INSTALMENT 9

Are you the kind of person who can't wait and reads the last page of the novel? Or do you fast-forward through most of the series episodes just to get to the season finale? Most of us can't wait to reach the destination when we are on a journey. But once we are there we lament that it is either not what we expect or if only we could start all over again. The end excites us. The end frightens us.

We're back with Instalment 9 after a break! Instalment begins the second half of Issue 3. I have said before that Issue 3 will be the last for Furrie and Shortie. So in this beginning of the end, Furrie and Shorties start on a journey within a journey as DianDian and DiDi take them on train rides from the city of Taipei to their home.

With a train, you have absolute certainty of the journey. It starts and stops where it says it will, when it says it will. Trains can run for decades. And even when engines or carriages change, the tracks somehow remain. The train driver follows the tracks already laid. And yet we are not magically transported. The train hugs the earth. In its body we are not suspended in atmosphere. Even if the train is like a bullet, the earth - in a blur - is still our background. We look out of the train window - it tells us that we are bodies on earth.

I love taking these slow long train rides with J. In trains his anxieties were quiet. Especially on old train routes, time, time moves ever so rhythmically. We are trees. We are sky. We are part of a landscape that appears, disappears, remains - even when we are not looking.

Furrie and Shortie 毛毛与矮矮

INSTALMENT 9

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