Twilight Time Machine (I.). Not all trips back in time land me in… | by Zulu | Jul, 2025
Not all trips back in time land me in that golden place, where the omnipresent sun shines from all corners of the room, where each leaf seems to shine all on its own. Sometimes the twilight is isolated, in the fluorescent overhead tube bulbs of the snack aisle. There are those moments that make me jump up and boot up the moment I hear the call to go on the search, abroad and beyond. Then there are those insinuations from ordinary moments, like eating sunflower seeds in front of the tele, that say adventure awaits only a decision to take the dive into the cave, no matter how plain the cave appears from the outside.
The days of second floor, heavy down-pour cafe views over those grey Beijing alleyways, home to the sloshing wheels of electric scooters and treading march of a spirit that heeds to no weather, a romance that captivated my suburbia imagination, returning to the lost artifact I can only recall by its essence. I too was searching. And in the hell-of-a-climb hilltop apartment of Hongdae, Seoul, where I watched endlessly, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, each night returning from the gut-wrenching attempt to find the soul, that ex-pat English gig, I found some kind of solace in an empty nest, a nest nonetheless, of my own, away from every single person I knew. The second string of Christmas lights, after the first blown out by my ignorance of international voltage circumstances, taped to a bare wall, a magazine of arbitrary fashion items, scissored-out and pasted on the wall opposite light string constellations, like my first and only dorm room, and nothing else but the scent of cigarette smoke, instant coffee, cup noodles, and convenient store chocolate cakes.
I couldn’t bear this obvious life cop-out and booked my flight back to the States with my mind set on Los Angeles to be the first Asian James Bond or something, all this before I even told the school. I didn’t even show up for another day of work once I made that midnight decision to follow the dim light after the first bend in the cave.
Once I got back State-side, I drove to Chicago to kisses goodbye for who I thought at the time was the love of my life, who deserves nothing but miracles. And of course, time and time again the mind falls short of the reality of the heart.
Before packing up the necessities and starting off on that forty hour drive cross-country, I often fell into the nostalgia of brisk mornings, brisk mornings that caressed my temperament, that sat me down on Sunday mornings to remind me of a gentle existence, dew-covered grasslands of Pittsburgh, ah, the lawns next to lawns that defines Suburbia, America, rolling down some hill next to nothing on our mountain bikes, mud flung up, some hitting me square in the face, just me and my American cousin, my first American friend.
The perfect concoction of humidity, just slightly into long-sleeve territory, a grey luminous shade of sun looming behind fog, and the same looming of indistinguishable distanced automobiles, dream-like, instilled in mystery, pulling me into limbo before death. It’s these brisk mornings that have me on my knees on a mat, in front of one of the infinite faces of God, singing silent prayers for all beings, humbling my precious egor just enough to glimpse the soul, learning that humility is the weapon against the dark tyrannical side of the human condition.
This is the curriculum from heaven, a most valuable education, of which its participation is not to be thwarted by the formal education machine of laminate-hardwood desks and supplementary packets.
It is the essence of these brisk mornings that accompanied me in grand libraries of U of Pitt, books I have yet to be able to read, and so picture books of spiders and different leaves and houses of Frank Lloyd Wright under impossible to reach gothic arches, tucked in from hotdog stands and busy public tennis courts. Brisk mornings of soccer games, then going home, sweat drying from the highway winds, showering to feel true warmth. Brisk mornings, when lakes make so much sense. I look into the dark rolling sky above Santa Monica beach feeling meant to be, lured inward, making objects photographic, a flower pot placed meticulously by grace, flawed like savage fields of timber for export.
~Zulu
