"If You Ever Get Close To A Human...."

...you'd better be ready to get confused."

I spent four nights in Lily’s guestroom, sleeping in moderate comfort on a plywood mattress, my back aching to a lesser degree after I accepted my weakness and secretly requisitioned a few cushions from a nearby chair.   Each day I rode the bus and the subway into and around central Beijing, saw the required sights, and each evening returned to revise Lily’s English essays and watch the World Cup matches.

As a free-lance interior designer and graphic artist, Lily was seldom required to leave home for any reason other than purchasing groceries.    Her flat was almost undecorated and the few concessions to individuality were hung asymmetrically on her white walls: two small, plastic-framed photos (both of Lily, alone) and one wood-framed, cartoon drawing of a corny off-color joke (Sigmund Freud: What’s On a Man’s Mind).   She was a self-taught English speaker and what she lacked in pronunciation, grammar, and listening skills, she made up for in vocabulary, regularly pulling out words like “detest” or “conducive”, but often unable to understand my carefully enunciated responses.   She dressed in a shapeless thigh-length brown dress at all times, except when she went out for groceries, at which time she would change into a fashionable jeans and T-shirt combo, which would be promptly abandoned in favor of the brown dress when she returned.  She told me she detested parties because of the superficial conversation, detested bars because drinking was a tacit admission of life’s emptiness, and detested being set up on dates because she felt love should be organic.  When I asked if she had a boyfriend she told me it was complicated, then spilled out the saga of a bizarre, on and off relationship with a German businessman; a relationship that spanned 10 years of infrequent meetings; a relationship she began doubting when several previous Chinese lovers were discovered (apparently because they wrote about the gentleman in question on their blogs), which she finally ended with an SMS exchange that took place over a year ago.  Two beer bottles displayed on a shelf in the kitchen stood as a monument to his last visit.   

I had planned on staying three nights then heading to a guesthouse and finding a social scene for my final two nights in China, but Lily asked me to stay one more so she could prepare us Peking duck for lunch the following day.   I agreed, we enjoyed an excellent lunch, I did the dishes, and then we sat down with coffee to practice for her exam.  When the time came, I advised her of my intention to leave, not right at that moment, but pretty soon, and she slowly began to cry.   She said she didn’t know why she was crying.  She said she would “close” her couchsurfing profile.  Finally she laughed a little and said, “I’m sorry.  I’m a little crazy.”  I tried to keep a cheerful tone, making small talk, telling her everyone’s a little crazy.  The tears subsided, threatened to break free again, then finally stopped.  Not knowing what else to do, I shouldered my pack, thanked her, and walked to the bus stop.