Nowhere Man

<please read with music, if you really want to go deep into Wang Jing's feelings>

  ‘Aika….she’s kind of pretty: Her long blonde hair, beautiful emerald eyes, and all that. Right! Her voice! So low, smooth, and soothing. It’d be awfully nice to marry her. She’ll softly whisper the word ‘love’ every morning in my ears with that marvelous voice of hers. Oh, isn’t that nice! But then again, she’s too plain in some ways. I mean, she’s just one of the many beautiful girls you can meet in the streets of here in Falls Church, Virginia. Nothing REALLY attractive about her, if you actually think about it…’

“Ghhh~~”

  With a loud burp, Wang Jing closed the Facebook screen. For the 19-year-old chemistry geek, Facebook stalking was the only hobby that fascinated him in times when he was alone and tired of taking wild guesses about how many molecules there would be in the entire universe. In such times, he usually visited his friends’ Facebook walls-mostly that of girls-and imagined strange things such as marriage, stage of ennui, and other numerous fantasized behaviors of ‘to-become-girlfriends’.

“It seems like old Wang Jing is facebooking again!”

“What is he up to anyways? Sometimes his abrupt weirdness frightens me like hell.”

“The excessive stalking is not the only problem. Have you guys heard him burp out really loud? I’d really love to find out what the hell goes on under that thick throat of his.”

“Guys, hush! He’s coming!”

“Wh, what are you ladies talking about?”, asked Wang Jing, as he approached the group of girls in his class.

“Nothing! Haha, it’s been some time we’ve had the opportunity to talk to you in person.”, Gloria, a close friend of Aika, answered with a stiff, feigned smile.

“Come one, girls. I heard at least something about me. I heard one of you say out my name during the conversation. By the looks of it, probably wasn’t such a nice thing about me, was it?”

“Hey, now Wang Jing…don’t be so defeatist, you know”

“Defeatist? A, are you guys kid, kidding me or what? I demand that I know the exact content of your conversation. I’m not asking you to explicate on the hexagonal structure of water-hydrogen bonding or something. It’s much simpler than explaining such phenomenon.”

“Here we go again. Another exciting daily chemistry lecture in every day conversation given by Professor Wang Jing. Everybody pay attention!”

“Don’t you dare mock me, you little..”

“Ghhhhhhh~”

  Wang Jing’s loud burp put an end to the hostile talk between him and Gloria. The girls went away with a contemptuous laughter at poor Wang Jing, and Wang Jing feebly walked back home, with the ridiculously thick chemistry textbook-Chemistry: Matter and Change-in his hands, as always.

  As he thought about the bonding angles of various substances, Wang Jing suddenly became overwhelmed by the feeling of dismay: ‘Why am I so terrible when it comes to talking with others? Especially girls, I think. Even today, that was Gloria, one of Aika’s close friends. Wang Jing spent the whole afternoon pondering upon his inability to converse with others in a friendly manner. He’d been in numerous quarrels before-he was somewhat of a hothead even though calm in most times-but to his surprise, the one he had that day made him feel depressed. All his confidence in his own brilliance, super-enthusiasm in chemistry, condescending manner were gone; instead, his mind was filled with worries for the future about his relationships with friends. He couldn’t concentrate on what he was studying. 

  Late at night, Wang Jing repeatedly wrote and erased chemical reaction equations in his notebook, kept his eyes on the brooding night sky, and murmured lonely lyrics of Deng Li Jun’s sad songs. Through the subtly cracked windows, he looked up at the brightly twinkling stars of the Virginia sky, ruminating on where he would fit in the diverse, multi-colored world. From the delineation of the stars, he could see Aika’s face: she was smiling at first with her beautiful emerald eyes gently twinkling at him. Then, in the blink of an eye, she stared at him patronizingly with her charming lips whispering esoteric chemistry-related terminologies. Bewitched by the two discrepant images of Aika up in the sky, Wang Jing drank in the night-scenery. Silently and smoothly, he sang a song of the Beatles with the mind of a drifter in this world.

“He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in a nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody…”