a long entry

I should get in the habit of writing when I feel like it, and not worrying about making it comprehensible and whole. It sounds silly, but sometimes I feel so compelled to make some sort of story with some sensible trajectory that it tires me just thinking about it and I don’t write anything. All the while the tug to share all the nothings pulls at me. So anyway, these are just some things, for memory’s sake.

body
My physical body feels everything my mind unconsciously feels, and it annoys the hell out of me. I can’t seem to fully revert to the blissful sleep of past (when that past was is hazy), of long long hours uninterrupted by early morning anxiety. I’m not generally anxious; it’s minor, which is why I worry about it. I really hope that I don’t require complete carefreeness to sleep well, because I had better get used to Growing Up and all that it entails. A few months ago I developed a recurring rash. At first I thought it was allergies but I couldn’t find anything that connected. My brothers told me it was probably stress-induced. I told them I wasn’t stressed, or at least I didn’t feel like it. Often it came out of nowhere, without any external instigators. But it’s true, often it coincided with stress that I didn’t really acknowledge--I got it before my first interview, when things were hectic at work, when things were hard between Andrew and me. And now after a couple nights of restless sleep I have a sore on my lip, which apparently also tends to arise during stress. I hate that my body reacts like this, reminding me that things do affect me and I can’t just think about them in isolation without remembering that this is indeed my life in fact, not my life hypothetically. The thing is, I’m happy with most things, only that things are hard in the way they are for everyone during this time in our lives and it’s not an easy happiness. I both naturally and continually put effort into appreciating and valuing that, and I wish my body would let the rest of me take care of it instead of reacting too.

cooking
I’ve learned that a little flavor goes a long way, that I will probably never be good at presentation, and that bell peppers are the best thing in the world. Bell peppers are such funny, wonderful things. They look and sound spicy but they’re sweet, they smell so nice and are so bright in color. They’re fun to slice and their seeds coat everything. They’re crunchy and oddly shaped. Anyway. I can make: Vietnamese pork chops and chicken drumsticks/breasts/wings (Vietnamese only because that’s the way my mom makes them), Thai curry chicken and California rolls (thanks Erika), fish muniere, rosemary/lemon chicken, chicken parmesan, mushroom and onion hamburgers, various stir fries. My problem with cooking is that I don’t understand the nuances, and I’m also impatient, and it’s hard to buy things for specific recipes when we’re always buying in bulk, and it’s hard to try different things without the necessary culinary accessories and tools. I did get pots and wooden bowls for Christmas. Making do.

brothers
So you know how around adolescence everyone realizes that their parents don’t really know everything after all, and that you actually think quite differently from them? Well, as far as my relation to my older brothers go, this relevation didn’t come to me until this past year and most sharply since I’ve graduated. Despite their having raised me and possessing somewhat parental roles in my life, the very nature of them not in fact being my parents kept me from losing that kind of faith in them at the time when people begin to question their parents. And for the most part that was okay, because I do value their judgment and experience, and the relevance of these to myself. But my goodness, how I’ve changed in college, how I’ve come to see how adamantly I disagree with my brothers about certain important and fundamental things. Not like political issues or moral dilemmas; it’s hard to explain, exactly. Small things that mean a lot, like I'll see value in an image or thought or book, and they don’t (or vice versa). And big things that mean a lot, like how I chose heartbreak and think that’s all right, and they don’t. I know these dissimilarities occur among all people. But with my brothers it's difficult because for so long they've been intertwined with who I am. Not that I haven't been aware of our distinctions before, but the gap in understanding has never been so glaring. I realize these changes in me are of the kind that are most apparent to oneself, and that the core most people see remains the same. But sometimes I can’t stand being around people who have developed an honest, strong portrait of me, so much so that they can’t begin to contemplate the possibility that I’ve changed or perhaps that I have kept and keep things to myself that they never saw. Stephen, with his infuriatingly confident way, evaluates everything I do as either characteristic or uncharacteristic of me, as if he knows how to categorize all that I do correctly. I can’t deny what they do know of me, and I can’t convince them that they don’t know everything. It drives me completely insane, and it makes me long to meet new people who don’t have a baseline conception of me. It also makes me grateful for the few I already know who use acts I make or thoughts I express to explain my character, instead of the other way around.

At the same time, I’m not losing hope that I will remain close to my brothers, that though our changes haven’t occurred in parallel, that I will remember how accepting they’ve always been and that it’s a matter of time, patience, active effort, and willingness. After much frustration with the ways in which the pieces of my family do not fit together…during the lovely Christmas dinner with the seven of us and the ensuing madness of present-opening, I found myself again finding the same essence and more of my dysfunctional family. I know this is how family functions, imperfectly and with rough edges.

San Diego
I had a fun weekend in San Diego. Seeing Erika (my best friend from junior high) was kind of funny, in that way when you see how much and how little things have changed over a long time. I wonder if I’d be different if I’d gone to Irvington instead of Notre Dame. While concrete circumstances may have turned out the same, I think what I think about and the way in which I think about them might be a little different. Then again, Erika reminded me of when I shared with her my fear of never meeting someone who would understand me, this fear arising in full force when I was thirteen. So I guess maybe Steph is right, that even if we were farm girls in Asia dedicating our lives to manual labor and our husbands, we’d still be contemplating the same thoughts. I don’t know. In any case, the flashback to junior high really made me appreciate the liberty I’ve had to be immature (“did I really do that?” “I said WHAT?”) as much as the room for growth (I feel quite distant from all of it). Southern California is warm and very laid-back, but I think I will always belong here. Here in the sense of what I feel here, not necessarily here the geographical area because I don’t feel tied in that way. Where do I see myself in ten years? Anywhere.

James Blunt
Steph compared a concert to a vintage wine or a flower, in its transience and the poignancy that comes from that, and I found the thought to be apt. You can listen to the music before and after, but the moment when you see it flowing from the source, you feel the fleeting quality of it right then and there. James’ voice is special. It amazed me that someone could produce something so perfect. Every lilt that you assume to be a result of polished studio production came instead from a slightly ragged Brit filling every note with something inside him. After a new song, he started the concert with “High,” which gave me something that resembled girlish delight. I’ve always liked how his album starts with this song, with all its images that don’t directly relate to a kind of beginning but somehow make me feel it anyway. I cried a little during “Goodbye My Lover,” partly because A. was there, partly because I am woefully in love with James’ voice, and partly because, even though no one likes crying in public and I hate crying in general, I felt like it. He played it just as you’d imagine, alone on the stage with a piano and a microphone to amplify a sentiment that’s already swollen and raw with hurt. I’ll never forget how that song made me stop. It did that to Steph (“arrested me”) and A. stopped the album after that song too. Somehow that makes it more personal, not less. He played an amazing rendition of “Out of My Mind,” where all the little elements of the song came to the forefront and every second of it was full; every part made me smile or inwardly flutter or bite my lip. I’m so glad to have seen him, and with people who really receive and value all that he gives.

high school friends
Long meals are one of my favorites. Being with A. and sharing our love of diverse tastes and ambience and character in the dining experience heightened my appreciation for comfortable company that lingers and sustains after a delicious meal. Sharing wine with Rea Mae, Tanvi, Kristina and Victoria didn’t make me uncomfortably old; it made me feel fit for this new skin we’ve each developed. I so value how everyone has grown yet radiates the same endearing, admirable qualities they’ve always had. I like how we talk about new things, and re-talk the old things. You girls are so quality: so smart, with real convictions and goals; funny, with unabashed silliness; kind, with such genuine warmth; fun, reminding me of the lovely freedoms of being this young. And Victo, your presence never fails to make me feel less alone, whether we’re driving or buzzed and rigging a game of King’s Cup or wrapped under blankets watching Little Miss Sunshine for the second time or sharing yet another cozy bed or chatting in your room or browsing in H&M or swapping cheek kisses on New Year’s Eve.

upcoming
I can’t wait to see my girls in New York, to venture into Atlantic City, and for our blockmate reunion in the spring. The thought of places makes me happier. I feel so lucky to have lived in Boston for four years and to have seen so much of New England. I love California, and San Francisco looks different every morning, revealing a new shade of beautiful with each glimpse. I can’t imagine not being somewhere urban during this time of life. Going on interviews has proved tiring, but I appreciate the renewed excitement for the future that I get each time. There’s so much left. Being immersed in the stories of older people in my writing class made me feel that in such a uniquely fulfilling way. Getting glimpses into the fullness of their pasts and how alive and eager they were for their presents and futures—it pushed me to concentrate on life as a continuous story and not a series of clearly defining phases. The bookends that we place on the sides of our experiences often make me forget what’s beyond them. There’s the four years of high school, the four years of college, the four years of medical school, making me feel like life comes in blocks and that once one is coming to a close, a lot has gone by when in fact the next block is even longer, only it’s not quite a block.

the east

Back from a whirlwind tour of the East Coast. I feel like my post-college life has been a stretched-out accordion: all the feelings and thoughts dispersed over a long period of uneventful time and space. But during this trip someone or something decided to try and make a noise by compressing everything, and all things of the recent past and the near future came together in the small sliver of one week and a pocket of the country.

I flew from San Jose to Baltimore, and had a long conversation with the passenger next to me. I’m not good at starting talk with strangers, but lately I’ve encountered several very open strangers who have been easy and interesting to talk to. This stranger did aircraft maintenance for the Coast Guard, and because this entailed quite a bit of travel, he’d been all over the place, from Alaska to China (he showed me photos on his computer). We talked about cities and food, and he told me a bit about Baltimore since he’d been living there for a couple of years.

I had a very hazy idea of how I should get to campus after I got off the plane. All I knew was that I didn’t want to shell out $30 for a taxi, and that somehow the light rail plus some other form of public transportation would take me to Hopkins. Though no one knew exactly how I should do this, everyone was very nice and helpful. Practically every stranger I spoke to in Baltimore (and being directionless me, I spoke to many) was super nice to me, which gave me a warm impression of the city despite what people say. I got on the light rail and had another good conversation with a stranger, a middle-aged man commuting home from work, who seemed as proud of me for pursuing medicine as if I were his own daughter. His smile showed a genuine sense of gratitude and pride, something that I haven’t seen in such a pure form in awhile.

I was going to take the subway from one of the stops but was told I’d have to transfer light rails to do that, so I got off at a random stop near the symphony, was told that the school was six or seven blocks away but that they were long blocks and that I couldn’t walk it. So I took a taxi which didn’t cost me much at all and gave me a chance to converse with a down-to-earth cabbie who kindly, bluntly told me that I better be careful “cause this hospital is in the hood.” He also told me exactly which streets we were taking as we were driving, which I forgot instantly but still appreciated.

I hurried to drop off my things because I wanted to get dinner at the Inner Harbor before it got too late. Eugenie saw me at the front desk at Reed Hall and called out my name. She told me she and her roommate, who was hosting a friend who was also interviewing, were going to go to the Harbor and asked me to come along. We never spoke much in college, but she was so welcoming and sweet that it seemed natural to hang out. She showed me their suite in Reed, I met a lot of first-years, and got to use the subway that no one in Baltimore seemed to know about or use. Since it was late Thursday night, the Harbor was pretty deserted, and it was a nice way to quietly take in the city. I was grateful for having run into Eugenie, and it became a running theme of the weekend, having familiar people in unfamiliar, different places.

After my interview the next day, I took the train to DC. It was raining and wet and a bit of an ordeal to get to Baltimore’s Penn Station, but it felt nice to get there and sit for awhile to wait for the train. After the three train trips I took during this trek, I’ve developed a fondness for train stations. I used to think it was just NY’s Grand Central that I liked, having met and departed from Andrew there a few times over those years. But no, a lot of train stations are unexpectedly nice (the unexpected came from New Haven’s small but beautiful train station). I like the sense of old, how there’s no hassle to get on and off like there is with planes. I love the non-electronic signs they use to post times and platforms, where the letters and numbers turn and turn noisily until the right one is posted on the sign. I like having room on the train, the fact that I can move around, the scenery, and especially how I can feel the motion, unlike on a plane when you don’t feel like you’re moving at all.

Anyhow, it was a short trip to DC, where Frank picked me up and guided me through the subway back to his place. It was so good to see him again; he’s such a teddy bear, huggable and comforting. We had dinner and caught up, and back at his place I got him to watch the last half of Life is Beautiful with me despite his efforts to study. When he was showing me his movie collection, I shook my head at one after another as I didn’t recognize any of them. He said, “Yeah, these are black movies.” At the very end when I was thinking I probably wouldn’t watch anything, he showed me his last movie, Life is Beautiful, saying that he’d bought it because he saw that we’d had it in our room in college. But he never got through it because he didn’t want to read subtitles. So he wasn’t really watching as I was, but he got slowly sucked in and told me that he was choked up at the end. Haha.

Andrew drove from Virginia to meet me in DC, and I spent the rest of the weekend with him. We saw the World War II Memorial, and visited the other monuments in the National Mall since we were there, though we’d seen them before. It was interesting, to contrast the WWII Memorial to the Vietnam War Memorial, which is my favorite. We talked about how there is a different kind of loss that emanates from the Vietnam War Memorial and its veterans, how the Vietnam one focuses on lost lives. The whole memorial is just their names. Unlike the WWII one, which features quotes about the fight for liberty, and names of all the states and territories, and a whole host of other symbols and structures. It was much more elaborate and emphasized sacrifice in quite a different light.

After that we had dinner at the oldest restaurant in DC and got ready to celebrate Halloween. We didn’t have time or energy to get costumes, but we headed to a club his friend had recommended for a Halloween party. After realizing that we were the only people around those streets and clubs who was not black (whoa for being the minority among minorities), we decided to go to Georgetown instead. Which turned out to be a great decision. There were tons of people in costume, and the small streets were lined with bars and shops. It was a festive, cheery, fun atmosphere; it’s always invorigating when things seem to flow out of places into the open streets, back and forth. It was fun to dance with him again, and be silly as is our natural state. I got a bit more tipsy than I have been in a long time, and he took care of me well. It can be nice to let someone do that once in awhile.

The next day we went to DC’s tiny Chinatown, where a ten year old girl mixed me not-very-good bubble tea and he had not-so-good moon cakes. It was fun to see, though, and we always get so much from walking and observing together. Later in the afternoon I took the train (Washington Union Station in DC is also quite nice) to New Haven, where a med student (a recent Harvard alum) picked me up. Oddly enough, I could see myself there in that city that doesn’t get much credit. The mix of gritty and quaint reminded me of Cambridge.

How immensely happy I was to be back in Cambridge. There is no place I love more than Cambridge and the Square. Besides its concrete charms of people, quirks, nature, city, school, water, shops, food, subway, Adams...there is no place I've grown more. It's where I experienced my lowest lows and highest highs.

I got to Boston first, and felt at home when the skyline greeted me while driving through a small street in the dark. Then took that ever-familiar M2 shuttle ride from Longwood to the Square. I got off at the Adams-Lamont stop and walking by Westmorley Court, I was struck by the most incredible heart-choking sadness. The autumn was perfect and beautiful around me, crisp and sunny, and there I was in the midst of it, such a pathetic spectacle, a bundle of mess. To distract myself, I decided to look for our fern. I’d bought a fern from the plant sale at the beginning of senior year and hung it up in my room. Later I took it down and put it on my windowsill so that it would be easier to water, but it didn’t fare well. It was constantly shedding (like Gregor, remember girls?) and its typical coloring was a dry yellow, not the bright green that it had when I first got it. I thought I’d throw it away when I was moving out at the end of the year, but Andrew fought hard against this. He wanted to plant it somewhere and give it a chance. So we dug a hole in front of A-entry and plopped the fern there. We viewed it mostly as a false sense of hope, but when I was leaving for Cambridge during this trip, he asked me to look for it. So I did…and there it was: greener, fuller, and happier than it had ever been when I’d had it. Not only still there, but thriving. This erased all feelings of melancholy, and I felt the most sudden pang of happiness.

Later I ran into Lily and she said she thought of me every time she saw that fern, because she had seen us digging up dirt to plant it. At the time we were embarrassed that someone had witnessed our whimsy, but when she told me that, I was grateful. A part of me was still tangibly there. All of these things—they do still belong to me, perhaps even more so than to those who are still there. As I walked around and around along those brick sidewalks I am so tied to, along that river, around those buildings, near those stores, atop that grass—I knew I would still have all of this.

People are always trying to let go and move on at the same time, when really I need these to be distinct. Last June was so hurried, things built up so intensely atop of one another, there was no real time and space to say goodbye. He said that maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, that I wasn’t missing out on anything because this was the full experience: rushed, packed tight. I don’t regret it. But I am glad to have come back, after time and distance from it, to take the time to slowly bid farewell. And I think that’s how it was meant to happen, not right away, but after a little while and during a return.

stories

My first writing class was today. I had half an hour between work/dinner and class, so I walked around campus. Not too many people around in the evening, so I could capture all the wide open spaces as an unabashed tourist. I think the continuous sunshine has gotten to me lately. I love it of course, but is it strange to say that sometimes it depresses me a little? There’s no sense of change, and I so easily slip into identifying with my surroundings that I also begin to feel like I’m the same, yesterday and tomorrow. I told Andrew about it and he said that it was thundering in Virginia, and I thought that was nice. It also reminded me of War of the Worlds, which I had just seen, when all that lightning was coming down and Tom Cruise asks, “Where’s the thunder?” But anyway, tonight the warmth and light felt more malleable, more like home, more spacious.

We spent most of class telling and listening to stories. We had to tell a neighbor a story and later introduce our neighbor to the rest of the class by summarizing the story. A common icebreaker, but this one was memorable for a few reasons. We spent a really long time talking, and people remembered and told the stories in great detail. And since it’s a continuing studies course, I’m by far the youngest in the class. There are two other post-grad students who are several years older, then the bulk of the class spans the thirties-sixties range. Older people seem more frank, and free-flowing, and willing to share. Unlike those awkward first sections in college, where everyone harbors some degree of anxiety about speaking up, these people talk and talk, comfortably and without reserve. And the most striking thing was that as adults…they had adult stories, like wars and marriage and business ventures and grandchildren and real true successes and failures.

I thought about the cancer patients I met last week, and about how what I loved and remembered most about that was hearing about what they did. Steph asked me what kind of cancers they had, and I blanked because the first thing that registered in my mind were their faces and their stories. I thought: music store owner and guitar player (from heavy metal to country, he said with a matter-of-fact smile), world RV-traveler (he lived out of one with his wife and their last trip was a month in Alaska), a family sports bar owner with tattoos of the American flag down his arms as a remembrance of his time as a Marine and in Vietnam (and who sought physical therapy advice from a former Miss America), and probably the one that touched me most deeply, an elderly Korean man (retired from running a supermarket with his wife) who reminded me so much of my dad. He didn’t speak much English and tried to compensate by smiling often, and he was so genuinely huggable. Anyway, all of that made me think again that I want to work with older people, because there is something so poignant about that time in your life, with all those experiences behind you.

I heard twenty-four other stories, and left with so many sad, amusing, bittersweet, complicated images. One man got out of mandatory military training by bribing his instructors, and he and his friends would hole themselves up in the tanks they were supposed to be learning to drive to play cards. “It was the best place in the world to play cards; it was so quiet.” I can’t get that line out of my head. That was my favorite story (it went on about how he had no idea how to actually drive a tank during boot camp because he’d spent the three years of training playing cards, and more after that, but that beginning part was the best). Another man described being in the middle of the ocean and being entirely alone in every direction. One woman hopped on a train for a day-trip to Paris and had a movie-scene experience of twenty gorgeous men packed in her train cabin filling the air with their cigarette smoke. Another woman talked about the smell of India when she returned to her home after two years in the States, familiar and new. While I had tried to find just one incident, the stories of a lot of people felt like the stories of their entire lives. A woman talked about her conflicting responsibilities as daughter, wife, and mother and how all the important people in her life were in different cities and she had no idea where she should be, literally. Those stories gave a certain sense of weight and lightness at once. I can recognize the ease of past, and foresee the difficulty of future.

My story was a trivial one. I told my neighbor the story about how my brother caused the death of my favorite mouse. I told him that being the baby of the family, and the only girl and the one people were supposed to protect, I’d always wanted to take care of things and this translated into having a string of pets when I was a kid, including countless mice. I wasn’t very good at taking care of things, and I’m still not (this worries me often), and they kept dying. The first one was sick when I got it, so it wasn’t my fault, and I don’t recall if the others were my fault or not, but without any facts, I sense that they were. This one mouse I had was brown and white, with a spotted face and brown spots on its tail. All the other mice were white and I swear they discriminated against her, and she was always fighting on her own against the two or three others. So naturally I aligned myself with her, and her vulnerability. I told my neighbor about how my brother and I always fought as kids, and how one day he put my mice cage outside in the summer heat, and how by the time I found them, one had died and my brown one was near-death and how I tried to revive her with water and how she woke up but died an hour or so later. I said that I knew my brother had done it but I never talked to him about it or asked why. I can’t remember if he was mad at me for some reason, I don’t think so, but it could have been general spite—or maybe it was unintentional or just forgetful or whatever. There are a million more important things that he and I never discuss, but for some reason that incident feels emblematic of the silence between us.

Anyway, after my neighbor relayed my story to the class, the woman behind me says to me, “You should read Julie Orringer’s ‘How to Breathe Underwater.’” I can’t quite describe how that made me feel. It wasn’t a happy, or an excited, or even surprise. Not only is that one of my favorite favorite books, but I knew exactly which story in the collection she was talking about. And I’d thought of my brother and my mouse story when I’d first read it a couple of years ago. I loved it so much that I made Richard read it. When you find something really truly worthy of love, you want to share it. It’s that desire to connect stories that’s the never-ending source of my happiness and my weakness, that way of always saying “That reminds me of…” And this woman echoed it. The feeling I had was somewhat like one of things being right, that the way I am is meant to be, and that the way people are is just, the way people are and it’s supposed to be that way.

One of my teacher’s goals is to “encourage anti-social behavior.” When he said that a lot of people in the class thought he implied hostility, but I knew what he actually meant because I’m already like that. He said that the world is noisy and it’s important to be by yourself and quiet it down on your own. I see how this would be conducive to writing. But I don’t think it’s possible for me to be any more introverted than I already am. I mean, all day I considered not going to the class at all—avoid the new faces and new situation and instead go home, sit in my room, and listen to music while I arrange photos into albums that I’ll likely show three people in my life. I want to write to connect, not to isolate. I’m naturally quiet and I naturally find quiet. I don’t want to subdue the noise, I want to mold it into a communicable shape and give it away in a way that makes it louder to you and to me too.

routine frenzy

My first creative nonfiction writing class is next week. This weekend I plan to purchase a guitar tuner so that I can tell whether I'm making any sort of progress teaching myself to play the guitar. I also want new sheet music for the piano. I also have to get enough groceries to feed two boys (and myself I suppose) for the next few weeks. I'm reviewing all the activities and research and STUFF from my entire life so that I don't flounder during interviews. I'm anxiously waiting to finish the last application for one of the few schools I'm actively excited about. Tomorrow I will meet cancer patients. The weather has been gorgeous, and I've been driving down 19th Avenue with my windows down. My car, however, is quickly and surely falling apart. I talked to Frank today and hope to see him in DC in October, and to see my roomies in New York in December. I got a long voicemail from Yonina and hope to chat with that crazy girl soon. And as though my mind and heart were not already stretched to their limits, Andrew is visiting, not once but twice, before he leaves the country.

I thought more time would mean savoring things, but really it just means more things. It's funny how we say we don't have time, or we have more time, when really, we always have the same amount of time. It may be that there is no absolute right pace of life. It's all right. Sometimes it's just hard. Other times it's hard, but it's mine and it's lovely. Everything is astir.

anticipating someday

A few days ago I read that NY Times article about how researchers found evidence of mental activity in an unconscious woman. They said that she was transitioning from a vegetative condition to a “minimally conscious state.” I learned that 100,000 Americans “exist in this state of partial consciousness.” Partial consciousness. That phrase struck me, and I was hit by a sudden sorrow. It’s one thing to be entirely numb, and perhaps more lamentable than to maintain a little something. But to be numb, with glimpses of awareness and snatches of thoughts? Just out of touch? I read a quote somewhere by someone about how mankind’s greatest source of unhappiness is the ability to conceive of ideals that it cannot attain. I’ve often felt that way about myself, doesn’t everyone.

Just before reading that article, I had already planned on writing an entry about how I’ve wanted to relish everything since college ended, to absorb every sensation, to take time to think, to feel things to their fullest intensity—in effect, to be conscious. But contemplating partial consciousness made me more acutely thankful for the capacity to be acutely aware. Oddly, it wasn’t the complete opposite of consciousness—the vegetative state—that induced gratitude, but this idea of partial. Maybe it’s because while it’s hard for healthy people to fully mirror that state of vegetation, I can easily see normal people, myself included, perpetuating a kind of partial consciousness in their daily lives, and not even realizing how very sad that is.

Senior year, especially the end, was such a blur, not any less intense for going by quickly. I am grateful for being immersed in school, in people, in him, in the East Coast, in that Big Important Time of Our Lives. A big burst of happy, bittersweet, pouring forth experience. A waterfall. I pretty much got drenched. But now that it’s all over, I want to feel each little thing a bit more carefully, a bit more slowly. Relishing drops, the way you blink when you feel one sprinkle graze your cheek during a drizzle, and stick out your tongue to catch it on its way to your lips.

So each day is this kind of venture. It’s hardest to appreciate mornings; most of the time I try to avoid the anxiety and hurt that mornings often bring. Most days I spend a half hour to an hour before getting out of a bed in a consciously unasleep state. I hate it. So from the very beginning of the day I’m asked to give the most effort. For awhile, I thought I could gloss over this segment, to not include it. But embracing feeling means every feeling. Only very recently—maybe only when I read that article—have I been really grateful for hurt. I’m reminded of Garden State’s sentiment of pain over numbness, and partial consciousness makes it all the more real. So I try not to tuck it away.

By the time I’m driving in the city and on the 280 freeway, it’s easier. There is no way to not love that drive. Junipero Serra, the country’s most beautiful highway, as its sign says, is one of the most purely gorgeous things I have had in my life. That’s where the photo is from; I haven’t ventured more successful attempts to capture it. That blanket of cloud often rests in the middle of the trees, making it look more like mountain than air. I relish everything about that drive. How the scene changes with a turn, how the clouds cling to the trees in different shapes every day, how the fog races, how mist drapes the middle section of the sky, how the sun resembles the moon except then it gets too bright and now you know it’s the sun after all. How fast the drivers are, how I get caught in a flow of smooth traffic, how the speed makes things communal. I appreciate the time. I am close to long drives, and the near-hour merges into a sublime minute even as every inch of the drive is distinct. I like that I can listen to full albums again, without the background of homework or even laundry. I don’t think of music as background. Most musicians I like have albums that I listen to all the way through. Not because every song is fantastic but because a real album feels like a book, and people have stories to tell. The lesser songs add texture to the whole, but besides the contribution to an entire collection, in a good, personal album where someone has felt something or has something to share, each song has something. I want that full experience, to live and make in my own way the connections that someone else has lived and made. I just like that sense of whole, and creation. I’d like to make something like that someday.

Once I get to work, I relish doing things with concrete results, and with more nebulous aspirations. It is hard work, learning a great deal at once, and I’m working so hard to get to the point of a job well done. I was overcome by a sense of incompetence at first, but it is a strangely satisfying experience, to need to go through so many mistakes and repeats to get something right. It reminds me that I consider this important, and also that it matters to do anything you pursue as well as you can, even if you’re not naturally inclined to be good at it. I like physically doing things, performing semi-exact procedures; it recalls the simple and core fulfillment that I had from dusting the shelves or restocking drinks at my dad’s store. At the same time it’s nice to also try and understand what I’m doing, scientifically. I like thinking there is some kind of underlying system to all of this, and imagining how it might function. I love knowing that there are real patients behind this work; how odd and touching it is to follow the story of something going on inside of someone. As small of an impact it may be, I am scared of being accountable to people other than myself. I am gingerly enjoying this fright. It sounds and feels more important than it is, which makes me look forward to actually doing this—working—on a larger, more real scale someday.

The drive home is the same but different from the drive away from home. Usually there is an abrupt change from sun to clouds as I enter South San Francisco, and get whisked away in the fog that is my neighborhood. San Francisco is never hot. On hot days elsewhere in the Bay, it is either a tingling cool or a comforting warm in San Francisco. I try to avoid the numbing effect that California’s constant sunshine can have; besides enjoying SF’s frequent grayness (though September has been gorgeous), feeling the air warm my arms reminds me that each day’s warmth is a new one. Even here, I try to remember that one sunny day doesn’t guarantee one tomorrow. On cool days, the fog in the city sometimes lies close to the ground, and you wonder at how the sky has overflowed at your feet. I savor coming home tired and having an evening away from the day. Sometimes I take a shower before making dinner, or awhile after eating. I prefer the former if there’s time, because I like getting clean, putting on clean pajamas and getting my hands messy again with food. I’ve found that cooking satisfies each of the five senses. As it’s easy to be overwhelmed, I’m learning to concentrate on certain things at a time. I’ve always relished the sound and feel of cutting vegetables. There are so many ways to cut things, and I like seeing barriers vanish as I peel and slice. The sounds of crisp and squish and chop are so satisfying. When I taste spinach sauteed in balsamic vinegar and soy sauce, I anticipate the flavor because I half-put it there and I hear again the crackle of the pan and the little black bubbles rising from the stove’s heat that came shortly before. I like to add the following things to everything: onions, garlic, soy sauce, oyster sauce, chicken broth. I’ve progressed from a terror in the kitchen to a not-horrible cook (I’ve accepted my forever non-domestic status), and I like feeding my brothers.

On evenings driving home or weekends driving to Fremont, I look out my car window and see an expanse of time and opportunity unfamiliar to me. I can go out, read books, watch movies, see friends, explore new music, write journal entries—at the instant I feel like it. Well, perhaps the freedom is not as wide as the “year off” I had envisioned. Applications to finish, interviews to prepare for; weekends go by fast when instead of a morning lecture you have an eight hour work day scheduled for Monday; even nights aren’t such a long stretch when you’re not done with dinner until eight and you have to go to bed by midnight and you’re too tired to do anything until a couple hours into that gap of time. But still, when I want to do something, I usually can. Reading as I choose is a calm comfort and an itching prospect. I can’t foresee another book becoming as close to me in this upcoming year as “Norwegian Wood” did in the first month I was back home. His language so easily mingled with my thoughts, his sentiments so reflective and discerning and sensitive. The urge to write, the shape of memory, the delicacy of feelings, the sad beauty of loss, the nature of introversion—I can’t think of a more perfect book to have read at that time in my life. Then I was stalled by a resolve to finish “White Teeth.” As infatuated I am with Zadie Smith (the most striking woman I’ve ever seen in real life!), I had only rare moments of connection with a few sentences and slight interest in its broad ideas. So it took me awhile to get through that, but have a promising one in store with “My Antonia.” I’ve also seen probably twenty movies since I’ve been home. We don’t have television and my brother and I have been going crazy with Blockbuster and Netflix free trial subscriptions. Noteworthy ones include Shopgirl, Nobody Knows, Infernal Affairs, Failan, The Classic, Tony Takitani. A lot of Asian movies-Korean, Japanese, Chinese. Somehow things that might come across as sappy or overdone in English are sweet and sincere in another language, Asian ones in particular when it comes to love stories; even images very manufactured to emphasize their sugary and romantic colors appear more genuine in an Asian film medium. I’m not sure why that is, maybe because parameters change from culture to culture.

I am lucky to have people who make it worthwhile to leave my cocoon of fiction. I was so happy to see a lot of Victoria while she was here and to have many a lazy day: one at the lake that we spent chatting on a blanket that we kept moving to keep in the shade, and where we took a few turns jetskiing on choppy water (I often looked over her, so small on her jetski and imagine that I must look much the same and I would smile at this image of the two of us that I couldn’t really see); one in the Sunset district, trekking the mosaic steps of Moraga Street to catch a view of the city, then being beach bums for the afternoon, and then party couch potatoes later that night; one night spent commenting on celebrities at the VMA’s and falling asleep after watching amusing music videos and partaking in usual sleepover gab.

Concerts have been highlights. Death Cab with my brothers, Chili Peppers with Sarah (I was a little buzzed, she a little high; we were a little nuts and the show was a big amazing...my favorite moment: the encore that was Soul to Squeeze), and soon James Blunt with Steph. She lives exactly a mile away from me, and it’s been cozy to just hang out (dinner, movie and shopping outings). I haven’t bought new clothes for a year in an effort to save for summer travels and school, and I indulged in spending part of my first paycheck on frivolous items. My favorite find: little black dress. I am also happy to have been present for less shallow events like Steph’s white coat ceremony. All the medical students looked so much older and more mature than my fellow college graduates of just a few months ago, and this made me a little melancholy until I saw Steph walk across the stage and fit into her coat, a little girl with a huge smile. I can’t believe how we’ve grown and are growing, and how we are going to take care of people. I can’t wait to do that, someday.

After everything else, there is sleep. Oh sleep. It gets cold here, which reminds me of Boston and how much I appreciated my down comforter in college. Creating that pocket of warmth feels like such an accomplishment. Somewhere between that and the re-arrival of cold in the morning, there’s doubt. There is the danger of crossing the line from absorbing to wallowing, when your toes and fingers cease happily taking up water little by little because it’s gotten to be too much and instead passively resist and then actively fight back…and you continue to soak anyway, even while you’re lamenting how your hands end in wrinkly prunes. Balance is so difficult, and there’s much bittersweet to take in along with the wonderful. There’s disconnection and loneliness and above all, missing. I miss Cambridge, Harvard, Adams House, my blockmates, people, him. It’s a struggle to maintain this damn osmosis of letting in, letting out. But I do feel its worth.

Can you see how the photograph is not quite clear? Obscured by strokes travelling in various arcs? I took it while driving. My windshield isn’t clean, but isn’t the view nice?

san francisco

Amidst the ache of the past month, San Francisco has helped me. Not by cloaking my feelings with other strong sensations, but by letting me bare them and accentuate them without feeling like it was too much. The places and people comfortably crammed into this compact city (seven by seven miles, right Steph?) remind me that all these things I carry in me can fit inside of me, that I can grow to make room for them. At the same time that I’m glad that my emotional self won’t burst from the expansion of my own thoughts and feelings, I’ve always found it difficult and lacking in value to keep these things for myself. Even writing publicly this way seems insufficient. But the most I can aspire to, now and until I find something more useful, is remembering and sharing.

Living in the Sunset District means living in the thick of fog, which means that you can see the air physically and swiftly moving across the hills like it’s racing to get somewhere, and it’s especially nice watching it roll over the bridge near sunset. Running through misty mornings is not unpleasant. The slight cold makes me conscious of my body gradually warming, and my breaths register more clearly. My mind keeps going even as I try to concentrate on these physicalities, but it still helps to move, literally. It is nice to explore the streets of my new home, see the rows of shops and houses and bookstores, and discovering oddities like the pink Catholic church that reminds me of New Mexico and an alternative elementary school where I saw little Asian kids milling about in black T-shirts.


Our place is a ten-minute walk from Golden Gate Park, where it is perfect to run because there is no way you can take the same path each time. There are so many small and large treasures sitting in that park--lots of quiet trails, gardens of varying sizes and types, a baseball field (baseball fields are so pretty). It is quiet on weekday mornings, and the sprinklers make the sidewalks wet. I got a little lost the first time through (because I’m that way, and because it’s larger than New York’s Central Park) and ended up in Haight-Ashbury, a funky neighborhood lined with pot shops and music stores and old Victorian houses.


Haight is also where Raph lives (crazy to see him, five years after our first meeting!), and I’ve been lucky to dine at his place twice. The after-work (even though I haven’t started working yet) get-together-at-an-actual-place-that’s-not-a-dorm felt very I’m-in-my-twenties. Sitting around in an apartment with home-cooked food and wine, with conversation as entertainment, with jobs but not yet careers, with people from different places now with a common city of residence, makes for a good combination of settled and not-settled. Both dinners were very satisfying meals.

So much good food here, it’s the one thing I feel like I can literally endlessly explore. In Haight we had Cuban tapas at a cheery place called Cha Cha Cha. Steph took me and Leo to The Stinking Rose, on Columbus Ave near TransAmerica and City Lights, which is a garlic restaurant serving boiled garlic as appetizers and garlic-laced entrees. We sat in private booths that each had a different mirror and chandelier, and velvety red curtains.


Sarah and I had a fabulous seafood lunch at Pier 1 on the Embarcadero, overlooking the Bay Bridge. Another time she brought John to the city to eat at Tadich Grill, the oldest restaurant in California; it dates back to the Gold Rush. The restaurant was one big room with large engulfing booths tucked on the sides and a big bar in the middle, and we had cheesy-rich casseroles. It’s in the Financial District, and gets quickly crowded with after-work businesspeople, so it felt very grown-up to be there.


Last week I saw Andy for the first time since he graduated last year, with Steph, and went to the famous Burma Super Star and had my first taste of Burmese cuisine. I love how there are super popular hole-in-the-wall places here. Speaking of which, Tanvi and I had lunch at a warehouse-turned-streetfood-Indian-joint in Berkeley. I forget the name of what I had, but it was huge puff of crispy bread that took up half our table. Yum. I went there a second time with Sandeep and friends, where I again ordered a dish I couldn’t finish. Another time Aud and I searched for a Thai place and found one right when we got off the bus. I always knew the city was full of food, but living right here and seeing food on every block still amazes me. I love meals.

And having good people to eat with. It’s been calming and good for me, to have the leisure to see people I’ve seen fairly regularly during college as well as those I haven’t seen in a long time. There are few people I can talk to for long periods of time like I do with Audrey. After not having kept in touch for a couple of years, Tanvi and I had a three and a half hour conversation without pause. True, some of it was catch-up what-are-you-doing but mostly it was thoughts on the here and now, and the recent past, and connection was easy. We talked about how much we feel we’ve changed, but also questioned how much of that is self-awareness. After all, she seemed like the same person I knew in high school—then again, we’ve both changed so maybe we just changed similarly. College, being a communal experience, perhaps brings about similar transitions and feelings for most people. Some things like, how home’s not home, anxieties about growing up, the need to do things before life takes over, misremembered memories, loneliness. I wonder, will there be a time when people diverge so much that they not only move at different paces but in different directions? There are big chunks of time and experience that most everyone goes through: post-college life, marriage, settling, children, middle age, and so on. I suppose people will eventually be at different stages in their lives (some are, even now) but it seems like—it is natural and comforting to think that—there is usually a common base from which we all begin.

The last two weeks, as the rest of the Bay was drenched in heat, San Francisco warmed to gorgeous degrees, and there was plenty of sun here. During this time I saw some of the touristy and not-as-touristy sites that I never sought out before, which makes me feel closer to here. We went to Alcatraz, which was interesting mostly for getting the view of the city that prisoners had there. There was this one tiny window where the gorgeous white skyline appeared like a diorama. The simultaneous feeling of closeness and distance was sad.


After taking the ferry back to the city and looking back to Alcatraz, the island looked a bit different, less formidable, more melancholy.

Sarah and I wandered downtown and decided for no real reason to see the Grace Cathedral. Apparently it’s the largest Gothic structure in the West, which brought back memories of seeing Yale this past spring and made me miss the East Coast. The cathedral has these golden doors that were cast from the same mold as the Gates of Paradise from the Baptistry in Florence (Sarah recognized them as something from Italy, and we learned this detail looking it up afterwards).


There seem to be several Italian architectural imitations in the city. I randomly came across City Hall, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and is beautiful, whose dome is modeled after St. Peter’s Basicila in Rome. Anyhow, I liked the building’s golden accents and its sense of length; it spans across a vast space, and a long row of trees and stretch of grass lead up to it.


I ran into it on my way to the Asian Art Museum, which is a wonderful museum. It’s divided into Asian countries and the physical space of the museum is handled really well and delicately. It was easy to sense the change as you transitioned from India to China to to Korea to Japan. The hall of the entrance and some of the rooms inside are beautiful, too, with the kind of tall fat pillars, high ceilings and smooth stone that make you feel like you could be as elegant as the surroundings. I spent the afternoon there by myself, and it was the first time since I came back to California that I appreciated the solitude. Not that I was without thoughts of being not-alone, because I thought about that a lot, as with anything that moves me enough to want to share it, especially with people who would value it.



I also saw the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which has a lovely collection of Matisse. I liked especially a portrait he did of his wife, wearing a hideously beautiful dress, a patchwork of vivid and odd colors—the one where he told people that she had been wearing black when posing for him. Besides loving the colors, I’ve always loved the value modernism places on individual perception, and how emotion gets expressed in the concrete. I still don’t really understand contemporary art, which was a big part of the museum. One of their biggest exhibits also featured Shomei Tomatsu, a Japanese photographer. It was called “Skin of the Nation” and was an enormous collection of war-time and post-war Japan and its people. Tomatsu’s eye is amazingly comprehensive; he captured the rural and urban, Americans and Japanese, prostitutes and socialites. The concept of skin was most poignant in the series of Nagasaki victims. It overwhelms you, thinking about all the elements that comprise a culture and a person.


Overall, though, the SF MoMA doesn’t quite compare to New York’s, which might be my favorite museum of all because I’ve been there three times and had such a different and satisfying experience each time. I still remember the thrill of seeing the huge canvas of Chagall’s I and the Village the last time I went there, the cold winter of junior year.

One of the most special places I’ve been to while on my break before work is Baker Beach, very close to our place (we live a few miles from the ocean), a beautiful beach at the head of Golden Gate. Warm white thick sand, cold water, and an unbelievable view of the entire bridge. We walked across the entire expanse of the beach, to make it to the cove of rocks, whose rugged, slippery qualities felt great on our bare feet as we climbed them. This is also the nude area of the beach, and it’s funny, it was mostly men who went without clothing. (In Greece we’d noticed it was mostly women, never any men). I felt happy standing on those rocks facing a sun that was on the edge of setting but still draping the water with its warmth and shine.



Then there are the places outside of San Francisco that have been great too. A few of us from high school and a couple new friends took a trip to the Takara Sake Museum in Berkeley. We watched a short video on how sake is made, and the different types; glimpsed part of the sake factory; viewed sake-making tools. There is something satisfying about knowing something about what you’re consuming. We sampled six different kinds of sake. First we had classic sho chiku bai, their most popular sake. It was hot (temperature wise), and dry and faintly sweet. Next was Ginjo, which was one of our favorites. It’s made from really well-polished rice (apparently, 50% instead of the normal 30% polished), so it has a delicate texture and flavor. Served cold, it felt nice travelling down your throat and into your stomach, and very crisp. Then we had flavored sake! Out of a choice of plum, lychee, green apple and raspberry, I had lychee (smelled just like the fruit) and apple (tasted like candy). We also had nama sake, which isn’t made by pasteurization like the others but by filterization. It had a very distinct taste (the details of which I can’t remember) and strong smell. Next was nigori creme de sake. Nigori is unfiltered sake, so it was a murky white color instead of the usual clear. It was textury and richer than the others. Finally we had plum koshu which was very very sweet, but had more alcohol than the flavored sake.


Today I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival with Steph and her mom. I can see where Steph inherits her silliness. It was so funny watching her mom impulsively gravitate to the foods and goodies that caught her fancy, and she was as excited about garlic ice cream as I was. We had garlic pasta, sausages, shrimp, mushrooms, and escargot. We had four different flavors of garlic ice cream: vanilla, pistachio, almond and chocolate. Gilroy is a funny town with lots of farmland, and we enjoyed the dry yellow landscape. We joked about how the dirt roads we had to go through to get parking had just been freshly dug out of the land for the festival, but I think underneath the humor was a wistful appreciation for the simple life of tilling land and producing crops.


I feel welcome here, and not because the Bay Area is my home--that concept of home as a place has been growing increasingly fuzzy for everyone. But because strangers (including the man walking through residential SF with a parakeet on his shoulder) smile back at me, because cars stop for pedestrians (even though they are perceptibly slower here), because a lady offered me money for bus fare (and in Haight, people offered us wine and crack). And mostly because the sun and hills and roads seem to love me back.

Will me and this city be enough to heal and grow over the next year? It’s too soon to actually feel the truth of it yet, but I build and rebuild faith that it will be.

greece

Sunsets from the three different islands we visited, left to right: Crete, Santorini, Mykonos.

The eleven days in Greece with Andrew made up the most intensely full time I have ever had. To be in my favorite country with my favorite person makes for a rare kind of happiness that is intangible and concrete at once. Much of it was surreal, and after all the difficulties, it was continually hard to believe that we made it, that we did it for ourselves and that we were there together, just us. Even on our very last night we were in awe, not only of the place but of our closeness that brought us there. At the same time, nothing in my life has felt as real as experiencing each thing with him, far away from everything else we've known yet being so at home with each other. Absolutely everything went smoothly; any mishaps were minor. We got from city to island to island to island to city exactly as planned, and saw all the sights on our itinerary and more. We spent our funds wisely, and we didn’t go as broke as I had thought we would. I was so proud of our ability to navigate the country, quickly figuring out the subway, bus and airport systems. The combination of my previously planned course of action and his on-the-site directions made everything go so well. It would take volumes to make just a small attempt at describing it all, so I'll settle for a summary of events with a smattering of impressions and feeling. Our photos and these descriptions portray such a small part of it all, the place and our experience. That’s always the case, and as always, I have the urge to share just the bit I can express.

Athens
We flew into Athens from New York (spent a lovely night and half-day there, eating at a late-night diner and doing laundry at a laundromat and being mistaken for newcomers to the neighborhood). The airport experience was worsened by rude people and inefficient service, and the twelve-hour flight wasn't too pleasant either. Not getting much sleep on the plane coupled with the seven-hour time difference exhausted us, but seeing Athens from above made us too excited to care. After dropping our stuff off at our budget hotel, we immediately took off for Mt. Lycavittos, the highest point in Athens. The 360 degree view of Athens was the perfect introduction to the city, and we were completely giddy after seeing the sprawling white that went on and on, and the Acropolis from afar. We also went to Parliament and the National Gardens, and walked around the Plaka district in the evening. The vendors really spill out onto the streets there, very charming and festive.


The next day we got to see everything up close, and he pointed out the linked nature of our experience. From Mt. Lycavittos we could see the Acropolis and from the Acropolis we could see Mt. Lycavittos, and also the Agora, and from the Agora you can see the other sites and on and on. We were early enough that it felt like we had the Parthenon mostly to ourselves, and we spent a long time lingering there. Over the day we saw all the best ruins Athens had to offer—the Ancient and Roman Agoras, the Theater of Dionysus, the Temple of Hephaesteion, and our favorite, the Temple of Zeus. There’s something about the simplicity of ancient columns that I really enjoyed, and there was a lot of empty space around them, so you could really take in the sight in its own space. We also went to the National Archaeological Museum, which has rooms full of amazing sculptures and houses the Mask of Agamemnon, and the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art, which had the opposite feel of the National Museum. It’s small, subtle, not as ancient, but gorgeous. We were the only people there so it felt like a secret treasure. The ceramic tiles and tapestries were beautiful; swirls and bright colors made for such pretty patterns.


Crete
The next morning we took a short flight to Hania, Crete. We first saw the hills hugging the sea from the cab drive, down a steep slope. Our taxi driver enraged us by dropping us off a twenty minute walk from our hotel and trying to charge us twice the fair fare, but our hotel made up for it. It was by far the best deal of the trip, very cheap but quaint and beautiful. Our room’s name was Zeus, and we had a small balcony overlooking a narrow street filled with colorful buildings.


Hania is a city to watch and walk through. We first went to the Municipal Market, where we were amused and a little disturbed by the nonchalant display of lambs’ and bulls’ heads. After that we walked around the Venetian Harbor, whose image was hard to capture in a photograph. The buildings arched around the water, so the view changed with every step.


It was very leisurely, which was nice because we were tired from all the walking the day before and because we needed to rest up for our next day’s activity—making the five-hour hike down the Samaria Gorge, the longest gorge in Europe (about 13 km, and an extra 2 km afterwards to walk out to the city to go home).

We thought we’d die doing the hike, but we actually took it on fairly well. The hike isn’t smooth; it’s steep and very rocky at a lot of parts. At times you just focus on your feet and the land in front of you, which can be a soothing thing to do—concentrating on one simple feat. The path continually changed though, and the whole experience was amazing and a highlight of the trip for the both of us. The drive to the gorge was pretty scary; the bus went over two-way roads at the edge of high mountains at a quick pace, but it was a great way to traverse the landscape. We got there early so we had views of the moonset over blue-misted mountains before we began.

Descending into the gorge, we saw so many things—different hills, creeks, rock formations, bridges…and the same single kind of pink flower bursting in bunches at various spots among the green and brown. At the end there is a narrow gap between cliffs, that they call the Iron Gate, that greets you after a trek across flat terrain. That sliver of light peeking through the gap is the most sublime culmination to a day wandering in the depths of the gorge. It gave us the opportunity for quiet time and conversation, and I think it made us feel very close to take that journey together, small bodies gliding through this massive structure.


The next morning we took an early bus to the other end of Crete, to the capital Heraklion. There we went to the biggest known Minoan palace, Knossos, and went to the museum to see all the frescoes and artifacts people had found there.


A fun part of the day was seeing the city itself, and all the Venetian buildings. We also caught a view of the city from the Kazantzakis tomb, a simple but compelling site. We had a delicious seafood dinner by the waterfront, getting there at sunset and staying until the sea was pitch black.


Lights across the sea started twinkling; one area was completely dark except for one winding line of yellow light, whereas another was sprinkled with green lights. He mentioned how in rural areas, one light usually signified a life—the lamp outside someone’s home, for instance. That sense of life was very detectable walking back to our hotel later in the warm night—a lot of families out, restaurants packed, water fountains in full spring.

Santorini
We loved Crete, but I was excited out of my mind to go to Santorini. We ended up being the only passengers on our tiny plane to the island, so we pretended it was our private jet. This, along with the fact that the airport was abandoned when we got there, caused him to deem Santorini “our island”—it seemed to belong to us from the very beginning. We took a bus to Oia, and though driving on those cliffs scared us, seeing how the island existed right off the sea was beautiful. When we got to Oia, we were even more blown away. Seeing pictures does nothing to prepare you for this place—all the buildings fit snugly into the rocky cliffs, practically dropping into the sea, and they are all a bright painted white.


The buildings within the teeny town are vividly colored: oranges, reds, blues and greens everywhere rising from the cobblestone streets. Walk a few feet from the town and you meet the vast Aegean sea that is so crisp it looks like you can skate on it, with other islands floating atop.



In absolute jaw-dropping awe, we made our way to our hotel. Having gone budget on all our other lodgings, we saved to splurge on our one night in Oia, living in a traditional cavehouse hotel. We appreciated its unique character right away—we both thought it wasn’t worth it to go broke for luxury, but to go for character. This place integrated the natural beauty of Oia into its own structure; it had an arched ceiling lined with stones, rocks nestled in its walls, beautiful wooden doorways and window frames. And it had a balcony with the most amazing view of the caldera, which consists of the surrounding islands and volcano (the same view you get everywhere you go along Oia). We also got a free upgrade to their best room, which had a jacuzzi on the balcony. When we got there he and I stood grinning at each other for quite some time. Then we headed out for lunch, where we also could not stop marveling at the town and sea, and afterwards explored every crevice of Oia.


In the evening we staked a spot at the northern end of the city to watch the sunset. The Oia sunset is often deemed the most beautiful in the world, and I felt so lucky to be able to see it. Hundreds of people come out and line the streets to watch it. The sun becomes completely circular and contained; after a certain point its rays don’t disperse from it anymore, it’s just a wafer in the sky. Andrew took the photo below. Well, he took several of these photos but I thought I should point this one out in particular because I really like it and because he showed it to me right after and asked me whether I liked it, and I remember thinking it was sweet how he valued my opinion about that kind of thing.


We left Oia the next day for Fira, where we stayed for two days exploring the beaches and the volcano. Hiking the volcano across from the island, we could see Santorini Island in its entirely, and were able to look up to where Oia and Fira sat atop the cliffs. We rode donkeys from the port back up to town, which was hilarious and fun, though he vowed never to do it again because the donkeys looked so miserable. His in particular refused to do anything; it would stop for long periods of time without moving, paying no attention to the fact that he was supposed to be carrying Andrew up to the hill. I would look back to see donkey and boy looking equally bemused.


We also went to one of Fira’s famous black sand beaches and to the Red Beach. The sand at the black sand beach comprised of small pebbles that were pretty to sift through your fingers. The Red Beach, though, was the most amazing beach I’d ever been to. Your first sight of it is with towering red cliffs in front of you, with a stretch of white sand that grows distinctly red as it creeps toward the sea. There’s a very distinct line between the sections of white, red, and deeper red once the sand hits the water. Up close, you see the gradations of red, from red rocks to red pebbles to red sand.


We saw the sunset in Fira as well; much less people were out than in Oia, but the sky was a bit hazy so we never quite saw the sun disappear, only watched it slip into the haze.

Mykonos
We were sad to leave our island, but looked forward to a new kind of atmosphere in Mykonos, the party center of Greece. We took a three-hour bumpy ferry ride to the island, and were glad to see the harbor. The buildings there were also mostly white, but in a different way from Santorini. They were boxier, and also often had the same parts that were colored. Like a row of white houses whose stairway railings were painted different colors: one house blue, another red. The roads were the same throughout the town: squares of stone separated from one another with thick white paint (we actually saw a man painting the roads at one point).


We first set out to explore the town, seeing the churches, Little Venice and the five windmills overlooking the water. We caught the sunset near the windmills later, and it was a nice moment. No one was really out, and the sun set very slowly, sinking almost imperceptibly into the sea. It was very quiet in the afternoon, and we sensed that the town hadn’t woken up yet. During our wanderings we came across a giant pink pelican, a famous creature in Mykonos and sometimes rare to see. He was pretty excited about that, and it was nice to have a private viewing—the next day the birds came traisping near outdoor taverns where tourists flocked to them, taking photos and laughing at their peculiar silliness.


Anyhow, on our first night in Mykonos we went out, bar-hopping and dancing, running into a packed gay club by accident—it was fun but not quite as crazy as we had envisioned…we were probably a little early. Lots of clubs and places don’t even open until midnight there, and they stay open until morning. We only stayed out until 3 or so, because we had to get up the next morning to go to Delos.

Delos is a tiny island, now completely uninhabited but once the sacred center of the Cyclades. Seeing the ruins there was unique because it was an entire region frozen in time…walking through, we’d come across mosaics and temples and sculptures. We hiked a mountain to see the entire island, and it was amazing to think the whole place was a sort of artifact. It was a hot and tiring expedition though, so we spent the latter half of the day on Mykonos’s white-sand beaches, enjoying the clear clear and cold waters.


Athens
We took a short flight back to Athens to spend our last day in Greece. During the ride to the airport I thought maybe it would have been better to fly back to NY from wherever we ended in Greece instead of returning to Athens, but after the day was over I couldn’t imagine spending it any other way. We came full circle by revisiting Athens. The first day, we’d seen a panoramic view and the last day, we saw it up close. Because we’d seen all the major sights the city had to offer, we were free to wander. Instead of seeking out particular things as we had the first, we explored. We went to the port to find that it wasn’t anything special, found a delicious ice cream parlor (we had so much ice cream on the trip), and stumbled into the poet sandalmaker’s shop. The shop is a family business that handmakes leather sandals; they had a collection of sandals with different names, some of them named after famous people who had bought them (John Lennon, Jackie O, Sophia Loren). The poet sandalmaker refers to one of the owners (his son was currently manning the store when we got there) who creates sandals and poetry, who says that a writer must have another occupation in order to truly write. That idea, the necessity of experience in order to convey life in words, was personal and touching. We went in and out of the store several times before deciding to get sandals for ourselves. His had to be adjusted, so we got to see the person’s handiwork in play right in front of us. We hadn’t bought anything during the trip, but we thought the sandals would be the perfect memento. They get darker and more brown with wear and exposure to the sun, so that the artistry of the sandalmaker continues with time. We found that notion of continuance fitting for us, feeling that our experience here wouldn’t be bound by geography once we returned, but would stay with us as time passes and as we grow. The same goes for our relationship.


We did a lot of window-shopping in the Monastiraki and Plaka districts, as he tried to find something for his brother, and in the evening headed to dinner. We found a place with a view of the Acropolis and Agora so that we could watch them light up as night fell. Yet another way of closing our time—on the first day, seeing the Acropolis in light and on the last, in the dark. I love how in these places, it is so easy to find a view—so many things are visible from different points in the city. I also like how everyone eats outdoors, and how long the meals stretch—our last meal in Greece was a two-hour dinner…eating slowly, drinking wine, having dessert. The night was very alive, so many people out and vendors everywhere. Our table must’ve been approached about a dozen times by people selling roses. We sat and talked about our favorites of Greece—favorite meal, sunset, hotel, ruins, characters and so on. We put on our sandals, and read aloud the poetry that we’d been given at the sandalmaker’s shop. We wore our sandals on the way home, and I knew we both felt grateful for being able to walk in Greece together like that. The air was so vibrant, live music playing, restaurants still crowded late into the night, vendors with tiny lamps illuminating their products. By that time, we’d developed a habit of waving goodbye to the places we’d seen, and it was hard to wave goodbye to Athens since it was also a precursor to the goodbye to Greece altogether.


What a crazy thing to have done. We went through a lot to make it happen, to stay committed to our fantasy. A lot of things were against us. We’re so young, but maybe that’s partly why we were able to do it. I can’t remember ever feeling so fulfilled, so in awe of how powerful a feeling can be and how far it can take you. Halfway around the world, and back.