Our bodies play in this world but our souls do battle in the other...
I dashed off the bus in what is becoming my characteristic dash and straight towards the new auditorium where the Personnel department singing team was lined up waiting for me. After slipping the team's matching Tibetan style dress on over my clothes we filed out to take our seats. The singing match between all the departments in our school began with a swish of the deep red curtains and the crackling of loudspeakers. The song which we were all singing: the school's alma mater, in Chinese, which I only knew how to pronounce maybe one percent of the words to. When it became our team of nine's turn to take a crack at it I smiled broadly as the curtains swished open and did my best to make appropriate mouth motions. Out of fourteen teams, we came in second. So you can imagine how fierce the competition was.
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It's like being in a darkening forest. There's a path through it, but you can't always tell what's around you, you can see a little where you've been but hardly ever where you're going. Though you have no concrete reasons for believing so you know at once that you're not safe and you couldn't be safer.
Yet through it you go. Alone not alone. You were called to this forest.
In the beginning you mostly hear forest sounds, birds chirping, bugs humming, leaves crunching beneath your feet, fat frogs croaking in unision, the occasional crack of twigs somewhere in the distance.
Then you start to feel it a little bit. The tension in the air of a breath besides your own. Shadows darting in and out of the trees. The faltering step. The sudden glance over your shoulder. But nothing, not one thing which your dry, nearly exhausted eyes can see.
Then you hear it. Them. Wolves. You hear their snarls, husky growling, claws scraping at the dirt around you, teeth bared in anticipation... you start to run but they are on you around you before you after you... you stop for a shaky breath and with hair raised on the back of your neck you try to reason with them for a moment... but they are wolves, they only howl in response. Drool drips from their sharpened teeth and red eyes glow in the dim.
And every fiber of every muscle bursts with the need to run, to leave, to get away but every ounce of your mind confirms that you cannot escape and so you stop and they close in on you...
You raise shaky ice cold hands to cover watery eyes that can bear it no more and you wait, standing still though trembling in the middle of the darkening forest, knowing, feeling, hearing the wolves encircle you as they near... Sensing the impending pain of attack as if it had already taken place, taking shallow breaths, shuddering with fear... eyes squeezed shut...
And your heart nearly stops when you are grabbed on both shoulders by hands you cannot see and hot tears burst from your eyes bathe your trembling fingers. The hands resting on your shoulders are hands that had been pierced by nails when they hung from a tree.
You hear a whisper: just be still.
And you know that you needn't look.
You are safe.
But you are not out of the forest.
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Sometimes taxi drivers are just chatty. This evening the driver with a broad face was content to talk mostly to himself as I struggled to catch a word or two from the Chinese. It never fails to amaze me how much I can understand and really understand nothing. Somehow I managed to answer his questions, though few and far between, correctly and so he continued. At one point, he slowed the taxi to a crawl, took out his fake iphone and started to show me pictures of his hometown and family. Turns out he was a proud Chinese minority from the neighboring province. I flipped through the pictures throwing out my dozen or so solid Chinese words as we neared my school gate. By the time we arrived I knew I had been given a unique opportunity to see into a life. It was as if the Creator himself had said to me: Look at how special I made him. I wished the dear driver a goodnight and the stars twinkled overhead.
