Blues

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Creeping,

Like stair-footsteps in the night,

Merciless.

Meaningless.

Like twisted sheets, they reach,

White hands so cold

And so bright

That all else dies.

And then I’m sinking,

Drowning,

Rushed along with the

Inevitable tide.

And then I’m lost,

Lost in white

That black becomes.

Blue.

And then it’s not.

It can’t be

Blue

Because blue is

Soft, and

Sky, and

Silk, but

This is

Hard, and

Feet, and

Glass.

Shivered.

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Loud,

Like the fall,

Proud, and

Small.

Day 7: Too Fast

I’m writing this on the plane from Baltimore to Phoenix, where we’ll make the transfer to John Wayne. I can’t believe that this trip went by so quickly. A week. Just like that. I went into this trip with no small amount of trepidation, what with everything that happened the week before I left. Now I realize that this is my senior trip, the last one I will ever have, and I let so many opportunities slip through my fingers. I let myself become preoccupied with what I have no control over, and I took so much for granted. I always feel like this on flights back home. Back to the routine, back to being normal.

As I was walking to morning session today (in 18-degree weather and freezing with the wind chill), I realized that I could very well be back in DC later this year. Permanently. Georgetown is my ultimate dream, somewhere far and unknown. I still don’t know if that is the best choice, but that’s what I want right at this moment. Maybe things will change.

I only have one MUN conference left in my high school career, and this one is for all the marbles: BMUN, which traditionally is the most distinguished and competitive conference on the West Coast.

We have won delegation awards at BMUN for the past twenty-two years with the best senior team with can put together. This year, schools from the east coast are going to be coming over to compete, so competition will be even stiffer. This conference, along with Nationals, are the only two MUN conferences where perfect performance is absolutely expected, with no exceptions. For the juniors going to Nationals, preparation begins with the selection process in November and builds all the way through to March. For BMUN, prep starts later but is no less intense because all participants are expected to push themselves.

It is a school tradition to take the top few sophomores to BMUN in order to build up future classes. By some ridiculous stroke of luck, I was selected to go to BMUN as a sophomore two years ago, a decision that still has me mystified, given my spotty record in the awards arena. I was brought onto the team nearly a month late and partnered with a senior I barely knew. I spent that winter break slaving over the access to nuclear technology and research and the health risk standards of nuclear technology, topics that have become my MUN “specialty.” I almost picked the Food and Agricultural Organization. Things would certainly be different now if I had…

But I went off to Berkeley as a sophomore and conquered my fear of flying but failed miserably in committee. Our first committee session lasted until past eleven at night and I was thoroughly exhausted. And dejected. This was a caliber of competition I could not match. At the awards ceremony, my co-delegate and I were one of only two delegations in the entire team that didn’t bring anything back home.

I was a complete wreck. I was determined to quit MUN, despite the fact that being in the program had been my dream since primary school. It took a lot of long talks and a special meal at a quiet Chinese restaurant with cranberry juice to change my mind, and I am forever grateful to those who did so.

Last year, I was over the moon to be selected to the Nationals team and chosen as one of two Head Delegates at the UN for closing ceremonies. That was a complete dream come true, and all on the day before my birthday.

And now I’m going back as a single delegate in one of the most competitive committees at the conference: the European Union. I have no idea what I’m doing. The last time I was in the European Union, I was a sophomore at the UC Davis conference and instead of discussing the accession of Turkey to the EU, we had a “crisis” ten minutes in and ended up quelling a rebellion in Republika Srpska. Or something like that. And then it hailed and our chair came back from lunch drunk. Not a good experience.

But I had no choice. I apparently “don’t have the personality” to “co” or partner with others, so I’m one of only two single delegations… again. Let’s see how this goes.

That was an epic MUN reflection. I think I should do this more often before I graduate.

Epilogue

Today was brutal.

After spending two hours of mutilation and humiliation at the hands of my chem final, my fried brain had to face another two hours of 4th Period CP Physics. I fell asleep partway. I'm sure that that does not bode well for my borderline grades.

I made up for it by coming home and doing absolutely nothing for four hours but hacking away at another depressing addition to what appears to be a series of stories I'm writing about nothing in particular. I believe I can title this part an epilogue. And I've been listening to too much David Bowie lately.

Rememory 1

A utopia is not a place but a process.
"It is a memory to be remembered, rendering knowledge and experience to shape a sweeter tomorrow."

I spent much of my childhood with my grandparents, who stayed with us through the long, sweltering summer and autumn months before flying back to Taiwan in the spring when only a short, distant phone call every few weeks would connect us. They would come with suitcase after suitcase full of toys and food and clothing that created a veritable heaven for my young eyes. The entire family room floor would be covered with old cloths, new possessions carefully laid out; my own private marketplace.

There were those long, rainy mornings in the winter I spent hiding the dust pan from my grandfather as he endeavored to sweep the kitchen floor, resulting in a merry chase that always ended in the broom closet. He always ate two whole almonds every morning for breakfast, and my brother and I would take a fiendish delight in hiding his nutcracker, usually in the utensil drawer, the last place he would look with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows. Long talks in Chinese with my grandmother where I devoured every word she said about growing up with honor and dignity. I would play with her blood pressure medication, sorting the little white pills into little white mountains and inventing stories for the little white pill with the brown speckles to journey through the snowy landscape.

I would always cry when they left, impossibly large suitcases filled again with American almonds cushioned in Wal-Mart shopping bags. I would follow the little procession out onto our front porch, watch as my father loaded my world for four months into our Previa, and wave manfully as they drove away. Then as we turned to make our way back into our now too-empty house no longer bursting at the seams with my grandfather's old newspapers, my grandmother's fourteen-dish dinners, when I turned to face again the ordinary, I would cry. I don't believe I cried because I missed them. I cried because the months ahead were so long, so empty with the uncertainty of whether or not I would ever see them again.

Now, I hardly understand a word they say over the distant telephone, and when the news is not good I sit and pretend that I am ignorant of the words babbled above my head. Now, I sit silently at the plastic-covered table in the kitchen with the dusty floor, head and heart full of memories that shape a brighter history.

Talk

I had a conversation with my brother today that lasted for about ten minutes. Probably a little less. It's ironic that even though he lives at home now, we still barely see each other. Maybe over breakfast, as the coffee maker gurgles and gags away by the steaming rice cooker. Maybe for a few minutes at night after he finishes dinner and I'm downstairs to brush my teeth before I go to sleep. Weekends are the worst. We are separated only by one wall one foot thick. I can hear him when he opens a drawer and when he sneezes. When his phone buzzes, I reach for mine. We never really talk, though. Hurled insults masquerading as greetings. Identical grunts of indignity at our father's lunch (and dinner) whistles. A collective sigh as we descend the stairs to the kitchen.

It took a load of laundry for us to see each other face-to-face for the first time since I enacted Operation Grouchy High School Senior, most of which involves me sulking about and hiding in my room.

How ironic. It's the laundry again. I just realized how strange that is. The last time there was a major laundry family bonding event, my mother told me the story of her mother's journey across China on foot to find her father. Of course, a sixteen-year-old girl walking across China wasn't anywhere near exciting enough for my grandmother. She just had to go and do it during the Japanese occupation. And my mother just had to tell me this story while she was doing the laundry.

These modern times are so very hard.

Anyhow, I was folding my mother's panties and my brother was folding my father's boxers, and we just got to talking about my life. Because that's the sort of thing that happens in this household. We discuss life over laundry.

I said something incredibly inane about pulling off an A in AP Chemistry for the first quarter, and he responded with some vague congratulations. He'd turned the television on, but had apparently forgotten about it. An infomercial for a pan that rotisserie-ified chicken burbled on behind him. I dug one of my father's shirts out of the laundry basket and started folding it, chattering on about how difficult school was, finally asking him where he thought I would "end up" next year for college.

I am a completely, utterly bull-headed, insensitive brat.

Sometimes, I just wish that I had been born in a nation in Sub-Saharan Africa so I wouldn't be such a self-centered idiot. I'd have to worry about malaria and other water-born diseases and whether or not the guy with the machete (fine, AK-47) down the dirt path was going to rape me. Or marry me. Or sell me. Or something along those lines that actually warranted being worried about. Instead of agonizing about a 96.6% in AP Chemistry and a 92.8% in AP Lit and where I am going to end up for college. Because it's obvious that I'm going to be able to continue on in this nice little civilian bubble of textbooks and pop quizzes and term papers for the next four years of my life.

I should be celebrating by actually memorizing these O-Chem functional groups that have been burning a hole through my shredded conscience for the past week. I should actually be annotating these plays instead of Spark-Notes-ing them the day before my exam. I should appreciate every chance that I have that he hasn't.

Because, as my begetters so kindly emphasize at every other meal, I don't want to end up like him.

Heaven forbid I should strive to emulate my older brother. It might even tear a hold in the fabric of reality.

I vainly struggled to soothe away the melancholia of this laundry conversation at the piano when I discovered that someone had moved a little framed picture to sit right on top of it, smack dab in front of my line of sight. It's a family picture of happier times in Alaska when my brother would smile for pictures and I would not. He's... sixteen? I'm still in primary school. He stands to the right of my parents and I to the left.

A wall between us.

Oh brother I can't, I can't get through.
I've been trying so hard to reach you 'cause I don't know what to do.
Oh brother I can't believe it's true.
I'm so scared about the future and I wanna talk to you.
Oh I wanna talk to you.
: Coldplay, "Talk"

One Day More

I have a battered, wooden dresser next to my bed. It has four drawers and is covered with Post-Its and drawings detailing Kingdom Animalia, arranged in evolutionary order, along with a timeline of Life on Earth and details for gel electrophoresis. The top drawer holds all my athletic gear: tank tops, mesh shirts, shorts, the stray soccer sock. The second is home to three fat plastic binders crammed full of wide-ruled paper filled with large, childish handwriting detailing tales of lost knighthood and turbulent seas. The third drawer contains my comics collection that I hardly ever touch anymore. All the plastic-slick books with their colorful pictures are gifts. One Pearls Before Swine collection is covered with numerous bling-sporting, cigar-smoking Stephan Pastises. That one was from my brother.  The fourth drawer often gets stuck; it is slightly crooked on its runners. In it are a coffee thermos from my grandparents and a few battered wide-rule notebooks, also filled with crooked script. Most of the drawer, however, is filled with scraps of paper, some laminated, some in cheap plastic frames, some crumpled and shoved far, far away from the light. Along with the scraps of paper are a few pieces of recycled polished wood and lengths of itchy ribbons in all sorts of colors, from which hang more shiny pieces of metal.

I don't really like to open that bottom drawer. It requires far too much effort to jimmy it open, and even then, what is there to see? Fancy paper with big words on them? Frames commemorating achievements of years past? Medals worn for one brief, shining moment, then cast aside as inconsequential?

Surely, the shelves above my desk are covered in trophies; honor chords and medallions hang so thickly that I might be typing under the lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon. All I have up there, however, are soccer medals and trophies from years gone by, little post-it notes from my brother on a Christmas many years ago. I can't bring myself to take them down even though my achievements have by far outgrown recreational summer leagues and afternoons scoring own-goals.

In my drawer are a Mayoral Proclamation, unopened letters of acceptance, heavy plaques of commendation, framed tokens of membership. For some reason, I like to hide them away and pretend like they don't exist.

And yet, I gave up a medical internship at USC for a chance to go off and win some more awards. How does this make any sense? Whenever I hear mention of my friends in the program, my stomach starts to crawl because I think: That should be me. But it's not. If I had been forced to make this decision a few years ago, I would have chosen the internship over anything. The medical field. That was my dream. Now? I'm not so sure. What has changed?

I leave for State tomorrow, and am looking forward to it with equal parts excitement and dread. I need to get out of here for a bit, but am not particularly keen on word-sparring with other girls for an entire week. Maybe it won't turn out like that. I hope. Right now, I have just one song on my mind.

Family

It's times like these, sprawled across my brother's bed, that I wonder what family is all about.

He comes home, and I greet him with my usual "Hi, Booger." He replies with the typical "Hey, Fartbag." His bed is so comfortable, large, soft, and squishy. It is always dark in his room. Rarely does he open the blinds. I grab a pillow and curl up on my stomach, watching as he examines his glow-in-the-dark shirt in the half-light of the room. He catches me watching and smacks me with his laundry. I shout, and he leaves, laughing. That's about all I ever see of him anymore. A minute. Two minutes. No long talks under the blankets, no more blasting alien spaceships under the pillows on Saturday mornings when I would sneak into bed with him to save the world. Now, we call each other names we don't even mean, hoping that love of the past will keep us together.

The past. It was more than just that. Everything was so much simpler. I didn't have to worry about when everyone would get home so I could retreat to the relative safety of my room. There were nights when I could just sit in my favorite corner of the couch with good old Brian Jacques and be undisturbed except for Vin Scully and the Dodgers. Before the need for large, flat-screen televisions and booming sound systems. Before endless questions, demands, rising tensions, voices. Perhaps it is me that has changed. A radical change, indeed. Playing catch with my brother in the family room with the squishy pink football, careful not to knock over the lamp. That was before even soccer and happy evenings at the park before Coach Leo got thrown out and the nights soured. Before even the radio came to gather dust on my bookshelf, before I even bought my first CD, when everything was written by hand and so felt, not merely seen. Before he died. I guess that's all it comes down to. Why, after so many years, I still think of this, I do not know. Perhaps because I was still young when it happened. Really, though, I was old enough. Thirteen is plenty old to confront death. Four years since the bloody fourth month of his fourteenth year. I am thinking dark thoughts and speaking in reverse once more. This should stop.