the round table

[quotidians]

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I should've slept two hours ago. I've started to feel indifferent to everything, and I keep finding videos from 20 years ago on YouTube. It started with this one, "Goodbye 2005." Though I wasn't alive in 2005, everything about this video seems familiar. Oh! That crowded Chinese restaurant with the seafood tanks in the back and the incandescent yellow lighting. I remember being in the cameraman's position, only surrounded by different people.

Are there any Chinese families who haven't sat around a big round table like King Arthur's knights to gorge themselves on squirrel fish, cumin lamb and fried rice? I remember those nights well, though when we spent the New Year in Canada my father and I would typically dine with the families of childhood friends, because ours was across the Pacific.

I'm feeling quite lonely tonight. Though I spent an equal sum of my childhood years in Vancouver, these last two years I've realized how much I missed China. It's strange. There was a period where I didn't return for over two years, and I didn't feel so sentimental. Despite the fact that I went back to visit only a few months ago, I miss the damn place so much I could cry. I miss my grandparents! I miss the dinner table!