Blank Walls and Birthdays

My room has devolved back into this white empty nothing. The maps and posters and pictures stripped from the wall, it looks ugly and vacant and un-lived in. My bookshelves are barren, with only a few boring stragglers left behind, the rest packed. As I get ready to leave, the feeling of this place having been a part of me for a year is disappearing with quiet force, like poison sucked from a wound.



I snapped this photo during the beginning of sunset yesterday.

It was Nicki's birthday last night, and it was a good one. It's interesting: we were all together for my birthday when this whole thing began, and now a year later we've gathered for Nicki's birthday to usher things out. It's impossible to measure just how much things have changed since that dinner in September. But the feeling during the meal was distinct: a meal between colleagues, peers, and friends.





So: my walls are naked, my shit is packed up, I'm about to go and enjoy my final durian with Steve, and my exams are well underway. I've got a brief stop in Hong Kong come Monday, and then it's back to Zhanjiang for some final goodbyes and, come next Saturday, I'm comin' home.