Stars

Felt a sudden rush of heightened sensations, head span a little, slightly lost control of my mind, a surge of nervousness. It's not panic attack, it's not hot flash, it's non-medical because no expression of physical alteration such as short of breath or heating up. At least not obvious enough. A sudden rise of certain hormone or chemical in the body? That I don't know. I don't think it's self-inflicted, it felt like somehow I'm hit by an invisible and unexplainable wave, one of the waves that exist in the parallel universe we are not aware of but weaved in. I am not unfamiliar with it, it's the consequence of cause, the cause of consequence, or the agony of a lost connection, perhaps.

After the incident, amidst the self-calming and self-soothing, it's fear I experience the first. Who said I have no fear any more, true, I choose not to live with it, but fear is something that follows me around for whatever I do, wherever I go. I'm just very capable of brushing it aside, dodging the bullets and moving on non affected. Fear comes from the potential persecution to my family members because of my actions, and it is unforeseeable and unpredictable, as long as they are in there. I can't call to check right away, neither can I express this in any coherent way. Most the time all I can do is to check if there're missed calls from them, if there're new messages left for me in WeChat, check if they updated their feeds for the past 24 hours. Sometimes the thread that holds people to their life, sanity or loved ones is so thin and fragile, you never know when it'll break. But I can't continue to live in constant fear, I'd been there, had enough of it. I'm out now, it's unbearable sometimes, but I refuse to go back, I have to push through. Those people, they must be feeling infuriated, they punched and strangled me so hard but I survived and escaped, looking them back with my sword and a cold stare. And I am just one of the tens of thousands, one of the millions, more and more are obtaining the ability to stare back.

It could also be that there're connections that are lost and waiting for me to fulfill, connection to something, somewhere or some people. When you close your eyes, life is just a dream, but you don't know what is the dream, the life in front of you or the life you once lived but have no memory of. Now you know why for some people, the line between sanity and insanity is so thin and blurry, because sometimes you really don't know what is real and what is not. Could it be that none of this has never been real? Trust me I know, I know the dangling sense of unfinished stories, the unsolved puzzles of what ifs, and I am constantly feeling sorry and sorrowful. I wish for whatever happens, light will always shine on them and the places, even I am not deemed to be part of it. 

Bravery is not that you don't feel fear, bravery is even when you are scared you still choose to do the right thing. I don't think I care about any of that, definitions, categorizations and such. Fear comes and goes, fear is sometimes up sometimes down, just like all the other emotions. The most essential thing for me is to do the right thing, regardless how I feel deep inside. It's such a dilemma, if one day soon enough CCP is thrown out, who would take care of my family members, since all of them are in the system? But they don't know, it's precisely their system that's robbing away their children's future and sanity, robbing away their dignity and humanity. That's why I can't allow myself get stuck in dilemmas, they are not healthy for my mental soundness. I have to stick to what is right and what is wrong. But the truth is, somethings are obviously light versus dark, while most things are not, most decisions are not, most people are not, and your affections to them are not.   

Raj told his papa, "Thanks to Momo, she never felt any pressure when I'm going through all these uncertainties and feeling stressed. That helps a lot." I do get stressed too, only that it's a completely different story. It's lucky that two adults in the same household don't stress on the same issue, in our case, money. I keep telling Raj, my heart could never be in a place for monetary pursuit, it had never been, and will never be, I don't even know how. And now, when day in and day out, all I see is young promising women in their early to mid 20s, thrown into secret prisons, disappeared silently, because they went to the vigil in the street and held up a white paper, I lost taste for my own life. Someone commented in my yt post, felt quite some resonation: "When I was younger, I wept for love, I didn't foresee this day that I started crying for my country and my people's pursuit of democracy and freedom". I replied to her: "Each tear drop is worth it".

I do still cry for both though, I thought I was done with the former, but then at the weirdest moment, I still find myself in tears. It's the hormones for sure. Good thing is I blur my mind so to get lost on the way and don't go there anymore. Another good thing is that shedding tears for my country's fight for democracy and freedom does occupy a lot of my time and energy.   

At the end of the day, no matter what, I do wish all the people I've seen and thought about, all the people in my world, are well protected and able to find peace in their mind. I guess this is my new year's wish then. If two stars in the sky are truly connected, then when one blinks, the other does it too, no matter how far away they are to each other.