Julius Caesar awoke that morning and sat up on his modest bed. He was satisfied with his past few weeks’ doings, after taking down Pompey and conquering Rome promptly after he came and saw what poor condition it lay in. Now, as leader of Rome, he could not have felt any better about his life. He lifted himself off the bed and strolled into his kitchen where his wife, Calpurnia, greeted him with a warm smile and a steaming plate of breakfast.
“I hope you finally got a good night of rest Julius, after your little conquest of those silly Romans,” she said. “Now eat up, I have leftovers in the fridge if you want some more, you need to fatten up that skinny build of yours!”
“Fine, fine, thanks Calpurnia. I’ll finish up my breakfast and head down to the Senate,” Julius replied with a smile as he devoured his meaty breakfast. He was scraping up the last of his eggs when he heard his wife exclaim something from the bedroom.
“Oh Julius! What a strange horoscope you have today. You are a Leo, right?” she questioned, and Julius grunted a yes back. He never did enjoy the foolishness involved with horoscopes.
“So, what’s so special about it today, honey?” Julius politely questioned.
“It says, ‘Beware the ides of March’, pretty cryptic, huh?”
“Definitely honey, but it’s just a horoscope, I doubt I need to beware of any March ides.”
“Oh but wait! It’s a date, March 15th, I just Googled it.”
“It’s just a date, don’t worry. That’s in such a long while anyways, who cares?!” Julius replied, and put his dish in a basin as he put on his cloak and walked out towards the Senate for another brutal Monday at work.
Meanwhile, two Senators, Brutus and Cassius, met in the corner of a town square and greeted each other with handshakes.
Cassius flashed a smile and emphatically said, “My man Brutus! What’s going on brother? Did you catch the horse race yesterday? Man, they knocked this guy off his horse so hard, he lost an ear and an eye! Blood was pooling up all around him an-”
“That’s…that’s just disgusting Cassius. No, I wasn’t there. Please stop.”
“But it was so crazy man! Wish you could’ve been there to seen it,” but when Brutus didn’t seem to lighten up, Cassius questioned, “Is everything alright bro?”
“Just a few things on my mind, don’t think you’re offending me or anything…”
“Sorry to hear that man. Go vent to that cute girl of yours at home, Portia’s the name, right?”
“Yes.”
“OK, look. I got an idea that’ll spice up your life a bit, you know, break up that boring routine.”
“It being?”
“So you know that new Julius Caesar guy? Our new leader?”
“Of course, Cassius. He’s one of my closest friends.”
“Well, I say we kill him. You know, stab him to death. Then dip our hands in his blood and show the Roman citizens what we’re made of.”
“Wait, what?! What?! Cassius what are you thinking of this as? Some sport?”
“Oh no, sorry, I forgot to mention why. Sorry. I think Julius is going to just start soaking up the power. You know, destroy our republic and create some crazy empire.”
“That makes sense I guess…Hm. I’ll think about it Cassius.” Brutus responded as he waved goodbye and went on his way.
Later that day, after Brutus finished his afternoon cup of tea, he began to ponder his fellow Senator Cassius’ assassination plan. He decided that, despite how much he loved his Saturday fishing expeditions with Julius in the Tiber, assassinating him was for the good of Rome. He went home and posted on Cassius’ Facebook wall: “I’m in, my man! Let’s take this bad boy down! (P.S. How did you get such a high score on Bejeweled?! Jeez…get a life).”
Months came and months went, and Julius slowly gained power as Brutus and Cassius’ assassination plan grew concurrently as well. Then, March 14th came. That night, Calpurnia dreamt an odd series of dreams. First, she was prancing through a field of flowers with her husband Julius, singing a cheerful song as they were skipping along until Julius got his foot stuck in a hole and face-planted into the ground, breaking his nose. Later, she was standing on a balcony looking down at Julius while he eloquently admitted his powerful love to her for the first time, until her brothers found him in the bushes and promptly beat him up. The final dream concerned her most however, when a magnificent marble statue of her lovely husband began spewing blood out of his mouth, an endless grotesque torrent. She woke up in her dark bedroom, wide-eyed and heavy breathing, as she stared at the glow of her desk clock reading: 4:44 AM. Still shaking from the nightmare, she climbed out of bed and sat herself at her desk, opened her laptop and began to write a detailed blog post about her dream to calm herself down. After she tweeted about it though, of course.
That morning, the fifteenth of March, Calpurnia explained the dream to her drowsy husband.
“Honey, it was just a bad dream. I’m not going to suddenly explode in some gory mess,” Julius reassured.
“Fine…but maybe you should stay home today? You’ve been awfully overworked recently and honestly…maybe my dream was an omen or something. I don’t want anything bad happening to you today Julius.”
“Don’t be silly, it was just a dream! And anyways, I feel fine, I’ll come home a little early today just for you, ok? We can have a nice dinner and go out to watch a drama, I hear there’s a good one playing just around the corner. Something about these two guys murdering an arrogant fellow.”
“Alright honey,” Calpurnia said with a sigh, “just be careful today. Here’s your lunch, I packed your favorite fish stew. Have a good day at the Senate!”
“I’ll try,” Julius mumbled, as he hurried out the front door.
On his way out, Julius peeked into his mailbox. Just a few ads and a letter from Artemidorus—Julius always thought of him as a little annoying and never much of a help, so he left it in the box for his wife to pick up later in the day. He rounded the corner and waited under a hulking tree for his chariot to arrive when his pocket buzzed. He pulled out his Blackberry and saw a text message from Artemidorus. Julius promptly ignored it and went to check his email. Three more emails from Artemidorus. Julius began to get severely irked by him, and decided to confront him later in the day. He then went to check his Facebook to see how many people liked his status that he posted last night regarding the “chariot race that was so boring that I planned to execute the losers for being so terrible”. He saw a post on his wall from Artemidorus again, but deleted it before ever reading it, his frustration boiling over. As his chariot pulled up on the side of the road however, Julius saw a new status update pop into his feed, from his good friend Brutus: “Gonna be a big day today! Big boy Caesar’s gonna go down with 23 big shiny, bloody daggers in him! Take that, dictator!”
Appalled, Julius waved off his chariot and rushed home to his equally shocked wife. He then spent the rest of the day home with his wife, playing music and chatting about how ridiculous Brutus was.
The next day, news spread that Brutus and Cassius committed suicide, apparently out of the misery that their months spent planning Julius’ assassination were crushed due to their decision on carrying it out on the Ides of March. Rumor spread that the date was disputed between the Ides of March and the Ides of May between the two, and a coin toss decided it.
Almost everyone I meet calls me by my English name. The rest addresses me by a name known by less than a handful of people, a name from my motherland, the name of a poplar.
Mom tells me stories of her childhood in Northern China where the trees were ubiquitous. She described them as being composed of stability and stoutness. A light silvery white is painted over its trunk, as it shoots into the heavens with a skyscraper’s undeviating mentality. Sturdy branches jut from the sides indiscriminately, appendages of an almost eerie quality. Dangling at the ends are small rounded leaves, green on one side but an almost-metallic white on the other. As breezes go by and they dance in the sunlight, the scintillating effect is near surreal, hundreds of miniscule mirrors turning rays of sun into a light show. When the clock of seasons strikes spring, flurries of seedpods float off the tree, each with a parachute of white fibers, like the down of a goose. When the humid summers arrive, pedestrians strive to reach breaks of heat under the massive dark shadows the tree casts onto the sidewalk.
My surname is nothing like my first though. It’s just a name. It has no meaning. How could there be significance when they're millions of other people that carry the title? But at least the name given by my mom has blessed me with an identity.
(more freshman year writing..)
A soft wind danced through the evergreen thickets of pine trees as clouds slowly converged together. The faint chirping of birds intermittently crescendo and fade away as the occasional car rumbles through the small suburban side street. The sky ultimately becomes overcast with ominous grey clouds as the pitter-patter of rain begins to increase—just another average Seattle day.
In the small suburb lay rows of modest homes in dull colors, no larger than two stories tall and four windows wide. In one off-white house, no better or worse than the others, resided the Fishers. The interior of their home is no more special than the exterior. Austere white walls, sparsely decorated with the occasional framed photo, surround small living spaces, with not much more than basic wooden antique furniture and piles of old bank transcripts. The smell of mothballs permeates the dusty air as one makes way through the musty, confined halls.
The couple living there was of relatively old age, not too old to lose self-reliance, but just a bit too old to relive their youthful energy. Sarah Fisher, of petite stature with dreary green eyes and long curly brunette hair, follows her daily schedule of waking up, feeding her cats, and walking in circles around her neighborhood with her mug of earl grey—which she rarely cares about, even if it goes cold. Her husband, Michael Fisher, who resembles the average post-middle aged man, with a scruffy graying beard and a thin layer of silver-black hair on his head, also lives his life by a monotonous routine. After a brief breakfast, he drives to work in an outdated BMW. After a day in his cubicle, he drives home, sits down at the rough, worn out oak dining table with his wife. They do not talk much as the aromas of a simple meatloaf fill the room. Only two chairs surround their table, since company never arrives.
The Fisher’s live a plain, apathetic life. They do not seem to mind, however, although they may not be aware of their indifference in their pedestrian daily routines. In the modest off-white house, lining a dark asphalt two-lane road under cumulonimbus skies, lived the Fishers. They lived a simple, linear life—but they were content.
Mom told me she chose this apartment because of the sunlight. “The apartment faces south, so light will always come in at the right times,” she would always say. And she's right, when I would turn the corner out of the hallway around noon, light pours through the patio French doors, engulfing the living room. I don’t blame her for wanting all these rays—anybody rebuilding a shredded life wouldn’t mind it.
But before anybody ever steps foot in this dwelling of light, they see a salmon colored building, standing as stout as a redwood on the decline of a steep hill. Smells of grease from the fast food joint and sounds of power tools at the repair shop at the foot of the hill creep their way up over the roar of the rush hour traffic, creating hectic Friday afternoons. But this isn’t an urban wasteland. This is home.
A brief walk through the lobby and a short elevator ride up, and I would step into the dimly lit hallway of the first floor, with small light fixtures every door down and shadows surreptitiously creeping along its walls. A left turn at the dead end in the back of the ominous hallway comes with the sight of an austere white door, energized with a small hanging Chinese ornament of several modest gold trimmed, bright red firecrackers.
A few strides through the doors, and with it, the still silence of a simple home, broken occasionally by the splashes of a fish tank and spikes of noise from the busy street outside. Passing by the open kitchen, aromas of delectable food greet me as I make my way to the spacious living room. Here, I recall moments of pain and sorrow, moments that try deterring me from an idea of a home. But in the end, those trifles never win out. A slow descent into the couch, and I allow myself to enjoy the sun.
(from a year ago. weird to look back on how I wrote, how I looked at things.)
