Have you ever felt an urge to fight the fadable?

Well I do, constantly.

Sometimes, almost unconsciously, I try to make a memory stay vivid by recounting it to people. I’m always blessed with thought-provoking friends who prompt me to make new discoveries as we talk and consolidate the thoughts as I attempt at verbalizing them. And if I’m fortunate enough, these talks would also turn into memories that I wish to keep intact.

Curiously, however, sharing is not an option at times. It could be because I don’t entirely trust the spoken word, which more often than not falls short of being deliberate. Or I prefer not to bother my dear friends with all the trivial ins and outs. Or I just don’t want to sound melodramatic, and I’m afraid of not getting a desirable response. There’s this episode, for instance, where I have felt extremely intense in a friendship. All these years I’ve been treasuring it so much that I probably have never mentioned it to any of our mutual friends, as if sharing would ruin it; even now, in this post, I’d still refuse to share it. But, paradoxically, when writing a piece of fanfic I adapted it into a dispensable scene that slightly contributes to one protagonist’s passion for the other, as if rewriting the episode, distorting my feelings, and presenting it to strangers would not ruin it. In other words, I sacrificed the precious episode for my writing. Since I didn’t mention it in my diary, the fanfic excerpt is about the only piece of record I have, and as years went by I no longer remember exactly how unfaithful it is to the original.

Geez I’m doing it to myself again.

I’ve already messed up my life once by fictionalizing it. I was young, vaguely aware of the power of words but inexperienced about its harm, yet desperate for a record. The first three years in university I was mainly busy with transforming my high-school life into a novel, which was introduced to a cautiously selected readership. Then I saw with my own eyes how life, given all the twists that are impossible to foretell, and especially when fuelled with sentiments that should have dissipated but instead are unduly enhanced by the written word, can turn out way more dramatic than fiction. Nevertheless, shocked and infuriated as I was by the turn of events, I secretly took pleasure in having experienced it, which constitutes excellent writing materials. Luckily sanity put an end to the pathetic loop of feeding my writing with my occasionally eventful life and creating new events with my writing.

Admittedly the motive for fictionalizing my life is manifold: I desire to write, to be recognized as a writer, but what with my lack of imagination I could hardly write fiction without inspirations from my own experiences (that’s why writers in general have a notorious reputation among people around them I suppose); but ultimately I want a record, and since I’m not courageous enough to confront myself and thus my diary is often obscure, haunted by nameless ghosts, to have a fictionalized version is not a bad idea, as long as I can tell the differences.

But my memory failed me. I once was so proud of my outstanding memory, I could easily recount each and every detail that others had forgotten. Just imagine how flustered I was as I found out that time had blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, which used to visible and definite.

Now that I know fictionalizing doesn’t work for me, a faithful record seems a more sensible choice. Last August I started an e-diary for the convenience of writing longer entries without tiring my hand and also to rid myself of the burden of having to carry my physical diaries around —as it happened, my last physical diary was used up to the second last page on the day of my arrival here. And even better, after realizing that I tend to fool myself when writing in Chinese, neglecting feelings that I cowardly refuse to face, I switched straight to English.

Problems solved? No. While I increasingly feel that there are more and more moments in life that I cherish, be it utter joys or boundless sorrows, sometimes intense and sometimes more on the mundane side but still experienced with relish, intimate encounters of hearts that deny me sharing with anyone else, writing too fails me—

That is to say, my clumsy ways of fighting the fadable have all proven to be unreliable. ‘Why not let the fadable fade?’ Yiyun Li asked in her sorrowful book reminiscing about her older son, who had killed himself. The question weighs on me too. Why bother? Why be a Sisyphus? Why not just live in the moment and let it be?

Because I see the sublime in the permanence of the written word, something so rare in a world that takes a new form each second, something unattainable among minds, including mine, that are understandably prone to changes. And the sublime in the fight against the fadable as well. ‘It’ll pass,’ asserted Fleabag’s priest. But before the snow melts, before the flower withers, before the sun sets, I’ll fold up the shadows neatly and put them between the pages of my diary. Then however far I travel, upon seeing them I’ll instantly be transposed back to the scene, even if a deformed reconstruction, of feeling so very surely in love, with a human being or a spark in sight or even the idea of love itself, and, in some cases perhaps, being loved back.

And this is how I built my pensieve of words, intrinsically untrustworthy, full of blunders that would waylay the future me somewhere along the path. But I offer it my contented acceptance.

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
(The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.)

Albert Camus, ‘Le mythe de Sisyphe’
(tr. Justin O’Brien)