Let's take a sensible approach to this. My brother is in Shanghai and I am beginning to suspect that I am getting a tiny bit worried.
It does not feel like a sensible thing to to be doing, this worrying. It makes me feel floral and settled with a long stretch of history, this looming worry.
I sometimes feel that I remember Shanghai but the memories are not my own, they are merely family narrative winding through my bones humming words I have never heard to the slide show of photographs and the incredible miracle of silent film footage.
The Shanghai I do not remember has vanished, vanquished in the war and built over and over. I don't know what the air smells like or how sunset feels. There is no way of feeling the length of my stride, I am lost in that city even in the false remembering. It doesn't take a typhoon to vanish a brother from reality.
It does not feel like a sensible thing to to be doing, this worrying. It makes me feel floral and settled with a long stretch of history, this looming worry.
I sometimes feel that I remember Shanghai but the memories are not my own, they are merely family narrative winding through my bones humming words I have never heard to the slide show of photographs and the incredible miracle of silent film footage.
The Shanghai I do not remember has vanished, vanquished in the war and built over and over. I don't know what the air smells like or how sunset feels. There is no way of feeling the length of my stride, I am lost in that city even in the false remembering. It doesn't take a typhoon to vanish a brother from reality.
Comments