I’ll start with the lady sitting beside me on my flight from Toronto to Newark. Her acrylic nails pressed tightly against her phone as she spoke, voice steady but stretched thin. She dabbed at her eyes, and that’s when I realized she was crying. Should I have offered her a piece of tissue? I pulled out a pack of alcohol wipes instead and scrubbed at my seat handle, once, twice, thrice, as if that could stop me from being uprooted, strands of me still clinging to Canadian soil, and tossed into a hastily dug hole on the other side of the border.
Life was static in the hotel; I threw my clothes into the bottom dryer and paid for the top one. A pot of soup from last night’s meal cold on the stove, my graduation dress strewn across the bed to dry. Alice’s uncle would visit me every two days, and I’d peel myself from the bed to greet him. I had hoped for solitude for so long but I had forgotten how to enjoy it. Air drowned aside me, drunk on memories that had too little time to ferment.
Alice didn’t go home that year, but at least I got to spend my birthday with her.
Where do you call home, anyway?
Beside you, I would say, the dusty floor outside of an art museum, under the tropical sun, scrambling to balance a bowl of cold noodles on my knees as I chase after a rogue plastic bag. Beside you, kneeling on a plank of wood, scooping ice-cold sea water into a wheelbarrow. Beside you, scrunching my eyes as we laugh about how we’re so bad at switch mario, pouring water through straws to dilute 50% sugar milk tea. Beside you, your brownies, your grin, your writing, I can’t even think of anything else to say but just you. Beside you, wearing your shoe actually, poring over draft resolutions and then snippets of your school life and now anything that pops into our minds. Beside you, dumping indomie water from your window, never mind if that would attract bears at midnight; we’d be awake anyway. Beside you, as I steal one of your shoes from under the table and sneak away, as Salma knocks on my door asking if I had seen your shoes and I die laughing. Beside you, as you bend down to measure the water level of pedder bay for your IA, as you come up with a math problem not even mbm could solve, and I realize how lucky I am to have you in my life. Beside you, as we try to watch a movie but end up just talking, as you complain about my passive-aggressiveness and I laugh and say and that’s why you love me. Beside you, playing volleyball in your room with you and your sister, your mom had made me her special porridge. Beside you, as you indulge me in my ridiculous obsession over cute stationery, as you smugly boast about your girlfriend, you’re such a simp. Beside you, staring at your slipper that somehow ended up on top of Woodward, and contemplating if it would be worth risking my life climbing up a frozen roof for you. Beside you, beside you, beside you, until I was no longer beside you.
I was uprooted, and it felt like I couldn’t breathe, that without the bits and pieces I left in you, that you left in me, I was withering and wilting and wasting away. The hole I was thrown into was too big, and I couldn’t fill the void.
But now I sit beside Janss steps, my bare feet against moist earth. An hour ago I lay down and saw stars; I bet those are the stars we once gazed at together. Graduating seniors ice block beside me, losing control and tumbling, rolling, somersaulting down their way. The sky is so wide. It is as if I could breathe in the whole world, as if the air could slowly trickle in and fill up all the tiny gaps you left.
And it suddenly occurs to me that I envy my ECE3 car. It can veer off course, crashing into walls screaming and wailing and complaining, and a sad engineer would dive after it and stop it from hurting itself. If I repeatedly throw myself against the wall when my car doesn’t work ,I’d probably get thrown out of the lab. And thus I told Emily that Friday I was having my first sad engineer moment. She glanced at me, incredulous. First? This is your first sad engineer moment? What about Mario? CS33? And I suppose what I had meant was I was having my first sad group engineer moment. In the dimly lit corridor of Engineering 4, crouching over a dirty track, writing code, cursing arduino with a bunch of other (I assume) sad engineers, I could feel new roots growing, holding onto new soil, a new life.
And I finally got to return to the ocean. The water was so cold, but I would’ve let the water take me for all I cared. Volleyball, wrestling, Chinese rolling off my tongue for hours and hours. The faces were different, but they made it feel like home again. I went to the beach again a couple weeks later, exactly a year after I left Pearson. They started a fire with lighter fluid, and I guess some things do change, but the s’mores tasted just as good. When we left we saw fireworks.
And of course, other things. Studio ghibli, zip cars, people who stop and wait to make sure you don’t wander off lost. Free pizza, column cookies, frisbee and the beach with giants. Grabbing food, ramen and donuts, you should be honored because you’re the only one I roast here. Mirror selfies, future roommates, I’ll see you back in Taiwan?
It’s 3:25 am and I’m in Powell, pulling an all-nighter not for finals but for the aesthetics. A couple of hours ago I was lying on the damp grass by Janss steps; through my drooping eyelids I could almost see the buzzing around Engineering 4. The moon was hidden behind clouds when I went out at 10 pm to meet Jenny; I’d like to think it didn’t want to watch people leave, or what people left behind. But the sky has now cleared up, and the dark spots of the moon saw everything.
It’s crazy that I’m leaving, when everything had just started to make sense. In six hours, in two hours, and then the sun blossomed from the tip of the tree outside of Rende. I packed up and left, leaving everything exactly how I found them nine months ago, except for the desk I had pulled out with Athena and couldn’t push back by myself.
Physically I’m leaving UCLA, but mentally it feels like I’m leaving Pearson again. There’s this tattered bag I have tied around my waist that I drag as I trudge forward. With every step something important is left behind on the dusty road, but with every step I bend and pick up a pretty-looking rock, or maybe a funny-looking flower, that reminds me of the old one I lost, and place it into my bag. And I guess this is how you get used to everything. How I will have to get used to everything.