force excitement into yourself, to try and press buttons and make combinations and wish desperately that you could play out your life again, like a moving stereoscope. i don’t know – but i suppose here i am. and i’m trying.