The Story of My Life

One-hundred days have now come and gone in Hong Kong. A culmination of fleeting whispers of wisdom, the melodies of children’s laughter, forlorn moments of homesickness, a sharpened wherewithal—the city has graciously rumbled and purred and I have been fortunate enough to listen, digesting the surrounding ambiance while also reminiscing upon the days of my youth spent in Hong Kong so many years ago.

These previous trips were more whimsical and without orientation (reflecting the demeanor of my boyhood), gentle and effortless like a gradual waning moon, starkly dissimilar to my current grapple between waking and working hours. Previous experiences in Hong Kong—all those before my 22nd year— are blurry. They occupy a slot in my mind that feels disembodied, as if I can watch monochrome reruns of my travels and transactions in third-person. Part of this stems from the fallibility of memory, though part of this reveals my own evolution as an individual. The same occurrence will inevitably happen again.

Even now at 22, as I balance along the precipice between youth and what lies beyond that, the memories built in my “youth” have become just that: memories. It is difficult to grasp even high school or primary school, despite having existed in those chapters for what, at the time, was eternity. What did I think about when I was 12? When I was 18? If these comparatively recent years are shrouded in ambivalence, what will become of my today’s and yesterday’s in Hong Kong? Will the moment arrive where each step is but a mere circumnavigation to a forgotten memory?

“Those were the days,” I will undoubtedly utter once my recent one-hundred days have dissolved from a reality into a memory, this present moment fading into the forgotten while a new set of themes and backdrops colonize my intuition. There will be a time in my life when these formative first one-hundred days in Hong Kong will be recounted in the same breath as my fifth hundred or tenth hundred days, blending into a multilayered portrait painted with geography rather than chronology.

The things and places I now see as novelty, excitement, and adventure, these too will amalgamate into an amorphous, geographical experience as the present slips further and further into my past and I scaffold and renovate my character through the people I meet, the decisions I forego, and the opportunities I seize.

I try to clench and realize each day in such a manner that to inhale the very life from them it seems I need only to raise my hands to my lips to inundate myself with mettle — I cannot claim to have approached any day like this when I was 12 or 18. The evolution of my still-youthful perception gives my current stint here very little overlap with previous visits; the places I frequented then and now are roughly the same, though the man who visits now is renewed by what feels like many lifetimes over.

I find respite in this. Knowing that, regardless of the destination, I will arrive different and refined. A quiet solace within, not one resting extrinsically or within the metaphysical. Novelty of place and sight matters less and less if I, the individual, am changed first and foremost. An old locale and a familiar sight can be perceived anew if the individual allows it to be.

Though I do think about the things that may retreat into a dormant recess of my mind and the things that will instead remain in the forefront of my consciousness, it does not bother me what falls into which category. Rather, I am imbued with excitement and purpose. Excitement to see the same places with new eyes and to meet the future iterations of my own self— a self that has forgotten many today’s but remembers my current tomorrow’s— and purpose to live each day to its utmost, and mitigate the slow atrophy of my present into my past.

Or, if you want to see it put another way: 

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”

T.S. Eliot

The thoughts I chance upon amidst my reveries are purged onto paper and regurgitated onto my keyboard, and I try to reinforce my own written word with my actions everyday, and vice versa. I gather these reflections and experiences with the hope of articulating something worthwhile from my day to day life. I unload these chapters in earnest, scouring my thoughts for a gem of insight like a child ripping apart their final Christmas gift hoping for something shiny after previously opening boxes of grey socks and underwear.

My writing evokes the discovery of my self (not myself, but my self). Each piece I write is a snapshot of my individuality and consciousness at a specific date in my life— a specific chapter of the same story which we all are destined to live out, one where each of us plays as our own main character. Each year is a chapter, each day a paragraph, and each waking moment a reflection of an overarching theme that guides our life. We all have stories to tell— we act out tragedies and dramas and conflicts embellished with rising actions, character development, and plot complications.

I am here to tell my own story, to delineate it in a manner that is at least slightly less suspect than my memory. As you have, I have been acting out my own timeline since my very first breath on Earth. My only regret is that I did not begin writing the story of my life earlier.