China

Purnima Rao

I awoke at four a.m. in the waiting lounge of the airport. The folks around me looked bleary-eyed, lost, or at best, blank. I must have drifted off after the announcement that my flight was delayed by an hour. I could have lost my temper, achieving nothing, proving nothing. Instead I dozed off.

The week before was spent in a stupor of weed and drink, darkness and light, music and card games, conditional and unconditional love. It was a life imagined, suddenly realized. The dreams of an eighteen-year-old coming true eight years later. And through the haze of mind-altering substances, experiences, thoughts, and feelings, a song filtered into my cloud. China by a goddess named Tori Amos. On an ordinary day I would have marveled at her brilliance, her musical genius, her open heart, and her freaky imagination. And as I woke up surrounded by these soon-to-be-airborne huddled masses, I realized that I had drifted off to sleep with the song still playing in my ears.

What happens when a song seeps into you? It could happen anywhere—in a shopping mall as you hunt for underwear, at your favorite table in your favorite restaurant waiting for your favorite dish wishing you were with your favorite person instead of alone, in a car that stops next to yours at a traffic light. There's not a damn thing you can do when the song enters your bloodstream, swims through the cracks and crevices of your head and heart to find home wherever it pleases. What happens when a song grips your soul and refuses to let go?

I woke up, hostage to China. Bleary images from one of the nights before. In bed, wrapped to my chin in a blanket. A good friend, a new friend, lying next to me, wrapped similarly so in his own fluff. He had turned to me and asked, "Have you heard China by Tori Amos?" I lied to him and said yes. It seemed easier at the time. I didn't realize I had lied because I wanted him to look into my eyes and find the comfort of a kindred spirit, even though I was the one who needed the comforting that night. But he's a child, I had told myself as we both turned our backs to each other; he to listen to Tori, and me to listen to the blues man outside who played my songs on his guitar. "China means a great deal to me," the Boy next to me said as he turned to face me again. I turned too, but I didn't want to look into his eyes so I buried my head in a pillow. I did not ask what he meant, I did not ask for his story. That would make him trust me more, I hoped. It was part of the game. "I shared the song with someone very special," he said, "I would hate it if it played at a party full of strangers." I hmmm'd appropriately, wishing then more than ever that I had heard the song. My head was spinning; alcohol and Puff the Magic Dragon were taking their toll.

In the week that had led up to this moment, I had seen the Boy be tough under pressure, calm under stress, buoyant under fire and always in the realm of the everybody. Through the week, we had seen aspects of each other we never would have if it hadn't been for the extraordinary circumstances under which we met. But I had never until that moment gotten a glimpse of his naked heart. That night, lying next to each other, China had forced him to come a little undone. In his voice I heard a story of softness and vulnerability and it didn't seem important to know the details anymore, like when a song is heard and truly understood, it no longer remains relevant to know the facts surrounding it or why one word follows the other in a given meter. It becomes baseless to know which year the song was written in or who the singer was dating when they sang it.

Airport lounges are strange at four a.m. Just about everyone is unhappy, whether just under their skin or right through to their cores. My sleepy, still inebriated head could not wrap itself around the coldness outside and the song inside. Even if I didn't know a word of English, I would be able to tell that China is a song about distance. Between two people who lie in the same bed and yet are worlds apart. It is closeness and distance sleeping under the same blanket.

That night, I had turned my back on the Boy once more and pretended to go off to sleep, trying to stop the fireflies under my eyelids from spinning in circles. Maybe I am falling in love, I had told myself. If I am, then this is the worst good news I've had in a long time. He is perfect in many ways, the kind of man I've always aspired to have but never gotten. But then, I had thought, he is too young, too idealistic, too pretty, too social, too much of best friends with the blues man. This is too wrong to be right.

I ever so slowly began to understand that China was about the distances I had created within my own mind; distances that had no reality. A Great Wall had circled me on the bed that night. Fear formed the cement that dried into hardness. Bricks are cheap excuses. Never underestimate walls built on fear and lies. Never underestimate their power to make you believe you cannot cope with good things. The blues man had begun to hum Dylan outside. Funny how he never made me uncomfortable until that moment.

A sudden flurry took over the airport lounge, forcing me to unwind from the two metal chairs I had appropriated, as the speakers triumphantly announced that the flight was ready for take-off. Dope-eyed passengers, fast asleep a second before, now sprinted toward Gate No. 2. I grabbed my coat and bag. I handed my boarding pass to the uniformed man at the gate. I was finally off to China.