She left for America kicking and screaming. She almost
seemed to forget she had willingly submitted the
application herself, the consequences of her own choices
eclipsed by her principled commitment to pleasing others.
She had already made up her mind on the culture, the
ethics, the lack of public transportation, America’s blind
devotion to faith, and distrust in community—or in
anything else she seemed to value, for that matter.
It had become a point of pride to drag her feet the whole
way across the Atlantic ocean – at once a reflection of her
fear of departure, and a performance for those left behind.
Her belief in the expansiveness of her own worldviews
only grew stronger as she sat there alone, picking at her
mac and cheese with the cheap plastic cutlery from the
student hall, convinced of the unfounded judgement she
had already made about her classmates. Unlike the
coddled, the sheltered, and the suburb-raised, she was
opinionated, well-traveled, and multilingual. Although she
would never perceive the irony in it, she relentlessly
devoured American exports and regurgitated its
progressive rhetoric into critiques of her stiff home
systems. She grew up going to punk shows filled with
thoughtful addicts, was given the freedom to walk home
late at night giggling with her girlfriends, hiding from
lurking men in cars. She tells people she almost got into a
street fight once. In reality, she stood petrified as a man
threatened to punch her in the face. Within the confines of
her rituals, she might as well have been free to do anything.
Somehow, the anything she falteringly chose became
America. Upon her arrival, the expansiveness of choice
became foreign, like she, wondering how it could be that
her effortlessness now felt unwieldy and misplaced.
She spends most of her first year alone. Still, she hears it
over and over. Wow, she sounds so American now, her
loved ones back home say. She can hear her grandmother’s
disapproving pout from the other end of the line. There was
no possible interpretation in which this could not be
perceived as an insult. She wondered how the body
could display perceptible change, in the bending of
the palate and the curving of the tongue, when the
mind didn't yet belong. For the very first time, her
neighborhood Thai spot brings out her regular order
without handing over a menu. Welcome home, she
thinks. The Khao Soi tastes better here.
She is visiting home for winter break, back at the
punk club where beers cost 50 cents and regulars
keep an eye out, gathering protectively around
lurking threats. As her friends debate on politics and
shame the country she chose to migrate her life to,
she sits mute and embarrassed, thinking, you know,
it’s actually not as bad as they think. People are
smart and politically minded and disagree with the
systems in place there, too. She thinks back to the
first American friend she made, boisterous, loud and
unlike anyone she would have anticipated loving,
who boxed up and packed her whole apartment in a
time of need, no questions asked. She wonders if
the European socially endorsed lamenting would
have restrained her childhood friends from doing
the same. She doesn’t say any of this to her
confidants and their much older boyfriends - with
years of law school and international relations uni
under their belt. Out loud, she tells them that
anyways, the country’s context is different. Now
that she has been there a few years, she’s learned
from the futile attempts of scaling socialist systems
and collectivist outlooks to the sheer newness and
expanse of America, she adds. Well, ultimately, he
suggests, she is still upholding the standards of a
morally abject institution that promotes war waging,
job insecurity and the privatization of public
sectors, and that’s something only she can decide
whether or not she is ok with. She moves away
from the grime-caked wall, leaving space for the
couple now grinding up against it. She sees what he
means, but like, who isn't really. Our politicians
may have more decorum but the institutions are
rotten all the same. Yea haha true. Want another
beer? Anyways, it's not like she’s intending to stay
there more than just through school, the education is
great but she doesn’t see herself there forever. They
all nod in understanding. She takes a sip of her
Rothaus pilsner and soothes her insecurity, suddenly
so self-aware of the tenseness in her jaw, by
checking her phone.
She looks up at these people she loves, with whom
she spent her most formative teenage nights, nights
which tasted of Döner, discount chocolate, and
hand-rolled cigarettes, discussing philosophy and
politics and moving weightless through the emptied
streets of her birthplace, until they decided to finally
do the dishes and go to bed with sunrise. She thinks
about how, with just a little perspective, their
venerated open-mindedness seems dreadfully
narrow now.
She is in bed with an American boy. A boy who
yesterday, picked up a rock in the shape of a heart,
and effortlessly gifted it to her. She wakes up from
the sound of her buzzing phone early in the
morning, after an inebriated house party. She stares
frozen at her screen, unsure of her own resolve.
She looks over to the Tom Sawyer look-alike sound
asleep by her side. She quietly puts her phone back
on the milk crate that functions as this American
boy’s night stand, rolls over into his arms and goes
back to sleep.
She hasn’t stood up from her desk in hours. She
forgot to eat lunch. She is on her third cup of coffee,
which by now has fully substituted water in her
diet. It's probably fine because she read somewhere
the net outcome still results in hydration from the
water needed to brew the coffee. She can’t really
remember what the source was but dismisses her
doubts, rubs her carpal tunnel and keeps clicking
away, masking the pixels on her monitor. Her first
full-time job, coveted and glamorous, will
eventually reveal itself as deceiving. She won’t
realize until a few years later that this is how it
usually goes. For now, she still feels the intensity of
the most urgent and completely deferrable task in
the world. Her phone rings.
She looks at the bonding effort on her small screen.
She smiles. Glances at the time. She’ll respond
later.
Out of sight out of mind couldn’t have been
proclaimed by someone who dwells. It is absolutely
never out of mind, she thinks.
She swivels around on her desk chair, reaching for
her phone and spills coffee all over her keyboard.
She falters, flailing hands, looking left to right for a
solution to her self-inflicted misfortune. She
despairs at the frequency of these mishaps and her
incapacity to correct her deep-seated bad habits.
She settles on using the pillow from the bed, with
its sides flush against three different bedroom walls,
and the fourth touching her desk. She uses part of
her place of rest to clean up the messes she leaves in
her wake. Well, that kind of worked. She looks at
the cold brew soaked pillow, the same one her
mother had bought her from the mall when she first
moved to America six years ago. She glances at the
clock, not yet adjusted to last month’s daylight
savings, and sighs at the chaos that has already
permeated her day at 9:13AM. She forgets to
answer her grandmother’s text.
She is getting ready for her interview and carefully
blow drying her hair, putting each warm strand in a
curler. She learned how online (the substitute for
information typically passed down from mothers to
daughters). She starts early, because she is always
late. Somehow, still, she fills up all that time with
non-pressing, arbitrary tasks that suddenly feel
itching to her. She sorts the coins that have been
sitting on the desk since she moved to her fourth
New York apartment. She unscrews the kitchen
cupboards with the intent to paint them verdigris.
Had they lived in the same country, she and her
friend would have surely painted the cupboards
together over gossip and wine, like they used to do.
Her wandering thoughts remind her she forgot to
answer a pressing matter.
She suddenly remembers the original task at hand.
She checks the time, realizes she would have been
on time to the interview, 5 minutes ago. She pulls
out the hair curlers from the half of her head she got
to, ties it back in a bun and scruambles to the
subway, which, expectedly, is running 7 min late.
She can’t help but think of the irony of heart attacks
and suicides, always happening the days she can’t
get her life together.
Annoyed at herself, she unlocks her phone
manually after face ID fails twice, and swallows the
cost of a rush hour taxi to Manhattan.
She thinks of her two friends almost every day, yet
she hasn't texted in years. After slow
back-and-forths, they eventually stopped initiating,
too. She now realizes she lost their numbers along
with her last shattered phone, years ago. She had
told herself she would never miss someone so
deeply yet lack the courage to do anything about it.
She has grown to understand the weight of passing
time and extending space.
It struck her, the speed at which her attention
sharpens when facing the possibility of urgency,
when she may be needed. Yet she thinks of the
reliability at which her attention immediately drifts,
when the interruption is driven by leisure or love.
She considers how aimless that is.
Her leg starts falling asleep from being in the same
position for too long. She never knows what to say
when she is asked this, anyhow. The cultural
asymmetry that paralyzed her when she first moved
away now makes her doubt the inevitability of
home. She watches as her relationships shift—and
now lets them. She stands up and leans on the sink,
an attempt at relief from the shooting pain in her
toes. Cursing herself, she remembers a video she
saw somewhere saying sitting on the toilet for over
10 minutes was bad for you. She can’t recall the
specifics.
She sees her existence as discontinuous—brief
connections severed and shifted along two parallel
timelines. She cannot shake the feeling that
geography drives the progress of her relationships.
Where she is not, love crystallizes, immovable,
unchangeable, ungrowable, until she finally decides
to release them with a retreat.
She has been drowning under a schedule of her own
design, driven by her incapability of declining, a
defining flaw.
She grows increasingly frustrated by the pressures
of splitting her time. The jump cuts between her life
and the love she has for others, witnessed in stolen
moments. She is half of a whole, half intelligent,
half funny, half loving, half here, half there. She is,
she thinks, not enough.
She convinces herself she can't possibly have time
to spare: time to laugh at the joke, time to talk about
nothing at all for three hours on the phone. The
non-consensual nature of long distance
communication goes undisputed, evidenced by the
understanding that there are no alternatives. The
strain from the required accessibility to her attention
at any hour of the day, regardless of context, wears
her down.
Dependably, remorse sets back in. She loses the
sanctimonious belief in the anger she has nurtured
over the course of years, or perhaps, within the last
10 minutes. She again becomes incongruous here,
precisely because she is vanishing there. The
infinite cycle—love interrupting her day, day
disrupting her devotion—perhaps reveals the true
burden of independence.
She is excitedly recounting a story to the man she
loves as they walk hand in hand to their
neighborhood coffee shop where the clientèle has
gotten progressively more monolithic over the
years. Trash skitters along the gutters in a gust of
icing wind as she confides that she's finally caught
her stride after a decade here. Did he ever think that
somehow, although the weather is cold, she has
never minded New York winter because of the
brightness. Winter out west is so much nicer
though, her love interjects. She tells him she finds
the perpetuity of it mind numbing. He preemptively
thinks, you know, he’ll probably, at some point,
have to move there for work. The subtext hangs
between them. Doesn't he understand her aversion
to that place? Everything is right here, can’t he see.
And she’s already so far from home. They can
figure it out, but like, he can’t expect her to drop
everything and move another three time zones
away. It’s ok, they can cross that bridge when they
come to it. She wonders if he comprehends what it’s
like loving a sister as much as she does, and having
to accept the reduction of their relationship to a
string of absentminded texts and bi-annual visits?
He tells her she is stubborn. She still refuses to even
give it a chance. Her withdrawal urges him to stop,
she despises arguing on the street. She is unable to
articulate the landscape of her homesickness, in a
borrowed tongue, to a man who has never had to
reconcile with absence as presence.
She doesn't call back. She can’t bear sharing her
mundane, convoluted unhappiness with the biased.
The appearance of steadfastness deceives both the
audience and performer alike.
She is listening to her friend rant beautifully about
the mundane. They finally got together for happy
hour, after rescheduling and rain checking back and
forth a few times. She glances at her phone, which
flashes with a request from over there.
She looks away from her device, reigns in her focus
to the conversation at hand, driven by a conviction
in the necessity of undivided presence. Yet, a fissure
takes shape in her attention and slowly widens—
these gaps, she reflects, have become embedded in
the very foundation of the person she is now.
Perhaps relationships were always meant to be
pulled apart, by distance and by time, allowing for
more surface to be covered, offering care more
permanence and stability. She thinks of how adult
love might simply be an expression of splitting and
tearing moments into many little pieces, and
sending them back, scattered one by one into the
atmosphere. Ultimately, she misses the window to
give her advice on which outfit to wear. Guiltily,
she glances at her phone once more, and fails to
notice the almost imperceptible sign of
disappointment on her friend’s face, sitting across
from her at the bar, too.