Macau

The rain had been falling through the evening as the front moved in from the South China Sea. It was still not summer but the air was not cold. Walking up the hill, I got this strange mix of déjà vu and premonition, like I could imagine myself decades hence stranded in a decrepit apartment in one of the houses, sipping small-batch bourbon whiskey and trying to finish a novel that no one will read on one of the typewriters of my childhood. The romantic excuses of professional failure, to make a fetish out of what every academic fears the most, to be lost in words.