I can no longer remember why, when I was younger, I loved a romance as guileless as Turn Left, Turn Right. Its theme song made the future sound like a promise that could not fail: someone would be waiting. Perhaps I believed that meeting and parting worked like the hands of a clock; however far they moved apart, they would eventually overlap again. Strangers would meet by miracle, lose one another only briefly, then cross every distance to fall in love.
After drifting through life for many years, I began to see that time often runs that story in reverse. Two people love without reserve, then separate over details neither can properly remember. Years later they meet awkwardly at a street corner, manage a helpless smile, and continue towards becoming strangers. I turn left without noticing; you have already turned and gone right.
Passing through Taipei, I walk its damp streets and stop for a jasmine-scented latte, or sit beside a roadside stall with a bowl of noodles still breathing steam. Spring onion floats on the broth. Above the city, Taipei 101 stands strangely alone. A great-uncle once returned from New York and made his home here; there must have been a reason. Perhaps it was this fine-grained warmth and peace that more dazzling cities could not offer.
At the Ximending metro exit, condensation gathers beneath my hand around a cold can of oolong tea. The lights change and the crowd moves like tidewater, one wave turning left, another right. Young faces shine faintly in the heat, each carrying a private thought. For an instant, the film returns: two people divided by a thin wall, listening to the same rain while circling through the city's maze. A line from the old song about the metro, the crowd, and a number for love comes back to me. But where, on this hot street, is the queue? And to whom could I hand the ticket softened by water in my palm?
I press the cold tea against my cheek, trying to quiet a small and causeless emptiness. My tired reflection hovers in a shop window. Against the measured signal of the crossing, it resembles a late-night train that has waited too long for its final passenger. We assume every city must conceal a missing piece shaped precisely for the hollow within us, and so we search in every direction.
Yet after crossing one sea of time after another, perhaps there is no one we are required to meet. The soul that has not arrived, the one promised for some future corner, has not gone anywhere at all. It has simply been sleeping, quietly, inside us.