AoNikki

This morning, when the sun was about to rise, a song with Spanish verses came up from somewhere in Mass Ave and caught my attention. At first, I thought the usual buskers were starting early today. But, as the tips of my fingers touched the window's glass panel and the breeze outside momentarily chilled my radiator-warmed skin, I realized this weather was too severe for anyone to be on the street and sing for hours - even with the love for music and the passion of spreading it.

I also realized a couple of other things. Piles of wet, golden leaves somehow had disappeared altogether, and at my eye level were gray, leafless, vulnerable-looking branches. As usual, a column of smoke drifted from across the street, layered between the dull early morning sky and the concrete wall of MIT museum. The scene looked terribly industrial, but I liked it ( as I liked many other seemingly terrible things). Why, hello there, winter!

It was the 20th of November.

I should have been sleeping as I hadn't for 48 hours. But, instead, I went Christmas Card shopping. The day wasn't bright enough to sleep.

"Say, Jin-kun, what do you think is the most beautiful thing in life?" I once asked.

"I'm too philosophical to think about that," he answered.

I could spend hours in a card shop, smiling and reading through all of them. But after coming home and being all exhausted and just in the mood of being cynical, I detested how such well-versed and heart-touching words could be mass-printed on luxurious pieces of paper, identical to each other to the precision of two decimal places inches.

"Tell me something else about you," asked my Princeton interviewer.

"I love Hallmark."

What's funny about it was that I often used the adjective phrase "Hallmark-liked" to sarcastically indicate superficiality, facade, and phoniness. Yeah, I guess I had a love-hate relationship with Hallmark.

Just like with everything else.

"If you take a gap year, you can come to California and write about cowboys and cowgirls," said professor Ken Pottle, from Stanford's Department of English.

Why not? I could write about cowboys and cowgirls. I could also write about Spanish songs from a van stopping by in front of Random Hall in an early Thursday morning and what comfort it gave me after a white night. I could also write about Hallmark. I could write about science. Or I could write about why I was not a writing major - the moment an autumn leaf softly landed by my feet I could almost hear the click of the touch and the joy of the ending. That, among many other wonders, is significant.

Un olor a tabaco y chanel
Una mezcla de miel y cafe

I could write in Spanish, French, Vietnamese, or Japanese. I could describe in Spanish what Tokyo looked like from thousands kilometers up high. I could also write in music.

I would fantasize about being a flamenco dancer, laughing and swinging into the arms of a torero. I'd grab onto the back of his neck, rub my nose against his, smell the scent of tobacco from his breath, tangle his hair, until we were close enough for a kiss - then the fantasy collapsed and I'd hastily open my eyes, hoping for a confirmation. That was it. I could not write any more than that. Instead, I ended up writing about tenderness and solitude, and called it love as though I knew what it was. I knew what it was not, and I wrote about that. I stood and waited as if just one more step and it would leap, I would capture it in my hands.

"Although you're culturally rich, you're culture-less," remarked one of my friend. I did not see the boundary. I refused its necessity. My mind was simple and I thought that this particular boundary was bad.

Simplicity is such a beautiful thing.

The plain, gray wall of MIT museum outside my window was simple. The sky was simple. Everything in this room but me was simple - and I wanted to be, too. I'd love one of those T-shirts that said "Kick me" on the back - except that I'd let it say "Simplify me." That might just result in some people asking me if I was, say, an trigonometric equation - but who said that that kind of simplification was not desirable?

And as I gazed at the MIT's dome, with my head leaning against the window and my cheek numb with the coldness, I knew why I was not a writing major. I rarely wrote anything that made sense.