請你記住留下給我這位置

In my rush and furor to finish my chopping and slabbing of beta coefficients and standard errors into tables with *'s for my final multivariate paper, and throwing the artifacts of my Albany life into my car so that I could get back home and attend to another onslaught of preparations for my flight away from this part of the world, an unexpected thing happened to me as I pulled onto the highway in my C220 1994 Benz. For the first time ever in my life, I thought to myself "I'm so blessed." How far I have truly traveled from the Felix I was 5 years ago, when Stephen Bor in Washington DC knew me as a tortured soul, and the only reprieve I could find from misery and hell on earth was by consuming others like a hungry ghost.

Reading a sincerely heartfelt and compassionate card before I got in my car was the set, and since I've lately been growing into the belief that life can be as riveting as the movies, I turned on my mp3 player from my cell-phone, and naturally the Cantonese songs came on - such tear-jerking ballads demanding dramatic plucking of heart-strings. I didn't even know the meaning of the song so well at the time, but it was the rhythm and melody that chimed my tear ducts:

無論你喜歡誰
請你記住留下給我這位置
時常在內心一隅
空出幾吋為我堅持

I recalled a conversation with Salvatore, my housemate and classmate, and Terrence, my upstairs housemate as well as fellow Capoeirista, where we came to the stoic conclusion that those people who aren't happy in Albany probably won't be happy anywhere else. It isn't 100% true, but there is a logic to it, and I've challenged myself this semester to force this yoga on myself that happiness comes from within, and so I should be able to adapt to any environment.

So the tears strewed down my face, shooting the lights of downtown Albany in every which way like the streaks of star-lights, and I looked back, knowing I would probably never live here ever again, but just as any material thing even as basic as a piece of cloth carries with it the ability to evoke neurochemical/spiritual reactions in the mind, so it is the case with the concrete/wood/glass/natural composition and imaginary of Albany, and the few, yet significant, special people I met and knew there who will also always be a part of me.