The same, but different

Around this time two years ago I’d just turned in my second essay for EN502. I uncovered it recently while looking at my old writing in preparation for grad school applications (fondly referred to as my grapps).

In that essay, I wrote about the loneliness of being left behind. The inevitability of coming and going. But I’ve found that the people I know never leave; there’s just all this history I don’t know how to manage.

Now that I’m at home again, I find myself asking one question, over and over: do you remember me?

You were the athletic trainer that evaluated me for a concussion when I took that hard hit in high school. You comforted me as I cried from fear and pain. Now we play adult league hockey against each other. When we make eye contact on the ice, do you remember?

When we were in second grade I used to go to your house after school. We’d slide down your stairs in cardboard boxes and eat frozen yogurt, and now I’m running into you at a dive bar, asking, do you remember? The history we have together?

I used to see you every day. Now when I see you I ask how the new job is and you say good, then you ask me how I’m doing and I say good. Then we both look away from each other and I’ll never know you again but I remember everything you used to be.

Endings and endings and purgatory between ending and beginning.

Now that I’m home again, I remember how much I love the snow on the mountains and leaves on the ground and sunlight on the river, and it’s still the same love, my heart feels full to burst. But then I’ll meet a friend for lunch at the one Japanese restaurant in town and an elderly white couple will ask me do you work here? as I walk through the front door or I’ll get called the name of my high school teammate, the only other hockey playing Chinese girl in town, and then I remember I hate it here, bracing for the next comment, the next alienating question that reminds me that I may think I belong here but I don’t. I don’t. I find myself in the forests but get betrayed by the people.

And then November began and I realized I only had two months left in my self-imposed deadline to submit all my grapps. Then the election happened and I started to get paranoid when I could no longer figure out the underlying motive when people asked where I’m from, and everywhere I turned there were people I used to know, mountains closing in on me, panic suffocating choking my lungs clawing up my throat I have to get out of here get me out of here—

Which is how I found myself in Bellingham, Washington. Back in the PNW. Leaves the size of my head. Velvety green moss crawling over trees. The salty brine of the ocean. Blackberry bushes gone to seed, encased in white, fluffy tendrils like sea anemones.

I stayed in Bellingham for five nights. Slept on the soft, drooping couch in my friends’ house. Danced and sang in the living room with the roommates. Turned off all notifications on my phone. Stayed up late sharing secrets. Laughed until I cried. Went to a café every day and wrote thousands of words for my grapp essays. Discovered Russian techno music. Read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. The pressure in my chest eased.

I drove home.

Went into my room, put together my bedframe, unrolled my mattress, made the bed.

Bellingham reminded me that I won’t be in my hometown forever. A temporary stop, a checkpoint, to rest, prepare for the next step. And I’ll make the most of it.

I spent a sunny Sunday with one of my hometown friends, studying at a café, giggling at each other’s silly voice impressions, bickering over trivial things. That night I played a game of hockey, cut short when I blocked a slapshot with my foot and had to hobble off the ice because trying to put weight on it made my leg buckle immediately.

I limped through a grey Monday with temperatures stubbornly staying just above freezing, turning what could’ve been a snow day into wet, bone-chilling rain. That evening I watched Anora in theater with a friend and sat for several minutes in stunned silence as the credits rolled.

My Monday hockey game ended well past midnight. At some point during the game, the freezing rain turned to fat, wet snowflakes, lazily drifting through the air, settling atop cars, railings, roofs. It would all be gone by morning, I knew – the temperature wasn’t cold enough for it to stick. But it was the first real snowfall I’d seen in two years.

I stood in the ice rink parking lot with my face upturned, watching the snow come down. Suddenly my perspective shifted and it felt like I was falling into the sky, rising through the snow, all around me darkness and light specks of ice, stretching out infinitely, endless possibility.

That night I dreamt I was in the mansion from Anora, watching thick, choking black smoke rise from a burning pile of everything I owned. When I awoke, I saw that it had snowed through the night; the world outside was blanketed in a thin layer of white.

From endings emerge beginnings and beginnings and beyond.