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As I said to friend the other day, the more I travel, the less I know where I am. I woke up in the middle of the night yesterday and it took me a long time before I could remember that I was back in Taipei, sleeping in my bed, in my very own room. My mind knows for a fact where I am, what I do, but it feels like the connection between my mind and myself is lost sometime. What if what I know and see is just an illusion and that the other dimension is slowly starting to make itself known to me?

Perhaps I am getting tired of playing that human game, just like when a child realises that the game he’s been taking part is just too silly and leaves.

Much as I love Paris, I had reached my limits: one and a half month. My father said told me on the phone that my mother wept after my brother and I left. We had spent a lovely afternoon, the four of us again reunited, just like it used to be, and certainly that must have reawakened some deep memories of golden time in my mother.

“Please tell her that you’re not going anywhere” my father pleaded. That was a bad idea. If I did, then she would think that although I am in Paris, I don’t bother to visit her. She had said so once already before this last trip. I was sitting outside on a bench near the Confucius Temple with my laptop, making one last call before taking the plane the following day. What she said startled me. If sometime she gets confused about where I live (Hong Kong? Tokyo? Taipei?), she usually knows that I am not in France. The disease must be progressing slowly and now her changeable emotional state of mind is dangerously playing with her memory.

“In three months” I told her. “I will be back in three months, that’s not a long time”. Will that be of any comfort when she has no sense of time? “One day is like any other day” she often likes to say.

Once in the plane, all sense of longing vanished, as if I had finished playing a scene in a play and getting ready for the next one. The emotional reality of Paris disappears as soon as I find myself up in the sky.