backwards

Yesterday I met a baby two days old, and realized that's the closest I've ever come to the concrete very beginning of life. Then we saw another newborn born without a small intestine who, the nurse told us, wasn't going to make it. And that was the closest I've ever come to the concrete very end of life.

Last weekend, I left the rain in New Haven for rain in Fremont. The hills had turned green since I last saw them. There is nothing I love more in my hometown than the green hills on gray days. The greenery is so fresh against the rain. We drove through Niles, a part of Fremont I rarely see; the last time might've been the summer before high school, with the same friends. We drove for two and a half hours to get to Sutter Creek, and drove through numerous new-to-me and lush highways and narrow roads along the way. We passed hills sprinkled with churning windmills, hills strewn with cows, flattened hills that stretched to remote ranch houses. I saw a whole new part of California, with two of my oldest friends as passengers, going to the wedding of a friend whose closeness I still miss. The tears at the ceremony were for him growing together with his one, but selfishly, the feeling that lingered afterwards was our growing apart.

I missed home and family something awful while I was at home, most when they were right there for me. I sometimes get the impression people here don't think I'm attached to them or value these values as much as they do because I don't miss California and my family when I'm away. It's hard to explain that these things are so sewn in me that I rarely feel disconnected from them. Yet for whatever reason this past weekend, the physicality of my parents made me feel there are some things I can't carry as well as they can give me in their presence. When I was leaving, my mom exclaimed, I miss you so much! She often forgets to insert the right tense in her English phrases but her mistake made my nonsensical ache for home while I was there right. I miss missing home.

Last month, Henry visited me at Yale and I talked to him in person for the first time since June 2006 when we graduated, and we had similar conversations as we did then. Or at least similar topics of conversation. He mentioned the people we respectively let go. He called them the birds we let fly...willingly, purposefully. He talked about how hard it was, how he hasn't loved anyone that intensely since then, but focused on how much he's grown since then, and how he didn't think he could've grown in the same way if he hadn't. I agreed but will never make up my mind about a concrete rationale for any of that, no longer want to make sense of my senses. I miss the bird I let go, the one who nodded yes you are a difficult person but I don't find it difficult and want to be there as you figure it out because I love all of you. All of you. I grew with him and I've grown a lot without. I've been incredibly happy in both. Like Henry, I know that I've lived distinctly differently because of that willful, purposeful choice.

But that's a given for anything you choose or anything that happens to you, that it has shaped your life in a certain way that's never quite the same as if you had chosen something else or if something else had happened to you, but you can't judge which is more worthy, and in the end you can only be grateful for having had something and later, something else.