It couldn't have been more than 5:30 in the morning. For some reason I couldn't sleep, and felt compelled to get out and take a walk. The only people up early in Taipei were baggy underweared old war veterans and sturdy obasans swinging their limbs back and forth, trying to drive age and decades of hard work away.
I didn't bother to brush my teeth, a forgotten luxury in this modern world. I knew traffic would be light and the sky would be clear. The two played off each other like a fraction. A Chinese fraction.
As I made my way through awakening valleys of apartment buildings, I shuffled by the local box man on his three-wheeled contraption, and out to the main thoroughfare. Before long, I found myself on the way to my favorite doh-jang hang out. A seemingly desolate little shop decorated in cheap fold-up tables and red plastic stools, the shop is actually an important frontier crossing between evening and dawn. Those who entered passed through time together. We all shared this common experience, even though we would never see one another again.
I watched as lovers in rumpled clothes sipped their hot doh-jang under the flourescent light. Were they breaking someone else's heart tonight? I saw tired taxi drivers who just dropped off their last fare, The hard work and endless tail lights filled their red eyes. Then I saw people like me who probably couldn't sleep, and felt the need to be around other people.
As we silently sat there, each in our own small and lonely world, two speckled birds in a small rattan cage, flirted about. As one chirped, the other flipped backwards in a full somersault, landing with an acrobat's precision on a worn wooden peg. These wonderful little creatures, no matter how confined their world had become, were as free as any of God's creations.
Watching them flip and chirp, over and over again, my own cage suddenly expanded, and for a brief sparkling moment, I felt a part of something uncomprehendably perfect and good.
I have since gone to the same shop many times over the past six years, hoping that those two little birds will still be there. But my favorite doh-jang shop, as most things from the past, is gone. When I pass by now, late for another appointment, I look out the window, and can feel something delicate and small somersaulting in my heart.
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