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Every time I look at my watch it is 12:00, yet I am wading through twilight.  Vancouver is dusk.  Asia dawn.  With one foot in each, my middle betwixt stranded.  I am within a state of liminality–a threshold of binary existence.  My body is in Vancouver; my mind is not so easily confined.  I feel myself disintegrating.  I am wasting away physically, mentally, and spiritually.  I’ve become little more than a ghost.  A phantasm huddled in the nooks of limbo.  I’ve been intentionally rubbing my skin with an eraser—slowly wiping out my existence.  I’ve created a mess of smudges.

Metaphor itself is liminal.

In this hypnagogic dream, I’ve become a sketchily drawn character—with little of its prior definition.  I’ve curled inward, an involuting flower ending its day.  I’ve become obdurately absorbed in my studies, my work, and my travel preparation.  I feel as if I were betwixt and between awake and sleep, that state of suddenly falling down, until jerking awake in surprise with heart pounding.  My neglect has wafted away my old friends while my guilt has kept me from the new ones–if I’ll be abandoning them; it’s unfair baiting people into depth instead of leaving them in safe shallowness.  I’ve been cutting my connexions as one prunes roses to make way for the new buds.

I’ve already snipped my Internet leaving me a connexion-searching nomad.  I’ll need a converter not only for my prong, but also for all of my communication.   Teaching English for the last few years, I’ve learned how to read and speak between the lines of body language and awkward mumbles; however, soon my position will be reversed with my students and I’ll be the stranger in a strange land.  I’ll get that look when I’ve asked strangers to repeat themselves one more time.  It’s the look that makes one feel ever so ashamed and uncomfortable for not knowing the same language.  I’ll try to communicate the language between the binary 1 and 0.  I’ll be describing the realm between where one song track ends and the next begins.  I’ll be trapped while moving in an overlap and absence.

Communicating between languages and cultures is the challenge of which I must accept.  Teaching English in a global world leaves me feeling arrogant.  While I teach English, I do not want English superimposed over all other languages; therefore, my mission–a long time mission–has been to travel and to learn more of various cultures and languages.  This vague awareness that I’d be leaving sometime, sometime in the undefined future, has given way to the full-blown realisation that I’m about to be seated on a 12-hour flight leaving behind everything.

I’ve just moved into my Vancouver West End apartment seven months ago—not fully being unpacked, due to studying, for three months—and here I am, packing it all up again.  I’ve a dearth of memories to pack away, yet being fraught with insomnia–while I fought with Bedcetera to send me the falsely advertised futon that I’d paid for yet never received–is hardly out of my mind.  Already, I need to sell off or store my Ikea futon that I’d bought with the refund.  Here I am again, packing away some of my life, and tossing the rest.  My life here is evaporating.  Again.  Déjà vu: another liminality.

“I’d often referred to myself as homeless,” says Pico Iyer, a third culture kid, as he seemingly writes from my own thoughts in his book ‘The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home’.  Like Iyer, I’ve felt as if I were in a constant state of transition since my youth.  I’ve moved countless times through my youthful years of angst infused with carpe diem until I found myself in Cuba only to come back continuing the trend of transience.  My life in Vancouver has always felt evanescent and more recently, for a while now, I’d been restless and scheming my way to Korea.  Through Langara’s Korean exchange program, the way I found.

My associate in synchronicity hacking and one of my closest friends, Aurora, knew of my mission to Korea and pointed out the obfuscated program.  Soon after I shot off an email to set up a meeting with Mike Allen, the coordinator, only to have the message stranded in oblivion of an inbox on vacation.  I put it out of my mind.

I almost gave up.

Yes, I almost gave up.

Almost.

Little voices finally nagged me enough to send off another email, and before I knew it, I was sitting in an interview being barraged with questions.  That very night I received a congratulatory letter from Mike.  I couldn’t have been happier, or more stressed out.  My dream was becoming reality, and this is most frightening, dreams are easy when they are mere dreams.  I was at one of those intersecting crossroads of life.

Folkloric crossroads seethe with liminality.  When I think of crossroads, I can’t help but to think of Robert Johnson’s lamenting “Crossroad Blues“   of which a blues man sells his soul in trade for becoming a famous blues musician to the Devil at the crossroads.  Crossroads are the places between worlds; neither here nor there, places to meet the dead, bury criminals, or flirt with Hecate.  All in all, crossroads are places of indecision, a place of too many decisions with serious ramifications.  I made my choice at the crossroads, and I’ve enough chutzpah to be confident with my choice; when I meet the Devil, I will win the golden fiddle just as in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” initially by Charlie Daniels Band; however I’d recommend Primus’s stop motion version.

I happened upon so many different crossroads in the months before August 2008 and they, like the veins on a Chinese maple leaf found in Vancouver, have only brought me to the next that lead to the ones after.  This apparently, is life.

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