The Silk Road Did Not Ask for My Time and Yet Here We Are

It started with a single sentence in a library book I've been meaning to finish since December. One of those offhand mentions, a place name, a route, a casual reference to merchants and spices like it was nothing, and I thought, I'll just look that up real quick.

Two hours later I have three pages of notes in my notebook. Not for school. Not for anything. Just because I apparently needed to understand, at eleven o'clock on a Thursday night, how goods moved across Central Asia in the 1200s. I drew a little map. I circled the word 'caravanserai' four times because it is genuinely one of the best words I have ever encountered and I don't know what to do with that information.

the notes I took at midnight like this was homework

The mug of tea I made at the start of this went completely cold. I didn't notice until I picked it up to drink it and it was room temperature and I made a face and then kept reading anyway. That felt like a metaphor for something but it was almost midnight and I was too deep in the Tang Dynasty to figure out what.

I closed the notebook eventually. Turned off the desk lamp. Lay in bed thinking about trade routes for another twenty minutes. The application wait is still happening in the background, still refreshing my email more than I'd like to admit, but tonight my brain decided to take a detour somewhere about eight hundred years ago, and honestly, I didn't hate it.

the natural conclusion of a two-hour rabbit hole on a school night