TERMINAL LAUGHTER

I, Todd Farley, am what you might call a romantic.  I know that you don’t yet exist outside of a merger of images I’ve experienced through the elegiac nuance of earlier Ang Lee and an ever-widening niche of erotic dramas, but I also know how real my love is. (Real.)  I don’t know if you’re Chinese, Cantonese, or Mongoloid, but to be frank with you, Asian, I don’t really care.  That’s not what this is about.  Whether your eyes turn out to be brown, like the silty soils of the fertile Mekong delta, or dark brown, like those rare senior bamboo stalks that survive the onslaughts of your strange bears, what’s important here is that you represent the refinement and nobility of what I’m going to assume is a common racial heritage. Besides, with the rising-sun sheen of your trademark black tresses, you will no doubt blind me from caring which god-emperor manages which kingdom’s lotus farms and silkworm prefectures.

Though I have never physically visited your shore(s?), I have been there in my mind many times: Our first meeting was wrought with a most perfect danger. There I lay, wounded but unfazed, having just defended the fern-yurts of your village from several opium-crazed Canton pirates.  Though their numbers were initially too great to be counted on your abacus, I was finally able to drive them all off with a few quick demonstrations of the flintlock rifle.

You kneel beside me, silent as the falling cherry petals that encircle us; they work in tandem to blanket us from the prying eyes of the local elders. Your crouch is low but proud, showing me only the subtlest signs of your generations-ingrained Confucian deference.  Your temperature-less hand hovers on mine, and this alone makes it clear that — despite the impossible depth of my three-pronged sai-wounds — all will be well.  Independent of the psychic balm that your very touch provides me with, I know that you are wise in the ways of herbal medicine, as natural as they are curative.  You seal my wounds with ginger root (made malleable with your warm saliva), and then fashion makeshift bandages from the ever-shrinking hemline of your gi.  Your reluctant grandfather would later insist our love wasn’t consecrated until after I’d scaled Mount Zhu to pick you one of the four Tan Hwa flowers foretold to bloom that decade, but even before then, I was pretty much sure that we were going to happen.

Despite these mind-forays into this love, a love serenaded by crane cries and cross-legged lutemen, I am a realist.  I know that the gifs on eastbrides.biz are blurry at best, photoshopped at worst, and only 19 pixels across. I know I’ve not yet clicked the “add to cart” button that will romantically (and legally) bind me to one of them/you.  And I know that you are no doubt nervous about what will await you in my threateningly modern bungalow, what with its glass windows and non-paper lampshades.  But worry not, my personal pan-Asian paradigm.  Things will soon be extremely “kawaii” between you, me, and this “Mingming_69″ Laotion woman I have found for you to live inside of.  We’ll be happy, and, though as I understand it you’re physically incapable of smiling, holy God, will you ever come close.