I woke up to the building shaking as in an earthquake. Only, the shaking didn't stop. The shaking was accompanied by a roar and grind and smash and waterfall of masonry. It went on for some time before I got curious and opened my door. The smell of black mold and diesel exhaust battered my face, and the sounds were instantly louder. My door trembled with my fingers still on the handle. A dinosaurian yellow machine with a long neck and a pair of pincers where its head ought to have been was gobbling up my building. Each bite brought another tremor. The strongest ones rattled my molars. I've grown accustomed to earthquakes, but this was something else entirely. That noone had forewarned me was a situation that should have made me furious, but instead I felt an overwhelming melancholy.
I had lived in this little place for more than a year since the breakup. It was a symbol to me of perseverance, of inner fortitude, of finding a meaning where there was none, and of realizing, with bloody hunks of meat hacked away from my life, what aspects of my life are actually mine and what had grown twisted and deformed, attempting like the climbing fig to make its way around someone else's scaffolding.
I had prepared a ditch-bag long ago, in case of soil liquification during a massive earthquake in Taipei Basin, or a typhoon that knocked out power for weeks, or a Chinese attack (my plan was to literally head for the hills and hope for the best). But the situations in which I ditched were not such that I could make use of my bag. Told in a fit of rage to move out of our house, I moved to this new one - iodine tablets and fire starters weren't any use that night.
Now, with a yellow monster gnawing on my building, my compass and signal mirror and camping food and wetwipes weren't of any use either.
I did my best to prioritize. First, I packed up my laptop, wallet, keys, ID lanyard, cellphone and charger, and notebook. Afterall, these survival tools are how I pay for my life. Time and again, they have proven their worth.
Next I packed appropriate clothing - a couple of suit jackets, dress pants, lobster socks, my best ties, and two pairs of work shoes. Without the appropriate clothing, a man can die in a survival situation. The windows were rattling the whole time. My jugs of homebrewed fruit wine sloshed back and forth in tandem. I would have to leave them to hungry machine.
I carried my essential gear downstairs, and left it at the gate so that I could climb the shaking, shivering stairs again to retrieve more possessions. Dust shook off the ceiling and walls of the stairwell as I climbed. The machine had already devoured sections of the building. Crumbled concrete with twists of haggard rebar grumbled and groaned under the treads of the angry machine. I could see into my neighbor's former houses: humble kitchens with the stainless steel sinks so common in Taiwan, a nursery with padded interlocked tiles on the floor and a brightly colored jungle mural, a bed room with shelves disgorging their charges onto the rubble, a white tiled bathroom with happy tropical fish stickers on the tiles and a moldy white shower curtain, a studio with no windows, a recently remodeled apartment with either wood or fake wood on floor and ceiling, and I sobbed, because this wasn't mine, but it was where I had been and now it was going.
Reluctantly, despite the constant tremors and shakes and terrific grinding, I made a few more trips, emptied the fridge, washed out the bathroom, and wrote some letters to the people I hadn't had time to say goodbye to.
After a while, I reached a point where the things left in my house weren't going to be of any use anymore. I had lots of clothes that I hadn't worn in years, if at all. I had bottles of alcohol, mostly empty. I had all kinds of rubbish and junk and jetsam that hadn't been useful even before the machine's arrival. There was a book of small paintings my sister had painted for me. I took it. There was a roll of posters of my mother's photography that had been intended for my exwife's family. I left them. They were too heavy.
It was time to go.
