(I don't know how to make it so that it doesn't play automatically. Sorry. Also, I know the title is nerdy, I was just playing around with the sofware, and now I don't know how to get it off)

The video above comes from the last night I was in Paris.

My plane was leaving early in the morning, so we decided not to go to sleep. We spent these last hours like we had spent the majority of our week together, probing around in the air for some sort of sign that we weren't being foolish. We were constantly asking each other questions: do you do this in Taiwan? Is it true that, in the US, you do that? How do you say this in Chinese?

There was a lot of silence, where we lay quietly on the bed, breathing, never ceasing to be amazed that we could hear the other breathing next to us. I remember thinking how nice it was to feel her breath on my neck and knowing it was her breath.

Despite that, I was scared to death.

One time last spring, I heard a report on National Public Radio that explained how scientists could say that, in atoms, electrons move around the nucleus by "all possible paths." The commentator said that it could be explained by the way a parent views a child. A parent can be furious and utterly in love with their child at the same time. Any person can be both sad and happy at the exact same moment.

There was a message playing my head that was disgustingly contradictory.

"This isn't real!" it cried, "This is too good to be true! Your in Paris, with a girl from the other side of the planet, and your in love! This doesn't really happen to people!" Then a toned, more sober me explained, "Not only is this not real, it's a plane crash." The latter me, was the one that realized, when life is so good, it can only get worse. It's true. It's like that first moment of lifting a heavy weight and thinking, I could hold this forever, but after a minute your arms start shaking from the gravity of it all.

I think that's what a relationship is. It's two people holding something up that's so much bigger than themselves. If either person decides they don't have the strength or purpose to hold it up, it's going to fall.

Three years before laying there with Fanfan, a girl whom I had loved let go and let it fall all around me. I'm sure that's why they call it "falling" in love. The thing is, when your falling, you think your flying. The first time you hit bottom, you never forget it.

It was the memory of hitting bottom that kept me from being completely happy about feeling her next to me.

"Tu sais, j'ai peur," I said to her. She didn't move. She told me she knew I was scared, so was she. I told her that I just wanted to be honest.

"Je sais," she said. Neither of us moved.

In just a couple of hours, I would be going back to the US to finish my senior year. She would, of course, stay in Paris. If one were to take a globe and draw a perfectly straight line from Clemson, South Carolina to Paris, it'd be 4,298 miles (6,917 kilometers) long.

I still find it amusing that my first girlfriend broke up with me after two years because she couldn't take the 200 miles from her college to mine, or so she said.

That, however, is a perfect example of how my life has changed in the last two years. Far from being the Charleston native, whose world consisted of very little outside South Carolina, I am now utterly involved in the push and pull of the world. In just a couple of years, I went from never having left the country or spoken a foreign language, to having lived abroad and travelled to countries as far away as Bosnia and Poland. My world went from being small, to enormous, and, as a result, to being even smaller than it was before.

The distance from Taipei to Paris to Charleston is nothing, unless your trying to get there. You see, that's one part of our globalization. Fanfan and I, after the night I spoke of above, would go back to being thousands of miles apart, but there would pass very few days where we didn't speak, where we didn't see each other. Will, my roomate and fellow voyager, had a webcam that he never used, so I would attach it to my computer, and Fanfan and I would talk to each other for several ours a day.

I didn't know that when I was laying there in Paris, nor did that reality make it easier to be far from Fanfan. I still couldn't tell you if it's easier to see her and not be able to touch her or not to see her at all.

The hours passed. We rambled around the tiny yellow room. Kissing, cooking, trying to learn about each other. She pulled out some paintbrushes and a special type of paper that they use in most Asian countries to teach kids how to write (it's what's in the video). What you do is you wet the brush with water and write, after just a couple of minutes, the words are gone, like invisible ink, and you can rewrite the words.

At about four that morning, I took a shower, and we packed my bags. An hour later, we were walking the blistering cold streets of Paris. After a week of pretending to be the only two people in the world, the empty Paris streets just seemed to reinforce the illusion. There was no sound, save for the wind. There was no sound but our feet.

The next part I remember is several hours later. I was on the escalator bridge leading to the terminal where I would take my flight to go back home, through the class I could see Fanfan staring at me looking utterly helpless and alone. That image is burned in my head, seeing her standing there crying, with people just passing by behind her.

I never want to leave her again. I never want to be far from her. I can't take that.

That's what I mean about seeing her and not being able to touch her. There are some things that words can't do, for that you have to touch people. I never want to know that she's hurt, lonely, happy, hopeful, or broken and not be able to touch her and experience it with her.

I've never been in love with someone like that.

I used to tell people that love is being with someone and not needing to say anything, but dying to speak to that person when they're away. I'd revise that a little now, because the physical touch of that person is a crucial aspect of love.

When I would lay awake at night, I craved just the feeling of her hair.

I can't leave her again, that's all I can say.

Technorati tags: love, relationships, Taiwan, Life, America, Current Affairs, Politics, globalizatoin