It's been a very long while since I have not written in this space, and I am grateful to those who have taken the time to write to me to make sure I'm breathing, surviving. Thank you, and I hope life has been treating you well just as it has been good to me. While in the year (in reality almost 2 years) I spent more time on offline projects, something has been cooking in the back of my mind that I'm bringing back to the Web.

As usual, I will say very little about the thinking and feeling behind my seemingly random writings (hint: it's probably better appreciated in sequence over time), and it's conceivable to me that it may please you or bore you. Either way, I hope that my words and thoughts still bring you some elements of pleasure.

You will find the new effort at here, but the home page of this domain will always show the latest entry. Photos are on their way; seeing as I shoot digital less than I used to, the longer labour of love takes time to make it online. To date, there's also a new little experiment called "impromptu".

It is out of pleasure that I write, so that pleasure may be taken out of it by those who encounter the words left behind. Especially dedicated to those who have come back time and again for more, I hope that I can keep granting you that pleasure for a little longer.

It surprised me that many passengers on the plane were reading, certainly all the individuals sitting within my line of sight. All of them had brought hardcovers with them for the journey, which was another surprising thing. In the tiny airplanes that zipped me homeward bound, these monstrous volumes seem to make a statement, exerting their presence, as if to assert that the gravity of words they contain must surely be important. It's reassuring to see that reading is still a viable pastime, or a viable thing to do to pass the time, but then, one is intrigued by the book titles — what are these people choosing to fill their heads with? A pop detective novel, a business self-help book, some cheap newsstand fiction? Hrm.

It is hard to imagine that the book should ever disappear regardless of the kinds of discussions over the course of the week that was SXSWi. Even with the changing landscape of media as we know it — be it publication, knowledge retention, television and music — you'd still be able to buy the crappy romance novel with the glossy cover sporting the woman's slim stockinged leg garnished with a red high-heel, the author's name splashed across the bottom in blinding bold letters at the newsstand for $2.

I can't say that I was entirely sad to be leaving Austin because the end of this year's SXSWi wasn't the end of something; it was the beginning of many beginnings. I met many wonderful people whom I will remember. I think I made an effort to tell them in person that I thought them wonderful, because face-to-face meetings are difficult to come by. In a world of fleeting friendships, many people would have forgotten me by the time they got home or soon after, but one could hope that a precious few might remain a part of one's life for a time.

I didn't take many photographs, only a few on a film camera that may or may not have worked. In the era where recording mediums are affordable and cheap, we have the tendency to document everything — and for what? To honour the memory? Yet the human memory serves as a sieve to dispel information that's no longer relevant, while retaining important information at close hand; how then could recording tons and tons of everything be "honouring" a process that is self-filtering? You could tell me that I'm taking the fun out of it all, but maybe I'm just the kind of person who would much rather be enjoying the glass of wine, remembering its flavours and savouring the company with whom I am enjoying it with, than merely taking a photo of it.

If I want to remember you, I will think of you, and think of you, so I won't forget you.

My memory of you would then be worth more than all the photographs I could have ever taken, all the voice recordings I could have made — because it was done with care, over and over again. If I'd stolen you in time's moment and given it away to the world, it seems no longer something shared and therefore no longer special.

I am deeply suspicious of days that pass like dreams. It tends to mean that I'm not living the day fully enough, or perhaps I've lived it too fully, but it's always difficult to tell.

His was a smile of shyness, a pleasure stolen but not without guilt. It was not so much a sense of having committed a crime; it wasn't as if we did anyone any harm — not with this smile, nor the smile immediately after, nor the one after that. But perhaps, it was more of having secretly broken an unspoken social code: the one that dictates strangers are not supposed to engage one another without a cause, or an excuse. Speaking is only permitted with reason, over the incessant rumble that could only be a train full of people battling inertia.

"Would you like my seat?" or "Can I borrow that paper if you're done with it?" "Excuse me, can I please get through? Thank you."

A smile without a precedence has no place here.

If these metal carriages are vessels in a city's bloodline, where would a city's heart lie?

And soon we joined the early morning flow of people drifting dreamily to the surface of the earth, swallowed by some kind of trance that a semblance of real life holds over them.

I loathe the idea of cars, though not so much the notion that they are machines — not least because one almost ran me over in its haste from a Point A to a Point B on my way home — but more how we have come to use them and be used by them. That our feet have been mysteriously lifted off the road, so we have lost the ability to distinguish concrete from cobblestones. How they have allowed us to give importance to the destination rather than the journey, how they have the ability to take away a life to be able to give an arbitrary gain of time. How speed somehow became more important than time; time is money, therefore speed must be money too.

But speed changes the perspective of things. How does one gain an ability to recognise the silent resilience of dry winter's grass, carving moonlight shadow into a rock, if one has always passed too fast to see? What a marvellous catch-22, that those who are precious about their modern miracle of a vehicle, travelling much too fast to notice the earth from which they leech, that it should ever occur to them what could be lost — if they had never stopped?

~~~~~

People are surprised when I tell them I love the winter, the snow, and even the cold. Everyone knows that the snow is white, unforgiving, and dismisses landscape in an indiscriminate sweep. Everyone tells you so in their stories, in their movies, in the poems they wrote but never recited. But no one tells you that fresh snow sparkles at night, that walking in snow could make you feel like a tiny plastic creature in a snow globe that has been rigorously shaken. No one tells you snow ranges from white to grey, that it changes shape, that it could become ice sometimes, but not everywhere, and never all at once.

No one tells you that your winter is special because it's not winter everywhere at this moment, and probably not the same kind of winter. No one tells you that it could get too cold to snow ... No one dares break the news that perhaps we have forgotten how to look for the umbra and the penumbra, the mysterious point where they meet, how one cannot be entirely too certain where they begin and where they end, because we've flooded our lives with bright electric lights in the vain hope that they would help us see better.

(How can we even begin to partake in poetry, when we no longer have the ability to see?)

Fallen leaves tainted a faint gold by the glow of the lone street-lamp, scattered in the shadows of the sidewalk, piled up against a random wall — perhaps by the wind, perhaps by a neighbour's rake — seem to whisper the passing of yet another year.

Autumn awakens unspoken words. A familiar song winding its way through copper wires that attached a modern piece of electronic marvel to my much-human ears dug up a distant, disjointed memory. That of standing on an unfamiliar curve, on an unfamiliar road, in an unfamiliar neighbourhood in the north of Boston, waiting for a bus that never seemed to arrive.

It was oppressively sunny and I'd left my sunglasses behind at my temporary home of a few days. Earphones firmly lodged in their proper place, my body swaying slightly but involuntarily to the gentle riff of the guitar, I seem to recall having walked a distance to a couple of bus stops down the street, thinking perhaps the time I spent standing could, instead, be spent walking. The bus must have finally arrived, but I have no recollection of where I was taking it to ...

It was the tail-end of winter, in a city loaded with memories, soul laden with shards leftover from too many broken things, I made friends with a writer-to-be who said to me that "a novel is just a long short story", and was puzzled when I burst out laughing. We traded books, and I came back to my temporary home one night to find him watching a French movie I'd already seen. That night I was surprised to discover that I could understand the language rather well, after what seemed like a long struggle to tuck it under my linguistic belt. Certainly well enough that I found pleasure in pointing out inaccuracies in the translated subtitles — as one would, in such an opportune circumstance.

Then I went from winter to winter, kissed a true love, back to a true home, to a city of squalling winds from the Antarctic and searing winds from the desert. Or was it still autumn? The comfort of old friends like the comfort of an old coat. Favourite places that I can name and give precise directions to.

Perhaps it was because that this was the album I'd always crave for the moment I stepped out of my front door every morning, that by the time I'd walked to the train station, the music had run its course and this very same song always found me standing on the open platform. The darkened asphalt, the bleak little beige station building that was too small to provide shelter on rainy days, the old waiting benches heavily ornamented with graffiti and scarred with overlapping messages of love and insults. People gradually gathering in the unspoken ritual of a collective act — that of the wait.

I marvelled at the dress sense of Melbournians — all dark grey and black — our notion of winter elegance simplified to the point of monochrome. I marvelled at those who seem to be purposeful even in the early hour of the morning, armed with a newspaper, an umbrella, or a briefcase for the day of work ahead, and the evening beyond that to look forward to. But first, we had to wait for the next train — the one that never seemed to arrive.

Yet these trains must have come. My memories of waiting persist beyond those of moments when the doors of the carriage slid open, or when the door of the bus folded to one side, welcoming one into a mobile cocoon. These trains must have arrived at some point. Finally, eventually. They must have arrived in order for me to have left, and left all that behind.

I can't quite explain what has possessed me this summer. The days seem to melt under the heat of the sun, and I no longer remember them one by one, singularly — or maybe that's just a sign that I've been keeping much too busy.

A quick spell of research — though it would have been faster if I'd read an old entry on my own blog — saw me out of the apartment within the hour, and I was out on the streets hunting for a place I thought I'd not find again.

It is strange, what one's mind chooses to remember and what it chooses to forget. I'd forgotten so many things, including the name of this place. I'd forgotten that I'd written it down so I should be able to find it once more — especially when I knew they were going to be moving when I was to be on the other side of the world ...

And perhaps that's what has possessed me this summer. The flashes of memories, isolated events that have continually come back to haunt me over the course of the last months have made me brave the heat, slather on the sunscreen and go for long, seemingly aimless meanders.

Some weeks ago I'd found an old building I must have photographed three summers ago, a place that stirred of possibilities precisely because it'd been left to die — dreams of converting unused spaces into bookstores, complete with a cafe. It turned out that someone still lives at the back of this place, even if the very old shop-front was terribly dilapidated and looked untouched for decades. Last Saturday, I systematically combed a quartier searching for a back street that had existed simply as a still photograph in my memory — disconnected from any true sense of location or time — with only the vague recollection that I had accidentally stumbled upon it once or twice, along the way to somewhere.

And today, I found myself in a completely foreign cafe, with nothing of what I remembered. But I was handed a menu, gifted a warm smile, and I took myself through the back door onto the very pleasant terrace, right next to the tall plants of flowering basil, mint, and herbs I couldn't identify or didn't know the names for. On the other side of the fence seemed a regular backyard, with very regular grass, very regular laundry on a very regular washing line. The girl forgot my order for a fruit smoothie, but it didn't truly matter. The sun was a little difficult to read or write by, but that didn't matter either. The gorgeous dish of food that finally arrived affirmed that some things may change, for better or for worse, but the creative mix of flavours that found its way to my mouth told me that they still have the same chef.

So perhaps, that's what has possessed me this summer: the need to hang on to things that so very nearly faded away. Frightened as I am of the fragility of this existence, the guilty knowledge that halfway across the world, there lies no peace under senseless explosions. How tenderly delicate all this is, when today I gaze at your eyes through a millennia of flying electricity, because tomorrow still waits for the sun to rise.