APRIL 29 — “You feeling all better now?”

I know the people who love me mean well when they ask if I’m well, if I’ve gotten better, if I’m cured.

You don’t ask the survivors of a war if their lives are back to normal now do you? 

On Friday my legs had started swelling again after an hour at the mall, so I eagerly got to the nearest open seat on the train going home.

Right across from me, a much older gentleman was looking at me with disdain.

All he saw was someone who looked perfectly fine.

Nothing about me now, from a cursory glance, would reveal that just a year prior I was spending most of my free time at the hospital.

Stairs, my forever nemesis

Some days I can go down steps normally but early in the morning or late in the evening my legs are either stiff or swollen or both.

The elevator is my best friend most of the time but sometimes when it’s broken or just too far away, the only option is to take that torturous journey while also dealing with my decades-old fear of falling down steps.

When I feel the back of my ankle brush against the back of a stair, it should be a comfort, a way to know I am firmly on the step instead of too close to the edge.

Instead something in me recoils.

It’s not something I can explain, this revulsion when I feel the back of my ankle or foot touch the back of a stair, worst being the grooves of an escalator.

One of those things that can’t be helped as I wear a size 8 so most stairs just barely accommodate my feet.

In Taipei they again became my cross though not quite as torturous as Bangkok’s nightmare long flights where I thought my heavy backpack would topple me over down, down, down like Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her.

So it was fitting that with the Year of the Horse (my birth year) I would finally visit that land not far from Japan, in a complicated relationship with China.

Why Taiwan?

Taiwan’s capital had long been on my bucket list but when I had money, I had no time; when I had time, my money needed to go elsewhere. 

Thanks to internet promos I paid slightly less than RM1,800 for flights and board for a 4D3N trip.

If I wasn’t currently made of tofu, perhaps I could have stayed longer by staying at a hostel but if I was to survive the trip, I would need a decent bed or I would not be able to leave it at all the next morning.

Taiwan isn’t Japan, where I would need to be checking my currency converter lest I accidentally spend a week’s groceries at a restaurant.

Cheap eats could be had, train and bus fares are very affordable as is, suprisingly, Uber.

Outside of souvenirs I would roughly be paying prices similar to the Klang Valley and that would not be much of a hardship.

Being affordable wasn’t why I wanted to go to Taiwan.

I’ve been to China and Hong Kong but what drew me to Taiwan was how much it reminded me of my own hometown.

In Sabah I grew up around Hakka speakers and it pained me that I while I could find Cantonese, Mandarin and even Hokkien books for my mini language library, I had yet to add Hakka.

That was my main mission — to acquire Hakka books, preferably about the language but I would settle for Hakka literature classics.

While I failed spectacularly at that mission due to bad luck and shyness, I found other things in Taipei.

When everything about you is broken

I understand now why people call travel “healing.”

Once, I would scoff at seeing people on TikTok waxing lyrical about “healing” at various locales, whether it was waterfalls, islands or those music festivals where youngsters basically wear outfits consisting of a handkerchief and one shoelace, adorned with sequins.

When I went to Bangkok last year I was in the throes of depression even if I could not admit to myself.

I know what depression looks like, after all.

I have read books about it, attempted to write a book about it, talked to a doctor about it and called it “healthcare.”

What I told people was that I just needed to be anywhere but here.

When you’re chronically ill your body feels like a prison.

How do you escape it when you carry it with you everywhere you go?

The only answer is to take it, bars, chains and all to where you can forget how the walls seem to close in on you.

While Bangkok was a frenetic change of pace, Taipei was a place both entirely strange to me while promising to be spiritually familiar.

I miss it already.

The next few weeks I’ll write about the too-short time I spent there and then what possessed me to then pencil in a trip to say “Hi” to Mom.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.