I spent Chinese New Year walking around Taipei by myself. 

The city had emptied. The busy, vibrant streets replaced by a hollow hum. 

I was alone again, the quieter environment matched my own solitude. For the last few weeks I had been seeing Natalie every day and night. We would eat most meals together and sleep in her room in a building down the street from the hostel or sneak into one of the hostel’s private rooms. 

I was counting down the clock for Chinese New Year to end and Natalie to come back from her family’s house in Hsinchu. The city didn’t feel the same without her. 

During her short absence I withdrew from the hostel bubble and kept mostly to myself. I had shifted states from lustful drunk to romantic and was actually quite relieved at the change. 

A few days after the firecrackers and red lanterns were packed away for another year, it was time for our planned trip along the east coast of Taiwan. 

. 

“I have to hurry because Brad is hungry.” she said, smiling and pulling a bright blue suitcase behind her. 

The smile disarmed me. 

I took the suitcase and we headed to Taipei Main Station. It would be a long trip through the night to Taitung, a small city far down the east coast. 

I’d heard a lot about the beauty of the island’s sparsely populated eastern flank, it was a shame the only views out of the window were our own darkened reflections staring back at us. 

Natalie took the window seat and slept for most of the journey. I couldn’t relax so easy. 

When I’m left without distraction I open up my imagination and come up with some wild story to live out in my head but I was finding it hard. 

The only thing that kept me sane was the game of the blue dot. 

‘Where am I now?’ 

I pulled out my phone to see where on the map the blue dot placed me. 

Seeing that blue dot in unique places around the world always made me smile, reminding me of the crazy freedom of the life I was living. 

I tracked the blue dot, closed up my phone, looked around the train, stared at my reflection in the window, stared at Natalie’s reflection in the window, stared at Natalie, looked at my shoes, closed my eyes, opened my eyes then opened up my phone and tracked the blue dot again. 

It was a long fidgety journey. 

Deep into the night as the rain came down we reached Taitung Station. 

I left Natalie under the entrance cover and ran across the street to smoke. 

When Taiwan rains it likes to be very clear about it. There’s no such thing as a light shower, the skies of Taiwan let you know, it’s raining and it will be for awhile. 

The Chinese lanterns outside the station swung furiously in the wind as I lit up and inhaled the smoke whilst being hit by an endless supply of thin bullets of water. 

I consumed just enough nicotine to satisfy the monster of addiction before throwing the damp cigarette to the ground. 

I rejoined Natalie under the cover of the station entrance. 

The rain pelted left, the wind switched and then pounded right. Left. Right. Rain. 

A hotel worker arrived to pick us up and drove us to our beds for the night. 

The hotel was old, in the same way grandparents’ houses are old, with all kinds of antiques, the smell of old dust and a style long since done away with by the modern world. 

The next morning after a rough sleep on a hard bed we went to explore Taitung. 

The trees were strung with lightbulbs, the houses small and designed in the style of fairytale chocolate shops. It wasn’t lacking in magic, it was just lacking in anything to do. 

It was a place for people who couldn’t make up their minds between living in a giant metropolis or building a wooden home deep in the jungle and forgetting the troubles of the world. 

It was an inbetween kind of place. 

With nothing really happening in Taitung we packed up and took a bus further south to a small beach town called Dulan. 

As we exited the bus and walked the long main street towards our accommodation, I felt like I had found a place of magic. 

Sometimes in Korea I would imagine Itaewon as its own sovereign nation state. In Dulan I was getting similar images in my head. Imagination masturbation. 

What the fuck was this place? 

A street? 

A highway with half a town littered either side? 

A cheap and broken Taiwanese beach resort? 

Dulan turned out to be a strange enclave of foreigners and stray dogs and a mix of everything above. 

I counted more white faces than Taiwanese in the town’s one 7-Eleven and sunbathing outside the small number of hostels and bars. 

There might have been more stray dogs than people. 

It was a fascinating little street/highway, building littered, cheap and broken Taiwanese beach resort. 

It had little going for it on paper. A sugar factory turned restaurant, a small forested chain of mountains with a few hiking trails and a local landmark made up of a series of ancient stones that were incredibly unimpressive. Insultingly unimpressive. Why da fuck did they leave these stooopid stones laying about kinda unimpressive! 

These little strips of humanity more often than not turn out to be places of intrigue though and Dulan was no exception. 

We checked into an artsy wooden hotel at the end of the main road. 

Our room’s bathroom wall was a shower curtain. Not the best setup for two people who had only been dating around a month. We weren’t some married couple accustomed to the smell of the other’s shit and I was determined we wouldn’t be moving into that territory anytime soon. 

The shower curtain wall meant one of us had to stand guard outside on the balcony while the other used the open-plan toilet to get the business done. 

After we settled in Natalie asked the owners for directions to the beach. 

“What did she say?” I asked as we walked the long driveway towards the main road. 

“Very open!” Natalie laughed, “She said the beach was very open.” 

“VERY OPEN!!!” we repeated to each other as we walked towards it. 

It turned out to be an accurate description, the beach was in fact very open. It was a very open beach. 

The black sand and pebbles spread out for what looked like miles, clouds floated off the nearby mountains and the great Pacific was before us, we had it all to ourselves. 

We went back to the beach a handful of times, but beaches despite how beautiful they can be aren’t really that interesting. 

With the sea too cold to enjoy there wasn’t much to do, once we’d been on the sand for ten minutes we needed something to occupy us. 

We searched the area for something to keep us from retreating into the room for the rest of the trip. 

We hiked up one of the mountains outside town, saw the stooopid stones and snacked on chocolate spread toast as a reward at the top. 

The chocolate spread mountaintop toast was just the beginning of unlocking the food secrets of Dulan. 

At first the food choices appeared not too special – 7-Eleven food, a very poor excuse for an English breakfast or the Italian restaurant located at the very edge of town. 

_ 

‘I wonder what small town Taiwanese Italian food tastes like?’ I thought as we crossed the small wooden bridge connecting the main street to the small pocket of Dulan territory on the other side. 

I had been to a lot of the world’s great cities, ate in plenty of fancy restaurants and yet here I was in a town that was little more than a mile stretch of road with a hundred or so buildings on either side and I was eating THE BEST pasta I’d ever experienced. 

I didn’t even like pasta that much. It wasn’t just good, it was unforgettable. I knew I would remember eating it. And for some reason, to this day, my memory of the meal is in slow motion. 

All three of Dulans star attractions were now ticked off: 

Very open beach 

Chocolate toast on a mountaintop 

The best Italian food in the world 

_ 

“You’re not going to kill me and leave me in the forest are you?” Natalie took a few steps away from me, half joking, half not. 

My first pregnancy scare was upon me. 

I was surprised by my reaction to it. The idea of having a baby even at the young age of 22 wasn’t sending me through a mental tailspin. If it happened, okay, if she wanted to keep it, okay. 

My cool mind lasted until the pee was on the stick and the few agonising minutes waiting for the results of the pregnancy test were upon me. 

TWENTY TWO! BABY! OH FUCK! 

TWENTY TWO!

22, 22, 22 

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling….ahhhhhhhhhh! 

‘We’ve known each other for less than a month!’ 

‘I didn’t even really want to go out that night!’ 

‘It’s weird having an open toilet in your room with no door just a curtain!’  

‘Does she want to keep it!?’ 

‘Do I want to keep it!?’ 

AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHH… 

My mind was a mess. A warzone of possibilities screaming in pain. 

I had my friends to calm me down though, the little bastards may have been indiscriminate killers but they also made life so much more bearable. Lucky Strike Reds were always good friends to me. 

She wasn’t pregnant. We took pictures with the pregnancy test and celebrated the close call like a lottery win. 

A very small part of me was disappointed. It would have been a great story to tell the kid one day. All about Dulan, the very open beach, all the stray dogs and the curtain-walled toilet. Still, only a small part of me. 

For our last night in Dulan we moved to a new room. A wooden hut hidden away amongst the trees of the same hostel. We had a bad argument that night and I was starting to think how long the adventure with this girl was going to last. 

I stepped outside as the fighting came to an end. I took out a Lucky and lit it, as I expelled the smoke from my lungs I looked up, my mind in one moment cleared of all thought. 

w o w w w w . . . . . 

I’d never seen the night sky so alive. Not like this. The infinite engulfed my vision. 

This wasn’t a starry night, this was an announcement of wonder. I was on a rocky dot inside a small bubble of air, a conscious part of it all. 

I ran inside to wake Natalie but she was sound asleep and probably still in post-argument deceleration. I would have to wait until morning before she would listen to me, so I let her sleep and went back outside to admire the infinite. 

There was an unspoken but shared knowledge that this was going to be a relationship. We were already arguing a lot, we both had things the other strongly disliked, but there we were with that shared knowledge. 

We travelled the coast some more before taking the train back to Taipei. When we arrived we booked a cheap hotel room for a few days. 

The room was perfect for a low budget horror movie set but we needed a place to stay while we decided what to do next and it came with a chocolate toast breakfast experience delivered to the room each morning, which more than made up for the crappy interior.  

I had another reason to get a hotel room and not opt for a hostel instead. I had an important call to make and wanted the privacy of my own room to do it in, even if the only affordable one in the city at the time was this hole. 

Since my time in Korea, my childhood dog Jessica had been ill, she needed to be put down and leave the pain that she had been soldiering through for months. No matter how badly I wanted to go home and see her one last time, I couldn’t finish the journey that way. I don’t think she would have wanted me to either. 

The morning of her last day I video called with her. 

I told her I loved her and said goodbye. 

She still smiled despite her body being at the very end of a horrible process of cancer. 

She was a great dog. I still miss her. 

After several days in the hotel, me and Natalie made the decision to move in with each other. 

It made sense to find a place we could share for a month, she would be going back to school to finish her last year of a bachelor’s degree in sociology and I had another month before my Taiwan visa-free status expired. 

If living together went well or if it turned into a disaster, I had an out for both. I could extend my status for another three months or book a new ticket and leave for Singapore. 

We went apartment shopping around National Chengchi University (NCCU), the university Natalie would complete her bachelor’s degree at. 

NCCU was located in Wenshan district, hidden between the surrounding mountains and home to Taipei Zoo and Maokong Gondola. 

It was a little city in itself, a secretive commune away from the crowds. Another sovereign nation state. 

A raging river raged alongside the university buildings, student restaurants and eclectic streets. The upper half of Taipei 101 was visible in the distance, reminding everyone what city they were in. 

We looked at two rooms. A small windowless cove with bunk beds and a basketball court of a room. 

We chose the basketball court. 

Big enough to house six people comfortably, the court was on the first floor of an odd looking building a few minutes walk from NCCU on the main street. 

The court came equipped with a single wooden bed without a mattress, four work desks, a small modern wardrobe with mirrors for doors and a black leather sofa. At the end of the room, a wall of windows opened up to a view of the busy main street below. 

We quickly went about claiming our territory. I laid claim to the leather sofa and put another flag down on the desk nearest to the door, as well as a majority stake in the wall of windows. 

Natalie took the majority stake in the wardrobe and claimed the fourth desk against the long wall opposite the bed, everything else would be shared. 

We slept on a pile of clothes the first night as the sounds of the forest behind us and the cars in front echoed around the room. 

Just as we started to settle into our new home black shirts and sunflowers started to appear on the students of NCCU and the Legislative Yuan was overrun and occupied by the Sunflower Movement.