My plane was shot down over Afghanistan.
I fell from the sky like pieces of anti radar ribbons. Flaky, in shreds, glittering in the thin night air lit by the heavy explosion that came just before.
I was a month from turning 28. I came to realise that I was old enough to die. I had done enough things in my life to not really worry about dying if I really had to. In fact I decided that I had seen and known enough about the world to know that I was dying. That was true because I saw my life flash in front of me as I was dying. None of it was in sequence or in proportion. Yesterday felt like it never existed, and three years felt like one second. But very quick moments that I don’t usually think of much came flooding into my vision. The smell of my mother’s milk lingered in my mouth. I felt the damp soaking feeling of water on my skin after my first dance in gumboots in the rain. The electrifying feeling of a man’s lips running down my shoulders and down the inside of my legs. Breathlessness. Swimming on a hot afternoon in a bottomless pond and feeling weightless that time I almost drowned when I was eight. Sinking into darkness and looking up at whirls of bubbles and patched of white light drawing to a close. Its just that then I wasn’t really old enough to know that I might be dying then.
I fell onto a bed of warm soft sand that felt like white silk sheets on a Sunday morning. The horizon was pale blue in the desert and it was morning. When I looked up there was a giant palm tree that stood very tall in front of me. A young man sat next to the trunk looking at me with his deep set of eyes. A skinny cat cradled next to his knee, also starring.
The man whistled. The cat sprung up from the sand and came over to me holding an instrument in his mouth. It was a beautifully carved wooden object resembling a guitar. It was encased with sparkling bright rubies around its rim and decorated with painted patterns of flowers and fruits. The string was made of something that reminds me of horse hair. Very fine, but very strong. When the air blew on it it made tiny pretty hisses into my ears.
I looked at the man as I picked it up, making sure that I wasn’t doing the wrong thing. He gestured with his hands like he is brushing it away, so I played. I played the only song I could play well. It was a really sad song. In fact it was the only song I remembered the whole entire words to. I cried because I remembered my family from far away. I felt like more of my life was flashing before me. This time I remembered more things, and things I did make a point of remembering. Like what the faces of people I loved looked like. The favourite things I remember them saying to me. And how free I felt when my plane last left the run way.
As I played and played I felt that the wind in the desert was blowing a lot stronger than it was. There appeared some small shadows from the dusts in the horizon. Several men and women and children came walking towards us. They all held an instrument too. They sang to my song and I sang back. There was more rhythm now. More drum beat. More melodious. More voices. More people came walking in from the rims of the horizon and joined me in my sad song. It felt like a magic orchestra because they didn’t know my song or my language but they could still play and sing along with me. The cat made a fire and we sat around it. The cat was very happy to be next to the fire and seemed to be very pleased with company.
I played with the magic orchestra all night. I didn’t feel tired. I didn’t mind these people singing my sad song with me. It felt really nice.
At the end of the night the man whistled at the cat again. The cat came over and gave me a beautiful ruby ring. The ruby was so dark and clear like a droplet of fresh blood in the sun. The cat blew out the fire and they all disappeared into the night.
After they sewed me up they told my parents that I was much better off than a lot of the others. Some were charred and bruised, some had ugly bullet wounds all over them and some without their limbs. They gave them a ruby diamond ring in a small white envelope with my name on it. They told them that I held it so tight in my hand that it was really hard getting me to let go of it.
This is a typical Taiwanese traditional morning market that runs every single morning of the year except for Lunar New Years day. My family's been coming to these markets for more than 30 years. I've lived away for more than 20 years, but so many of the sellers still know my name and who's grandchild I am.
