goodbyes

[begun July 17]
A lot of people in my life have left New Haven, in a cluster over the course of a couple days. I've always found it funny how things coincide, either naturally or through my mind's doings or some mix of the two, or a mix between things beyond my control and things directed loosely by the directions I choose in my life. Today I said goodbye twice, to people who have left the city permanently.

[currently]
I didn't give myself any time to process those goodbyes, and it felt a bit like betrayal to myself. I wanted to cry but I wouldn't, because I knew how all consuming it would become. I wanted to sit on my bed and listen to music all day, but I couldn't give myself that space amidst all the things to do, and I didn't want to falter. I'm not sure if it was right, but at the time I didn't feel I could function well otherwise. And, the only thing really is to do it now.

One farewell was to one of my best friends in med school, one I'd met on my first day at school three years ago, with whom I spent many a day. The other was to a family I'd met a couple months ago, who I saw every weekend for about an hour and a half. They each deserve writings about them, one of which I have done a bit of before and the other which will be coming. But there is something about goodbyes themselves, and the relationships that make them hard, that warrants words.

Relationships are funny in the way they incorporate such different ingredients and take such different forms, yet converge into similar general feelings. There are of course nuances, but I felt a parallel heaviness with both goodbyes; maybe it was partly because they happened in the same period of time, but I think it was also because when it comes down to it, it's about connecting to a person, and change.

With one, I was hit with the awareness of the luck and good chance that my experience fell into place with the experience of someone who gives so much to respect, admire, and love. As a friend, classmate and person, his presence so defined my time and growth here, with such gradual steadiness that its substance molded itself naturally into the walls of my life. Time is so constant that I sometimes forget what happens in its context. Even though there were many moments I was conscious of how lucky I felt for his friendship and existence, it wasn't until he was going away that I understood how lucky I felt for not just moments but the proximity and closeness of our lives, how easy it was to seek him out and be sought out. And for not just moments but what grew through and in between them, how incredible it is what develops with time. Time is so crazy. I saw him pack up the last of his empty apartment, and I drove him to the train station. His bus was coming soon and he needed to get food before it came, so the final goodbye was of the quick see you later quality, and it's apt in a way. I'll see him again soon. He's not that far away. But his place in relation to mine has shifted.

With the other goodbye, I was struck by how affected I was by a connection with such lack of detail, so few moments, so little time. The family didn't speak English well and we couldn't communicate well. Somehow, the limited expression made clearer their depth. Recently I've been told often by someone to speak without filters, and I always think that for me it's not so much about filters as it is about finding the most accurate words because I feel so messy that I don't know exactly how to explain things. But when you have so few words, there is no way to filter, no way to dilute or complicate. When there are no other ways, people capitalize as much as they can on the simple means they have to convey kindness and openness, and the purity of that carries force. When they first told me they'd be leaving, and in just a few weeks, I was completely surprised and I felt sudden sadness in throat and eyes, which also surprised me. It wasn't until then that I recognized what our short time had led me to envision; I had been under the impression that there would be long to go, that the small space we had formed would fill and fill. Ultimately, I'm amazed at the deep impact of surface interactions, and how the nature of an interaction can account for just as much as how long it has been in place.

It hurts very much to know, while they are still there, how much you will miss them. To know that that can come from something cultivated in time, and also from something more fleeting, makes me think that nothing is too bound or static, and these goodbyes aren't demarcations but more part of a larger mold. Still, they pierced a defined day in my life, and I'll remember it as such.

sharing

During a long conversation of several hours, the kind that's really a flowing string of prolonged jokes and many long conversations interspersed with small comments, the kind that happens over the course of time that stretches from a couch in a living room to non-matching chairs on a small balcony to standing on a rooftop against a wall on either sides of an open window--during one such conversation, there were thoughts like why writing, why paintings like Hopper's Room by the Sea and Wyeth's Christina's World, and why a song like Mad World by Gary Jules. In a stream of pockets between friends, there is fast and slow talk of how one person sees this ocean as warm and comforting and the other finds it cold and foreboding, and how the grass around Christina slightly darkens, and how we seek hauntingly dark songs for a spectrum of feeling. That song is so damn beautiful.

Some of that contributed to what I wrote about last time, some of the sense that there is too much; even when it's good, when it comes in layers and builds up into dense blocks it can be incapacitating. But that conversation(s) also made me excited about writing, because I was pushed to articulate what lies at the bottom of that urge to put things in words. Which is that when things are experienced and felt strongly, you want to share them. And this phenomenon is most reliable when it's beauty. The beautiful quality of beautiful things inspires the sharing of them. There are probably a million reasons underlying this and more reasons existing in its periphery, but this is the feeling undiluted by explanation and psychology.

Since that time, I've fought hard against the turbulence of last week that made me sluggish, and in that have naturally fallen into a flexible routine. Within that space there's been an immersion in small beautiful things.

Mornings are spent in the architecture library. I like entering the place with the neat columned wooden bookshelves and artwork above, like a picture to be taken (but I don't, because I go there every day). The deep orange carpet and long smooth tables are calming, and there's a vertical window from floor to almost ceiling across the way, to see people come and go in their own proportion. There are very few people there these days, and I stay there for a few hours before I go home for lunch.

This morning, in those hours, during a pause when I let myself savor a song and stare out the window, I thought about how you always want to share music that moves you. I was listening to The Antlers' Hospice. It's an album my oldest friend introduced me to, when I was studying for Step 1 of the boards--over a year ago. It touched me then, but over the year I've grown to really love it. I like listening to albums in their entirety, for the full stories, even songs to which I'm not partial (writing that sentence grammatically correctly is kind of lame). Sometimes songs just aren't good, but sometimes you get an album like Hospice, where some songs are difficult to get into, but over time you really listen and then one day every song makes whatever it is in us that feels, explode. And it does it not with easy tricks, but with real, honest sentiments that are sometimes so much harder to communicate. I like how often the words are incongruous with the melodies, in a way that isn't about conflict, but about many things existing at once. Seeing passersby as this washed over, I wanted every one of them to have it happen to them too.

I walk back home for lunch, and cook something easy that I can have for both meals of the day. It's amazing how different, concretely and otherwise, it feels to have fresh food in your fridge, and to eat your own food. I'm going to make my own food for the rest of my life for as long as I can, because in the midst of everything else, it's so satisfying to care for your basic needs, and to know that the taking care of them can be basic too.

After passing time to digest by studying a bit more at home, I go running. I've found that one thing I really love about this is that it coincides with my love of long stretches of time. Running for an hour gives time to listen to an entire album and then some, or to a smattering of songs when I feel like it, and to be immersed in movement. The gym is also pretty empty these days, especially in the mid-afternoon, and this is a welcome break in the day.

It's also nice to shower in the middle of the day. It's almost like starting again, and makes the studies feel not so prolonged. But the studies, for the most part, have been good. Going through a different area of medicine each day, I remember the actual experience of the rotation in the past year, which is something I haven't been able to draw upon in the past. It's not that I remember anything scientific or clinical better because of those experiences; it's that spaces are filled in and studying becomes three-dimensional. Studying ob-gyn, I remembered what it was like to first consider the physical experience of miscarriage, to witness how abortions were performed, to squeeze into the corner of a crash C-section, and all the life that happens. Studying rheumatology, I remembered what it was like to think about living with constant pain in your muscles and joints, to speak to the people who have molded their skins to accommodate their illnesses, to appreciate the care and tenderness with which my attending physician touched their hands and bones. Studying renal, I remembered when I first thought about how simple and creative dialysis as a concept is and how awful and foreign it can be for the person being dialyzed, and how I felt a visual miracle to see the kidney go from gray to pink during a transplant surgery. And throughout all of that, there's the science and body alone, how dynamic we are and how a lot of the way our body functions are weird phenomenons. That's a post for another time.

I get distracted easily, of course. Yesterday I looked at photographs of my brother's trip to Wyoming, and that led to an hour of daydreams of road trips and open spaces under big clouds. I immediately shared them, and our nature loving friend said, these pictures make me want to stab myself in the heart and explode. My favorite pictures are ones where the muted browns/grays of the rocky backdrop contrast with other vibrancy in the scene; natural things that exist as they should, vivid trees and bright sturdy houses, and a rainbow after rain. It's as though their color, and presence, don't quite belong, but they're there, a quiet surprise that just about made me want to die.

In the late afternoon and evenings, I take a pick of coffeeshops. In the evening I spend time with someone whose presence I enjoy; this can be anything from eating with wife or studying at The Study, a posh hotel lobby and restaurant, with a classmate who's also wearing shorts and also not buying anything. Or it can be an activity like climbing or dinner with friends, something to look forward to and something to remind that there's not only things worthy of sharing, but people worth sharing them with.

Some nights I sneak in a few pages of Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World, a book that steadily flowed along and has spun into a heartaching last quarter. Murakami is something else I've consistently wanted to share, so much due to how much I feel he sees and shares. The part of the book in which I'm currently residing, shouts that conflict and imperfection and all this mix-up I feel is, if nothing else, honest and therefore, worth it.

Before sleep I feel things I try to hang onto upon waking, and these days it's been the sense that all these things add up to a minuscule percent of a percent of all that can be experienced. It's how heavy that feels, in our hands, and then how light it is buried at the bottom of what's been and what can be; this is why.

six weeks

Back in Connecticut, today was the first day of third year. We were advised to be present: to be aware of where we are in a moment and to stop thinking about where else we need to be or what we should do after this moment is over. During the lecture about how to manage stress, it was suggested to write things down as they happen, so they don't slip as days pile upon one another. I'd meant to catch up on some things during our trip to Prague, but that didn't work out for various reasons. One of the things that has frustrated me most in med school is not having time and energy to reflect in thought and writing all the things in which we're immersed. I recall clearly deciding to not spend my life writing because I had nothing to write about, to experience instead so that I'd have something to say; medicine has brought me closer to that, has given me much to say but in the process often takes from me the capacity to form sentences.

One piece of advice was to just get things down, even if incoherent. I used to do that often, but somewhere between that and now, have done it much less. The idea is to capture your immediate impression; that you can return to it later, give it real form and thought later. I worry very much that I never will return to it, that there's too much; that I can't fully describe how I feel in a moment without more time and energy, and so I should only write when I have all the time and energy I need, and since I won't settle for less, I end up doing nothing. While I'm somewhat proud of this stubbornness about taking care about completeness, I realize that in some circumstances you do have to work with limitations, not just ignore them.

In theory this would mean I would jot down the overwhelming amount of stuff thrown at us today, but there is a lot of past too and I'd like to share that first, even if insignificant. I know I can't spend my life catching up to myself, but for the next two weeks before we start in the hospital where I have to be present, I'd like to have that luxury.

So to go back to what feels like way way back, the six weeks I spent at home studying for the Boards was pretty wonderful. I'm not sure how the test itself went, and while I learned a lot, it didn't quite feel like enough. I'll talk about that whole process maybe later. But other things happened, and for those I'm proud and glad.

I ate all my meals with my parents, and my brothers came home on the weekends for the more elaborate meals my mom would make. The first few days I returned, Fremont was gray and green. I studied in a room with a window facing the street, and we live on a busy street. I had three second glimpses of people as they passed from the left edge of my window to the right, or the other way: teenagers walking home from school, missionaries going door to door, parents wheeling strollers, dogs on leashes, stray cats, a man collecting cans in a shopping cart, young couples, old couples, people talking to themselves and each other, various runners with different running styles, a woman singing and running into her notes as they flowed forward and she walked after them.

I ran a few miles every couple days, all on the treadmill after my first week at home, which I know surprises everyone because people think I'm really unathletic (which I am, except for in elementary school but no one believes me when I tell them I was good at sports back then) and because when I do run it's always outside. I started because it got too hot in the afternoons to go outside, and despite sleeping fine for the most part I was too tired to run in the mornings. So I grew to love the treadmill, which faces away from the screen door to our backyard, in our living room. I'd open the screen to make it feel more like outside, and I grew to love the mechanics of running on a machine, of focusing purely on movement (not even forward movement, obviously, just moving), rather than surroundings and surrounding feelings. I was disappointed to realize it'd take me much longer than I anticipated to work up to a decent pace, after many years of irregularity, but it did motivate me to continue. I also started to like milk (I do tally this on my list of accomplishments), because it was the only cold drink we had. It was really satisfying to have everything I needed to run at home. Just changed in my room, went downstairs to the living room for the treadmill, panted my way to the kitchen for milk, then back upstairs to shower.

I finished one book during Boards studying (in my small defense, it was a long one)--The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami. It's up there with my favorites of his. Much of it was dark, and I'd go to sleep unsure. Through it all there was something to hang onto, as is usual with even his strangest contexts and characters most disconnected from things. And in this book amidst all the unbelievably expressive and knowing and detail, there were in particular two pages that I may hang onto the rest of my life.

I didn't get to see friends as much as I would've liked, only seeing my high school friends the day before I left for Prague. I did fly to LA for a day to see Iron & Wine at the Troubadour with my oldest friend. Awhile ago I posted about my top songs and none of them included Iron & Wine, even though he is one of my top artists. This is because what I love in his music runs through everything he writes, and the whole experience of hearing Iron & Wine with someone close to me who values that feeling, felt like that, where places and events and things lose definition and become vessels for something ineffable and common in all of them. He ended with Trapeze Swinger, which is a long song and one I'd been listening to often before the show. It's a beautiful beautiful song and one that will always make me think of that moment in the show, and also the walk in the cool night to the venue before the show, and the car ride afterwards which I remember as a long straight road punctuated by streetlights, though I'm not entirely sure it was that way the whole time.

I said goodbye to my great-aunt, and the funeral is something else I'd like to write about, and separately. I wasn't close to her, but I tried to stay close to what it meant. I can't say that I was always able to completely focus on it, with the hectic background of studying and other things, which forced me to consider balance and my role in that. It also made me glad to be with my mom, who is much nicer to me than I deserve and who did teach me to make a couple of her dishes. Not quite as many as I wanted, due to her cooking hours before I got up in the morning; by the time I was getting up early enough, I was trying to make up for lost time in studying. But now I can (theoretically) make my favorite spring rolls and savory crepes? pancakes? Not really like either, but yellow and crispy and eaten with fish sauce and lots of lettuce and herbs.

I also cut off about 12 inches of my hair. I needed 10 to donate to Locks of Love, so the hairdresser asked me if I wanted to keep that extra 2 inches, but I told her to just take it all. So instead of messy wavy hair down my back, I have manageable straightness to just my shoulders. Even though I don't like the look of the haircut much, it felt pretty good to make a dramatic change, after growing it out for two years. Other tidbits at home included getting my white coat tailored to my actual size, getting a new backpack, and finishing a roll of film.

Writing about things awhile after I've thought of them is hard, and dissatisfying in the knowledge that it's inadequate. The intersection of language, or my language, and feelings makes me feel that it's always inadequate, even when I write in the moment, but this feels more so. Still, I'm really very glad to be able to do at least this.

scene

There are a lot of famous scenes in the Godfather trilogy; some for shock and gore, some for cinematography, some for telling one-liners, others for plot-turning points or moments of betrayal. I love all of these, but in my opinion the brilliance also lies in the fillers, and even more so, in how the world of the movie extends beyond just the scenes that you see. It may be the best movie I know of that makes itself so palpable and rich, that you find yourself creeping in the unshown corners of the characters' lives and environments. It's like when a friend tells you a story about something that happened to them as a kid, and you can imagine not only the story itself and what your friend was like before you saw and knew her; based on her story--but also what may have happened before and after, how she might feel about other things similar and different; based on the time and space you've occupied together.

I can't do justice to this feeling, to describe it exactly or how incredible it is, but it's one reason why my favorite scene in all of the Godfather trilogy is a sliver of a moment. It takes place in Part II, during the flashback of Vito Corleone as a young man, before he's become the Godfather. The appreciation for the scene partly arises from what comes before and after. He's working in a grocery store, and the rising power of the mob sprinkles around him in smatterings. Vito gets laid off from his job because the mafia made his boss take on a relative instead. His boss tries to give Vito some groceries as an offering, but he thanks his boss for all his goodness and doesn't take it. Prior to getting laid off, Vito incidentally and innocently gets in the middle of some mafia drama. This happens while he's still working as a grocer, but after he's laid off someone offers to repay Vito for a favor by stealing a fancy rug for him to bring home to his wife. And because you've seen Part I where Vito isn't a grocer but the Godfather, you can see how the Corleone empire unravels from this humble ball of yarn. My favorite scene is right after Vito comes home from getting laid off, right before he acquires the rug from the mafia.

He returns home to their small apartment. It's dimly lit but warm with browns and yellows. It has this quietly lush quality about it that I love, because the lush comes from so little. The doors flanking the dining room make it so you really only see Vito and his wife standing and facing each other around a dining table, creating a slim rectangle in the middle of the screen. He unwraps a pear from some crumpled paper and sets it on the table. "What a nice pear!" she says, he kisses her, and the scene fades, leaving them in their small space with their small meal.

People generally dislike Part III; it's true that it's not as well made as the others. But completing the story makes scenes like this one in Part II all the richer. Enmeshed in grandeur and suffering and the massive drama of the rest brings you back to these moments, and you wonder, even as you know, how did we get from here to there?

I think we all wonder that too sometimes about our lives. Someone once commented on an entry, that it's funny how our lives take on logical trajectories and narratives given all the different choices we might take and random things that might happen. And while it is true that things connect each of our days to the next, I feel that when we each near twenty-five years like I am, we look at where we're sitting or standing or moving and say, this rug? What happened to my pear?

While it may seem otherwise, I'm not saying I think the pear is always better than the rug; it all depends. I never foresaw that I would be doing what I'm doing right now (at this very moment or during this larger timeframe) or that I'd be the kind of person I am now. Everything has its rough edges and rough centers, me and my life, but I'm incredibly grateful for what has become of both. And because there is so much to come, I know that despite all the changes and growth (and perpetual epiphanies of the need for more growth), growing up isn't about replacement. Working to achieve things is hard; I think achieving them while keeping what came before is harder, but possible, and better.

packing

Due to a traumatic experience with too much luggage in high school, I tend to be a minimalist packer. I've told this story a bunch of times, even though it's not at all interesting or important, but it really did affect me. It was my first time away from home, for a summer program following junior year. Six weeks in Ithaca New York, and I had no sense of what I needed for a compact time away. I took everything with me. I rarely had to wear an outfit more than a couple times, I brought pictures to decorate my room and CDs for my desk even though I had nothing to play them on. I put all of this into one big luggage, thinking that it would be no sweat since it was one you could pull. It didn't come to mind that everything has its limits. It was so heavy that the pulley broke, on the way to Ithaca. On my way back home, with my bag a bit heavier from accumulating books, it was the biggest pain to put it in the car, transport it, check it, retrieve it. Since then I've been much wiser about what I need, and I lean to the other extreme of bringing the bare minimum.

In the late summer and early fall of 2002, after high school, I packed one very large suitcase and a couple duffel bags and that was everything I took with me to start college. In the late summer and early fall of 2007, I sent about 11 boxes of varying sizes from San Francisco to New Haven to start med school. I also took the suitcase and duffel bags with me on the plane. My packing philosophy hasn't changed much, though after living out-of-school I definitely wanted a feeling of home in my next place, and brought more than the bare minimum for med school. But having packed and moved in some form every year in between, I have learned a few things about packing.

Each year I re-learn, and learn more so, that I have to throw stuff away. I hate it but I have to. I still keep mementos but not as many multiple scraps from the same event. I throw away programs unless they're significant and just keep the tickets. I threw away my one fork and one spoon. I can't keep half-broken (but still usable) plastic trashcans anymore because their shapes are sadly not conducive to fitting in boxes. Yes, I threw away the dried leaves from my Halloween costume. I've given away things like my stereo and fridge. It makes me feel better when things I can't take with me are used by someone else, including toiletries. Gave Jey my detergent once, and Don my toothpaste, Amy my shampoo.

No matter how I try to stick to a system of organization, I never pack quite the same way each time. I knew from the beginning to mix my clothes and books (haha), but there is never a "best" way to package everything else, like shoes and desk stuff and files and vases. There are ways to make them fit that make sense, but there isn't one way that I know to do it every time. Plus there are slight changes in content. So I re-think and re-pack each time. The boxes change, too, of course. I try to re-use them as long as possible and I always over-tape to hold them together, but moving just isn't good for stability and they fall apart.

When you pack, you have to consider everything. You get your big things out of the way, but you have to get rid of those paper clips on the sink, pack the souvenir cup on your bookshelf so it doesn't break, find a place for postcards people have sent you. You go through every inch of your material life whether you want to or not.

Somehow the time and energy it takes increases with each year, even when the amount of stuff stays similar. I used to be able to pack stress-free, even during exams--finish in a day and move by myself in an hour and a half. Last year I remember it being a struggle, deciding what to bring, send, leave behind. Moving this year, it took me a day and several nights to pack, and I enlisted the help of four friends and two cars to move. There seems to be more of me and correspondingly, others.

And in the same way I'm writing minutes before leaving for Vietnam, as time passes I find myself packing up until the end, scrambling when before I could take my time. Things feel semi-incomplete and not fully articulated because I didn't have as much time to think through it all, but it's packaged up anyway and I go on. As heavy as they get, my boxes push me forward.

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.

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.

moving through and on

My first summer in Cambridge is nearing its end. Trying to decide whether I had a good time is impossible, and I’ve concluded that such an experience can’t be narrowed down that way. I had a lot of good times. Summer here is incredibly beautiful. I was able to do many of the summer-in-Boston things I’ve always wanted to do. Sailing didn’t happen, nor did outdoor exercise, nor did Swan Boats, but I won’t give up on those for the future. Staying here was also difficult, and intense, for reasons that have more to do with my interaction with the environment, my relationship with this place, and my general state of mind as far as where I am in my life and how being here reminds me of it, doesn’t let me escape from it. It was hard. I can’t describe it in less vague terms because it’s all hazy to me too. I just know that I was often happy, often unhappy. I guess I’m still coming to terms with the fact that the proportion of my different emotions has changed, that the things that drive me and fulfill me are changing, becoming bigger and requiring more of me, which almost ironically makes it harder for me to make myself happy.

A lot of the superficial unsettledness stemmed from the fact that I was immersed in physics. I’m sorry to those of you who appreciate physics, but oh my God, I hate it. I know that it’s not arbitrary, I know that it explains many things, and I’ve always valued that about science, but honestly I can’t remember the last time I cared so little about a subject. Chemistry and biology have always offered so many analogies to concepts that mattered to me, but I couldn’t find anything in physics. I’m sure they’re there; I’m just not built to see them. It was a good course, well-taught and well-organized, but I’m glad it’s over. Also because I think being in a class I hated put me in a mode of thinking about other things that I didn’t like. Annoyances heightened, anxieties increased. I told Sarah recently that I write so much about things that I like; I should really mention that there are many things that I don’t like. Like when people are selectively nice, or don’t clean up after themselves, and especially when they’re inconsiderate. I know no one likes these things, but I think I get abnormally irritated by them. My biggest pet peeve has always been people kicking the back of my chair, on airplanes and in movie theaters for example. It’s that complete lack of awareness of another person’s presence other than your own that really gets me. Anyway, I think being in a general state of negativity made me have unnecessarily mean thoughts and made me forget that I like to believe in mean moments rather than mean people.

But like I mentioned, I had a lot of fun too. Dinner with the blockmates happened awhile ago, which was so much fun. Melkis, Courtney, Yonina and I met up with Jackie at Star Market to buy ingredients, and I was amazed by the wide array of bellpeppers. I love bellpeppers, the way they smell and look and taste and feel. They had orange, yellow, red and green…so bright and immediately appealing. They’re also so odd-looking, and have these various quirks and nooks and crannies about them, so that I can’t quite pinpoint exactly why they amuse me so much. They’re so shiny and smooth, and make such a crispy sound when you cut into them, and I really enjoy how the little seeds that had been neatly arranged spill out and stick to your fingers. I like how they look sliced, or diced, or in chunks. Whatever it is, I just like them, a lot. Back at Jackie’s we prepared everything, salad and chicken and tofu stir fry and rice (I mostly cut things, a process that I like in the same way that I like bellpeppers, and put things into pans when Jackie told me it was okay to). It’s very satisfying to eat a meal that you’ve prepared, and even more so to have it supplemented by wonderful people and funny conversation. It was very homey, and comfortable.

We also went to Shakespeare in the Park…specifically, Hamlet in Boston Common. Lara and I staked out spots really early so we had the best possible seats. Then she brought Vietnamese sandwiches and bubble tea from Chinatown, and by the time Rajan and Tim and Maciej and friends arrived there were about twenty of us piled and squished on two sheets and a blanket. The show was good. I’d forgotten how much I love Hamlet, how much I think I’m like Hamlet sometimes—indecisive, contradictory, moody, disconnected, overanalytical and overly emotional at once. The set was more elaborate than I’d expected, and the actors used the space really well—using the high stage, having people up and down the stairs, in the little pool of water in the front. For some reason Lara and I found the line “I find thee apt” really amusing and every few moments she would turn around and tell me that she found me apt. I discovered that that girl gets crazier as the night goes on, without any assistance from external agents…she burns some kind of inner fuel and makes you laugh harder and harder with every minute.

During the dramatic final scenes lightning occurred every few moments, and you could hear the distant rumble of thunder grumbling louder and louder, until it started pouring after Hamlet kills Polonius. A little at first, then a flood all of the sudden. It was cooling, and refreshing after soaking in the humidity. We walked-ran to the T station, and it was so fun to be out in the summer rain. I don’t care what anyone says about East Coast weather, I love it. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t experienced it long enough to become jaded, but I’ll take the illusion. The weather personifies the world, reveals its moods, and makes me feel connected to it and makes me feel a little less silly for being emotionally capricious. The thunder that’s so loud it sounds hungry and the sharp lightning that’s so quick it’s elusive at the same time that it’s so commanding, make it seem like something out there is demanding something from me and from us, and all of that is so crucial to not becoming stale and indifferent, which I suppose I fear sometimes.

Melkis and I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I really loved the first half hour, which probably sounds strange because it’s all removed from the factory itself, but I think that’s what I really liked about it. I liked how they took the actual legends of Willy Wonka from the book and set up this fantastical image of him before they actually showed the factory, and how they contrasted it with Charlie’s bleak but cozy life. I liked how content Charlie was with concepts, dreams and ideas, with his models of the real thing. I found the rest of the movie—the real thing, I suppose—entertaining but in that during-the-moment kind of way, rather than an enduring kind of way. I always envision the book coming to life as such an exciting prospect, but maybe it takes away a bit from the self-guided imagination that’s such a part of Dahl books.

Afterwards we went to the Cambridge city dance party. They basically cut off a couple blocks in Central, in front of City Hall, so that people could dance outside. It was the first dance I’d been to with fellow college students as well as little kids, high schoolers, famillies and senior couples. We found Rachel and Connie, and other Harvard people, and had a good time. It was a warm night, but not stifling and I’d never danced in the streets like that before.

I got to see Andrew relatively often this summer, which was nice. We tried catching the Swan Boats, but apparently it was too humid and the man-powered boats weren’t running. So we walked around the public gardens a bit; I wanted to show him the duckling statues from Make Way for Ducklings. While we were doing that we saw the cutest fuzziest littlest yellow duckling in the water, surrounded by other brownish ducks. Maybe it was because the day was becoming gray, and rain was nearing, but the image of that bright duck in the murky water is so distinct in my mind. It’s so easy to conjure, it doesn’t even seem like a memory. Before we could find the statues it started raining, and we were without umbrellas or any extra layers of clothing. For some reason we thought it would be all right to find cover under a tree and wait for the storm to pass, and this worked for all of two minutes before it began insanely pouring. After the initial shock it was pretty liberating to just get bombarded by the elements. We have so many little associations with the rain that it seemed fitting to get drenched like that together. We eventually made a run for the subway station, where much smarter people had already found cover. But they probably didn’t have as much fun in there.

I suppose that’s the most significant thing I did get from this summer—that sometimes it’s better for me to brave the outside instead of seeking shelter. It makes me feel good that I got through whatever it was that made this experience tough, that though I had to work harder, mentally and physically and emotionally, to achieve what I wanted to, it is probably meant to be that way. Keeping sight of my original goals in the midst of expected and unexpected worries and down moments became a new thing to work for, and to prove to myself that I could do. When I spoke to Stephen during anxious times, he’d say things like, “Of course you’ll get through it but it comes down to the fact that if you had to do it all over again, you wouldn’t stay there. You would’ve gone home.” And without even thinking about it, I said, “No, I wouldn’t have.” Seeing a lot of people close to me go through difficult things this summer again made me think again about how I’ve always romanticized struggles and pains because I see them as part of the full experience I want to have and think that I’ve either downplayed in my own life or really haven’t had. I know that I won’t feel that way when I actually go through them, but I have faith that I’ll see their value in retrospect as people always do. Completeness is just that, and I wouldn’t want to settle for the partial.

an incomplete picture (closer)

Melkis and I saw Closer in the Square the weekend before we left for break. We loved it. Right after it ended I clung to Melkis's arm and all I could say was, "That was so good. That was so intense." I can compare it to no other movie experience. I've seen a lot of intense movies but none that made me hurt in quite the way that this one did. Not that it was more valuable than the other kinds of strong feelings that movies in the past have evoked, but just that this was singular.

It was painful and fascinating to witness how deeply and how effectively--and how efficiently (that word seems to convey the tone of the movie fairly well)--people can and will hurt each other. There were moments when I literally hurt. Why is this unusual? That always happens when I see people being cruel to one another. In some cases, it's a simple repulsion by inexplicable unkindness; in others there's a more complicated empathy involved; the actions may be cruel but the intentions can be understandable. The kind of things Closer depicted were more of the latter sort, but for some reason they scared me in a way I don't think I've experienced before. Because they were so real, so understandable in the context in which they were placed. The things that were said, and that were done, were things I would never have imagined people actually saying and doing, but when they were said and done in the film, they seemed so natural. And that was scary. And even scarier that the original source of these incredibly hurtful things was love. Love is powerful, most movies optimistically tell us, love can surmount all things, they say. Closer doesn’t deny this but it makes distinctions between love and compassion and kindness—love is in fact so powerful that it can destroy any inclination to practice the latter two virtues.

I mentioned some of this to Andrea and she asked me whether I've seen/experienced that kind of hurt in real life, and I said yes, but in real life these incidents and feelings are diluted over long passages of time, place and experience, so witnessing them full-force on-screen, you recognize and feel them much differently. Particularly in this movie, which was so compact. So concise--every word or lack thereof meant something, and lifetimes and a million musings fit easily and comfortably into four characters--four bodies, really--and a plot that could be summarized in a few sentences. Maybe this is where my vague dissatisfaction with real life stems from; I want that level of intensity, all the time. I think I talked to Sarah about that once and she said something along the lines of, why would you want that, you’d be drained and exhausted. This is probably true, and reminds me of what Foucault says about never being able to experience things fully and directly, using the example of the sun—you can never experience the sun as it really is because our interaction with it is too intangible and even if it were tangible it’d be too intense; you can only see its light reflected onto other things and feel its warmth, diluted by distance and particles in the air.

Most of the time I’m more than content with that, even incredibly grateful and happy for that because there are moments when even as it is things are too much, and so beautiful (a la American Beauty). But I wonder sometimes whether that is sufficient, or we only think so because it’s all we can have. I like to think, though, that maybe things are beautiful because even only a fraction of the whole can have such impact, and we’re left to imagine how amazing the complete image would be.