POSTCARD#397: Phuket (say: pooket): The first time for us (Jiab and me), in many months, to be ‘away’. Short attention span due to being in one place in time then in another place another time. In this other place we’re in, lies the memory of what happened in that place, up-to-date but all-too-soon it is replaced by the experience of the next place in time, thus pushing things along and along… time connected with place.

The car came for us early that morning headlights ablaze, at the house in Nontaburi, and daylight was only just coming up when we arrived downtown at the condo, forty-five minutes later. This is the thing about having two places of residence, arrivals and departures don’t mean the same as they did because there’s no point of origin. The travelling between two separate halves gets to be structured into chunks of attention that last for the duration of their passing and are replaced by the next chunk of attention.

M was still sleeping when we got there – teenagers sleep and grow long limbs like tree branches. So eventually we got her to wake up, she started a small breakfast there and finished it in a plastic bag when we were in the car headed for the airport.

Smooth, sweeping highway between tall buildings. Awareness of ‘the whole thing’ is not yet engaged and there’s only just enough time to decide what this is before it changes into something else. Everything is as it is for a moment of consciousness, and another – then it changes again. Thought is a downloadable app – install/uninstall, thinking is the whole story; random episodes, snippets, individual words. In the interval that the mind is engaged in ‘thinking it’, everything moves on and I can never seem to catch up – can never find the right words to express it… wordless and indefinable.

Fragments of a thought arise again, pieced together from associated thoughts, memories of a past time brought into present time, together with things thought about in future time. Pause for a moment and everything stops… just the circumstance itself. It takes some effort to get it started again. Maybe there is only one moment – only one, all the time.

Language is like an overlay placed on reality, gives everything an identity, tells the story, creates a fiction I get lost in. Nothing is what I think it is. The present moment feels like it’s an immediate event occurring ‘now’, but there’s also a feeling maybe, that it’s not that at all.

Time is a measurement I apply – applied time. Maybe this is something that’s not happened yet… it happens later, gets reflected upon and what I think is ‘now’ is actually a fraction of a moment of hindsight situated in future time? How can I be sure things are what I think they are when I’m only always just feeling my way through something not experienced yet? Looking at what it’s not and everything on the other side of that, must be what it is.

The huge airport looms up and engulfs us three small people, getting smaller and smaller, with rolling-along-luggage at our feet and swept into the mass of human beings coming from somewhere and going to another somewhere.

“All life is a single event: one moment flowing into the next, naturally. Nothing causing everything. Everything causing everything.” [Wu Hsin]

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