I see through the hole in the clouds and see you, waving. I wave back.

Despite the distance between us and the respective lives that we are doomed to live, I can notice proximity. “How are you feeling, old chap?”, I think to myself while moving my hand from left to right. As I can’t receive an answer, I just make up one myself.

You’re looking up and see my round face in the sky. “Do I look this weird up close?”, you’re asking yourself.

“You do.”

You’re the future, I am the past. I know what has taken place, you don’t know anything. Who’s better off?

Even when M. Aurelius was sitting on the banks of a river, contemplating over his third book, he couldn’t help but notice the ridiculousness of the amounts of thoughts that we put into interpreting the past and worrying about the future.

So in the end, you’re truly blessed, viewed from my perspective. You have the capability of knowing nothing, learning everything and forgetting about it. That’s why I am in the clouds and you’re the, all materialistic and stuff.

I envy you.

Dears truly,

PS.

“I’ll be back” – Terminator.

I have been back. I will not be back, most likely. How many tries I will give depends on the urgency of matters.

A return can be miraculously thrilling, it can be as blunt as a club. It can be a Michelin star dish or a warmed up sausage in a New York Hot Dog stand. Depends on the consumer. And sometimes, you are even the sausage that never gets picked, simmering away in that murky water.

Choices of returning are choices of luxury.

In most cases, you’re sitting on the passenger seat in these situations. Likely, without a seat belt. Make sure you are grabbing that handle to not fly through the front window.

I’ll be hitting the brakes now, because in this case, I am behind the steering wheel. I am the sausage that leaps itself out of the meaty water. For long I have simmered. It’s time for the barbecue part of this journey.

Bring on the heat.

When people plug their electric devices into the socket through a cable, they will be sure, in most cases, that they will find a recharged and refreshed phone. But how do humans recharge, I have recently asked myself. And as your papa Shanghai is not a human, I have turned to the observation mode.

Major recharging cycles usually happen during the night, both seen in phones as well as humans. Silence ensues over whole countries, only because the sunlight is missing. I wonder who dictated this approach a long time ago?

Still, recharging is not something that can be dialed down to the percentage, as it is in electric devices. So how can we understand when a human is recharged?

When looking at the outer appearance, you can be fooled by the usage of drugs. Caffeine for example, leads us to false-positives.

What I have recently witnessed while floating through time and space, is the usage of so-called naps. They are usually taken during the Waking hours of the day. And measurement is quite simple, I have been told: “a successful nap is followed by a puddle of drool.”

So for today, let us drool. Let’s drool during work, during a movie and let’s drool, together.

Click, click.

I have become the conquerer of time. I hold in my hands the evidence of things past. For eternity, if allowed, I am capturing what I see, factually.

Living bound by the inevitability of time, I feel free in catching a glimpse of what has been, just in that split second of my seemingly endless existence.

I see colour, I witness life, I document love, I capture nuance. My camera makes click click and unknowingly, I burn images. Continuing to document life on the small earth, just a tiny spark of light helps me in clarifying matters.

Holding the tools of documentation in my hands I wonder whether impressions are there to be truly captivated. Have I become the fool or I am truly in charge of making things a memory? Will I ever look at the same image a second time with the same eyes? What if I change, have I captured anything more than just a spark of myself, looking at the image? Is my tool adequate to capture the idea I head, the things I felt?

Most likely not, but what else is there, but to capture (or the minimalistic effort to try to capture)?