Overseas Love Letter to Taipei, Taiwan

A poem about my first time traveling overseas

Cabin fever is twelve hours on a jet plane. Time suspending my disbelief that happenstance carries meaning. Featherlight accident of birth.

Return flight: Taipei to San Francisco. My father to my left. Stranger to my right in a darkened jet plane where cabin fever has meaning and does not have meaning.

Already, I miss the strange intonation of Mandarin, hearing without understanding much. Instead of loneliness, a welcoming dish of spicy fried fish with friends, new yet familiar in a city full of trees with foliage, like kindness, dripping.

At the restaurants we shared course after course after course. In Taipei, for company there must be fish and pork. 20 dishes spun round the wheel at a table with just as many friends.

Here we are, heading back together. My father to my left. Stranger to my right in the darkened cabin of a jet plane, one of many planes this year.

The year my wings have unfurled, taken flight into my wanderlust, nothing less than my right of birth. Delicious as jellyfish and abalone, mochi and beef noodles eaten clumsily with traditional chopsticks and a spoon — xie xie, thank you.

Taipei, already I miss you. We set wing above the sea, leaving and returning, returning and leaving. A salty depth of longing, beating ache of my heart

for new passages again and again.