i found a note left by a former lover while sorting through boxes the other day. i was clearing out stuff, really, sorting through what ought to follow me around for years to come and what ought to take the direction of the closest recycling center. i'm a keeper, you should know. i keep ticket stubs and subway maps and notes scribbled on napkins by friends over coffee. too much. i keep too much. so, in my 'voluntary simplicity' frame of mind, i sorted through my boxes in the closet and found the note. my lover was a poet, before she moved to canada. she wrote beautiful pieces that i could not understand at the time. she'd patiently teach them to me, word by word. she'd take beautiful watercolors and write down words for me, with their meaning spelt out on the back. anyways, i found a note written in her well-trained calligraphy:

海内存知己 hai nei cun zhi ji. meaning 'within the 4 seas exists an understanding' though, the dictionary tell us, we really want to use the term cosmopolite or cosmopolitan in english or french.

there is something incredibly poetic about mandarin chinese. about how all those little boxes and lines (because even after studying it for 3 years, they remain boxes and lines to me) translate abstract concepts into concrete objects. 4 seas. understanding.

i've been thinking a lot lately about the permanence of things. the permanence of relationships, to be more precise. about the people you meet and the people you've met and the impact they've had on you. on the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you think and the way you get up in the morning and clumsly find your way to the bathroom. the people you hug as if it was going to be the last time everytime. and the people you hug as if you were going to see them a week later though the whens and hows of your next meeting are still unsure. the people whose impact on you, you only come to measure long after their image has vanished from your memory and their pictures are stored away in boxes deep in your closet.

i remember meeting people whose culture and life experience varied greatly from mine, but from the first time we talked to each other we found a space for that understanding to happen. for those 4 seas to flow into each other.

i've been fortunate enough these past few years to meet so many of these people. these members of my self-created family. older sisters and younger sisters whose presence make me so much richer in so many ways. and writing with one of them lately(that's what we have to resort to when having coffee together requires boarding a plane) , essentially about that. about how we create these families and care about them. and about how our real families sometimes do not provide us with the understanding that our friends from the 4 seas share with us when we're lucky enough to be standing together in the same time zone.