And then they died…suddenly

All that loving…longing…even lusting.

First the corner store owner. Then the jewelry store couple. Amidst counting their silver coins and bitcoins.

Leaving their inventory behind. Their relatives behind. And their retail customers bewildered.

Stores closed. Finished. The end.

Never got to do Sinatra’s “My Way”.

Never got to take that trip of a lifetime

Never got to celebrate their well-deserving birthdays, to walk their daughters down the aisle (and to give them away properly and publicly.)

Never got to see tomorrow’s sun, to look up Groundhog Day’s weather.

Just like that. Gone and forgotten. Like yesterday’s flowers.

Perhaps they once learned languages, second ones: at Chinese school, French lycee or at an ESL class.

What’s with Vietnamese, our century-old native language? Just because it doesn’t carry the weight of “currency”?

We have our loving, longing and lusting too!

That had been before we died…not in war, but during the pandemic.

Talking about war. Vietnamese got more-than-a-fair share of it: from fighting fits-and-starts with the Chinese up North, followed by anti-colonial sentiments and struggles against the Chateaubriands of the world (what were those European breeding in Southeast Asia to begin with) and fairly recently the Vietnam “experience”- hot flare up during the Cold War?!?

All those fighting and in-fighting, only to collapse at the feet of bat virus…From spare parts to body parts -victory counting and accounting derived from McNamara’s Pentagon propaganda.

And then they died, prospect or retrospect.

The moral arc of history traces itself to infinity, full weight of accounting…(and of sin, is death).

But when we focus (by zooming in), we see the differences, split hair….50 shades of grey, of vaccined and unvaccinated zip codes.

I felt a jolt, a reminder that life is short-lived. And that all the counting and accounting don’t amount much. First silver coins (to point out the Son of Man) to finally the bitcoins (for re-distributing digital disinformation).

Who is going to have the last laugh? The laugh soundtrack of late-night shows on TV? or the ones who keep tab of their growing war chests…for the next election and de-selection? Will they live on to be 100 and re-call their swindles and loots?

America is a strange land and a strange place. It thrives on being (both rightly and wrongly) and becoming better than anyone else… at home or at the Olympics… out West and in the Mid-West…but then… they died. A better more supreme- version of their previous selves…the ones had got left behind ( ethnic grandparents’)…

Live free? Sure, clothing are optional. Die free? For sure. Free to die. To bring others with you (by way of spreading anti-vac). By way of spreading hate (while still alive). By way of filling up your gas tank and war chest, to all of a sudden, fall by the wayside (like the last scene in the Godfather) unable to finish up a sentence, a complete thought or a full accounting of silver coins and bitcoins.

Wait….my passwords…my last words…Let me finish…Oh Lord, I have gone astray…too late to live out a Judas life.

We have yet learned to distinguish between cost and price… price paid for all that loving, longing and lusting called life.

All of a sudden … in mid-sentence. Like a dangling modifier, an incomplete thought. A life interrupted. Half-baked narratives full of attention-getters and impatient garbles – digitally unworthy in the age of artificial intelligence and internet.