I get listless at the end of things. I enter into a state of fugue a little earlier than I’d wish for, otherwise. I find myself with an overriding sense of there being little point to starting new projects on account of time or logistics; as far as I can see, I’ll just be packing things up in a day or two.
But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about what’s to come. And that makes me listless with an impending sense of futile excitement – I WANT, but I can’t have, so I must wait, but in waiting there is frustration, so I daydream… it’s a brutal cycle, really.
Listless. Le sigh.
It’s been warm lately. Real warm. My understanding with the weather is that the cold snap over the Spring Festival was the last gasp of winter – the coldest gasp, indeed, but the last one nevertheless. In the past three days, my right hand has shrunk to only about 110% of its normal girth, compared to the estimated 300% increase in size I managed to accrue in stages over the course of a couple months stretching from mid November to now. I’ve shed layers, though I’m still wearing three (again, due to the fact that my apartment is still pretty cold, and that most of the heat is from the sun, which I never see indoors).
It’s also become warm enough that the city has started to smell again. This was a bit of a surprise, since I had (somehow) managed to forget that Xiangfan has a special odor at all. Yesterday’s stroll through the back-alleys (another wonderful gift of the warmth is the ability to hang out outdoors again) confirmed that – yes, Xiangfan smells.
And my apartment smells. I woke up yesterday with a huge blast of nostalgia for last Fall. A strange fact of my stay here was that my adjustment period took place during a change in a season. It seems that once you attain that local mindset, the one you arrived with – and all sights, sounds, and experiences you ingested with said mindset – gets shelved somewhere far away, like a dusty photo-album on a top shelf somewhere. That’s how, I think, it’s possible to feel such strong, life bending nostalgia for something that only really happened about three months ago. Contexts shift and change, life weirds itself out.
But back to my apartment. The smell, upon waking up yesterday, was a pleasant sign of warmth returning. Fruit peels, a leaky toilet, laundry, over-used bed covers, and dirty dishes from early January (my tap water is ice cold – washing dishes has not been a priority) arrayed as a legion of aroma. The streets were alive with the stench of sewage, old food stuck in clogged drainage, and exhaust – both man and machine-made.
It is an odd feeling to be enthusiastic about something you’re not really enthusiastic about.*
*Someday, I would like a psychologist to tell me why my most memorable travel experiences, specifically the ones I enjoy recalling the most, involve things that others would term “TMI” (for those of you less savvy on the lingo – “too much information”).