Wounded heart, wounded pride, slowly saying goodbye.
Vancouver is the fourth home I’ve had in as many years, and it is the fourth one I am leaving also in as many years. It’s another forced move, another case of “have to” overriding “want to”. Boiling under my skin is this feeling that I shouldn’t “have to”, that I am better than “have to”, that I ought to be the one forcing, dictating – I glower in frustration at the board, my opponent’s positioning and tactical flourishes and traps that might have snapped at empty air if I’d only been properly fearful. How could I let this happen? How could I have lost, again?…
It’s best to ruminate on the game later, perhaps, although the memories of mistakes come in and swing their feet on the table, old drunkard friends you don’t have the ice to boot out onto the street. No, we address them in due course, though surely their clamor shall at times drown out the words I have for you. Priorities –
One of the things I’ve always remembered from my high school literature class is the idea that rain symbolizes baptism. An atheist reinterpretation: renewal, cleansing, letting go. It is easy to associate rain with tears, but grief belongs to snow. Rather, there was many a time in my younger years when a pitter-patter on the window would draw me out of self-agony with its melody – sometimes a soft lullaby, sometimes cacophonic deluge, but always lifting that anguish for a while with song. Mother nature’s petrichor percussion, her nursery glockenspiel.
I arrive unprepared. In some aspects these are things I expect (what you know you don’t know), but the worst of it (what you don’t know you don’t know but you really should have known based on prior experience and what other people warned you about before you came here, you fucking idiot, you stupid naive little child you–) ambushes me and slices its jaws shut on my sternum. I am prideful. I tell myself this is workable, that I can fix everything through sheer will and bravado if I just try harder and focus better and use this or that schedule or productivity technique; yet on Discord calls with old friends and get-togethers with new ones, my heart bleeds and I cannot stop spilling onto them the viscera of my spirit.
Rain cloaks Vancouver at times like a shroud, at times like a baby’s blanket, at times like the brilliant white gown of an uncertain bride. Rain dismantles me, rinses crimson out from my heart, peels off vain sunlit pretenses and reveals stark blunt realities. Rain clarifies the mind and sharpens the senses, stops me weeping in frustration, and gazing skyward through the downpour I can focus and plot the necessary moves - shelter the king, let go of the pawn, dash with the queen to pin the knight so that it cannot join the assault on the center. I am standing in a drizzle just strong enough to remind you of its existence when I make the decision to leave, long before those sunny days when I email my resignation and shake an administrator’s hand goodbye.
The day after I quit, I go to see Australia and Turkey in the World Cup. A much-touted Turkish offense is blunted by masterful defensive play and lightning-quick counterattacks from Nestory Irankunda and Connor Metcalfe. Before kickoff, the Aussies in the stands clock in at 100 decibels and the Turks at 120, but the end of the game sees the stadium belting out “Down Under” as dejected Turkish fans file out into the night. I make friends with two brothers-in-law sitting behind me and later visit the one at his chocolate factory, where I am given a healthy smattering of small treats to take home.
The day after, I celebrate my birthday with a small group of friends who kept me sane. We boulder, share a Peking duck, and banter back and forth as we wander carefree in the Richmond evening. For an every-four-years football fan, going to a local World Cup match is incredible. Tucking myself into bed, I find myself smiling more at the companionship.
25 is a good time to ask what the point is. Usually you are not running out of time overall, but you have a lot of life left and you start feeling the pressure to decide what to do with it. That is, you start feeling like you are running out of time to decide what to do with your time. Is this right? Am I happy with how I spend my days? If we say we are too busy and that we do not need to answer the question now, then when exactly does that answer come? Doubt is quicksand in front of the mirages of a dream career, relationship, and family, yet it is also the natural reaction if you realize your first few years of adulthood are from an existence you do not want. Perhaps 25 is the outermost layer of the life crisis matryoshka.
I grapple with my own refusal to be easy. I am unable to make the choices everyone else seems to make. I turn down money (and what exactly is wrong with money? what is wrong with the concept of standardized value across society?) because suspended within is something insidious, a sapper, shadowy stone phalanges dangling people from strings and eating the skip in their voice and drinking dry the light in their eyes. I think I hate the puppet people. I hate the ones who respond predictably to predictable stimuli, whose obituaries will say more on when they were born and by whom they are survived than why – why they were alive. I don’t want to hate them, because I know there are circumstances and mouths to feed and lives that were too unlucky to taste freedom (and I also sold myself for a time, so I’m also one of the too-fortunate sons-of-bitches I seem to hold a grudge against; self-hate, gazing upon your marble skin in the reflection and raising the brutish hammer of the demolitionist, shame), yet upon seeing the bright and beautiful souls strung up by those faraway hands, how can I not wail in horror? How can I not hate the puppeteer, and if I hate the puppeteer, how can I, zealotry-blinded believer of self-actualization, not hate the puppets? I wonder if I have to hate them, because if they are okay then what is the point of me and my tribulations?
When I was younger, I wanted more than anything to do good unto others. There is this saying that the meaning of service is to plant trees whose shade you know you will never sit under, and I remember relishing in that end, dreaming of dying with a smile of contentment looking out at saplings. Alas, the tempests of my age have voiced dissent, and as I come to reckon with the realization that my generation will be one of consequences, I see the earth in which those trees would root be sundered by hate and hurricane, leaving me with the last prisoner of Pandora’s box asking where is left for her to take refuge.
I hold on greedily, desperately, to a vigor I do not understand, a steed that blazes in flames blue and black zig-zagging upwards to a light in the sky I cannot see. The only thing I know is to cry out: Hope, I am your canvas! Paint on my skin a madness of colors, weave my hair into impossible shapes, let not fear stay your hand from searing your vision unto my unworthy soul! Science and technology are my sword and shield, advocacy and empowerment my warcry, but inside the carapace of me lies this simple truth: I’d like to sing everyone a song. I am a bastard of the arts.
Coming from the Midwest, there is something unbelievable about mountains. You grow up accustomed to a flat horizon, perhaps annotated with a treeline or dotted with distant buildings. It is a fact there that the sky is flat; any hill you see is a happy accident that will safely resolve itself if you just go a couple miles down the road. Then you come here and you see stone domineering that placid horizon, and the voices in your head hush as you recognize you are in the presence of great power, a peasant kneeling in the royal court, and (much as it makes you feel like an idiot country bumpkin, no wonder they make fun of us) you cannot help but gape at that alien sight of the earth towering over itself. Is that how it is for everyone? Do the passersby on the streets look in the distance and feel that same primal awe? Do they see past visions of earthquakes and eruptions and the planet reaching to touch the sky? How could anyone ever get used to it? I never do.
We climb Pump Peak through a thick morning fog. The rocks and grasses are punctuated by ponds, blackbirds perching in dead trees, and two patches of snow that survive in defiance of June. At the top, we yelp at the icy wind flogging us through our jackets, and like baby rabbits in a den, we nestle together between the crags for warmth.
When we reach the parking lot again, we learn Canada beat South Africa earlier that afternoon, and we shout and jump up and down with a pair of small grannies in celebration.
Days pass quicker than I want them to (although I am to blame – Slay the Spire won’t play itself). I make poutine for Canada Day. In the World Cup, we flare out in the Round of 16, technically as good as Brazil and both of our co-hosts down south. We fill our stomachs at the Richmond night market and lose our voices at karaoke; we cycle around downtown and feast on cheap lunches from T&T in Chinatown. I lose my Compass card on the bus days before it is set to expire. I prepare for my move to California in a half-hearted manner, irritatedly summing up shipping fees in my head instead of creating a proper spreadsheet.
Canadians are sweet. Even with the coolness that enervates the Pacific Northwest, you notice how they come in with McDonald’s and offer you fries, or how they always ask if you want to do something else after lunch so that you have more time to talk and joke and be together. I like to think sometimes that I have a Canadian heart (laid-back, carefree, optimistic, unconditionally kind) and an American shell (loud, relentless, clinical, mercenary): my good traits protected by my selfish ones.
I didn’t always divide my patriotism this way. Years ago, leaving the US for the old world filled me with a love for home I didn’t know I had. Seeing the fluttering stars and stripes at the embassy in Helsinki swelled my heart just like the soliloquy of a clarinet, and when I returned for the first time in seven months, I understood why seabound sailors kissed the ground. I almost did it too, almost collapsed to the floor in DTW to smooch a dingy olive carpet in the middle of the line for TSA.
I plan an opportunistic trip to Seattle and California. Two days before I leave, multiple people are shot at a food festival near the Space Needle. Three die. It is the first time in ten months that I feel the terror I felt after Oxford and MSU. Later in California I hear fireworks on my first night, which I eventually learn were gunshots down by the pier.
I want to make that sad but relieved laugh you get to do when you’re in a place where that doesn’t happen. “Thank goodness we live here and not there!” I don’t want to think about it. Not the guns, not the politics, not the 30 and 40-year-old somethings ignoring the sushi on their plates to chatter about upcoming quarterly earnings reports – I don’t want to think about that being home again, but I’m not dumb enough to allow myself not to think about it, and I am haunted by fantastical fears of a war between my two homes as I play games and watch shows and try to figure out whether a moving pod saves me any money at all compared to a truck. Heavy are the boots of the wanderer, and to wander back to a dark place weighs heavier still.
I sob watching the Air Canada safety video. The safety video! Of all the things I am starting to get emotional about. The video shows the suspension bridge as it reminds me about leaving my baggage behind; I vaguely remember her asking in March or so if I wanted to go, and so a few texts later we schedule a trip for the following Sunday.
The bridge steps rustle disconcertingly above the river, and I find myself asking if I actually got over my fear of heights. Awaiting us on the other side is green, flora and fauna every direction you look. Once on an oddly Google Maps-flavored call, my friends and I looked at the city of Nouakchott on Street View, and memory plucks out the sight of all that muted reddish yellow. I stare out at the trees and wonder if I’ve earned this sight.
Out of bemusement (or nostalgia? or just a desire to have fun without having to think about how to have it?), we run through all the kids’ activities: first the weather display, then the banana slugs, then Ollie the otter…according to activity 6, I have the wingspan of a Canada goose. A group of bird handlers introduce us to an owl, which meeps like a big exasperated chicken. Before returning, we scratch our initials together into the wooden plank railings.
As we back across the shaking path, I make a terrible joke, either a pun or some wild obscenity (probably both). She groans. “When do you leave again?”
I’m out for another fretful nighttime walk, the kind of walk I do when my head is too full on todos and not full enough on the will to do them. I pass by a glasses store with an amusing name. A gelato place, still running at 8:30 in the night. The popular breakfast place – damn, with my schedule these last few days I probably won’t be able to try it. Does everyone discover things like this? The things right in front of their eyes the whole time, only tangible just as they are about to leave?
Shadows loom over my sleep. When I close my eyes, I am replaying the lost match, reviewing inaccuracies, exploring alternate lines. Seemingly innocuous positions are remapped to threats: the fianchetto staring down the main diagonal, the flank pawns poised to charge and batter down the castle gates, a quiet, inoffensive rook one step away from raining its fusilade down the unsecured file. I gape in frustrated wonder at bizarre terms (what is a Boleslavsky hole?) and swear at overly shy moves and lost tempi, blunders made obvious by defeat. To fall for such vile manipulation a second time in a row – unspeakable – unforgivable –
Day to day, I consider all possible opportunities for disaster. At every restaurant, bus stop, and Skytrain station, I must keep my head on a swivel. A computer vision algorithm scans crowds for edges and corners that might belong to the faces of hostile figures; thank god it never happens, because there was no plan for what to do if it detected them. In more lucid moments I recognize my fear in the city as paranoia, but I cannot ignore the upcoming resumption of play. There will be that opponent again, and away from the board I am swarmed by nightmares of his radiant and splendorous visage, cackling.
I am greeted by a waft of seabird shit. They bicker, shout, jump back and forth on the pier across from the ferry. I go to Victoria to say goodbye; we inhale poutine, hold unreasonably large insects, and watch the sunset painting the Olympics across the Salish Sea.
I finish Roadside Picnic while I’m there. I tried it at some point, and I know that because I recognize the characters and shapes of the plot, but tonight the ideas make sense. The drunken ravings of Dr. Valentine Pilman seem to accuse me directly – how can a scientist driven by belief truly do their duty? What is faith but an irresponsibly prescribed self-medication for the uncertainties of the world, an early gondola ride down on that infinitely long climb to truth? I decide that the whole of Russia needs to go to therapy.
When the bus back to downtown pulls up, we lean in for the embrace, and I want to ask what is friendship but to say you are irreplaceable (I know not how else to find what you give me) / you are loved (I will look ahead to the stars in anticipation of your trajectory) / you are needed (what would I have done without you?) / you are (a wonderful thing, being) ⇒ I let go and cheerfully tell her “good to see you!”, and we wave and I step on the bus and she vanishes / will be back / I will return – be not afraid.
On the bus to the ferry, I try to count the feelings I have for the people in my life. Is there some collection of specific emotions that defines a friend? If I take the intersection of each set, is that what I must feel to say I truly care about someone? Does that construct not morph and reform as we grow older and, ostensibly, more mature? I am trying to reassure myself (or simply determine, with no particular affection towards any direction) that I am a caring person, because I have discarded supposed friends before. Perhaps there is a way to prove I made a right or wrong choice, a correctness score for my loves, my hates, my apathies.
I’m scared I’ll leave them.
The ocean wind tousles my hair as the mountains (where there are mountains, there will be earthquakes) steer our ship back to Tsawassen. A woman wakes me napping to point out two whales breaching and diving – a mother teaching her calf, she thinks? I remember Stockholm, then Rejkyavik. When I get home, I wonder where was the memory of Luzern.
Metaphors are a hazmat suit, similes are like tunnels you dig and crawl through to hide from plain, simple, direct honest statements. I am afraid because I am vain enough to think that I can be special, that my character is so complicated that others might not want or be able to keep up with me. I am all-mighty and pathetic, like King Sisyphus standing before shackled Thanatos and foreseeing his judgement in the court of Lord Hades. Someone once admonished me by asking, “Do you think you’re the first person in history to feel the way you feel?” I know no, but I feel yes; after all, life never existed before I was born, and it all ceases to exist after I die.
I am so terrified of being cruel. I’ve pushed people away. I’ve gotten lost in myself. I don’t want to be an important part of someone’s life, then make them unimportant from thousands of miles away. I haven’t told them that I’ve done this so many times before, that I felt the pain of doing it and tried to do it again, that I have walked out the door not looking back because I believed all that mattered now was what lay ahead. A long time ago, I wrote how easy it was to seek others to selfishly run from your own loneliness, and now I silently beg them to understand that it wasn’t loneliness, or maybe it was, but what matters is I wanted them and needed them and loved them and longed for them when I was encased in that hall of mirrors, and every time we parted ways a hollow pang would echo inside from the ivory abacus counting down the time we have together in this life – and so if we drift away it is not your fault, between us let yourself never doubt your worth for it is I who wants to star in a hero’s journey instead of a gentle pastoral, and please do not be hurt; I do not want to be cruel.
Why couldn’t it have worked out this time? Why did destiny give us only this year? Why couldn’t we keep walking together up mountains through rain? Why does my story dictate that I leave again and again, and why, in spite of all my callouses, does it still hurt so much to watch you shrinking away in the distance?
I have sushi at the place down the street one last time. We exchange thank yous and they tell me they hope I’ll be back someday. They always give a little candy with the receipt. I consider holding onto it for sentimental value and then deliciously come to my senses.
At the end, I stay with my first friend in Vancouver, the one who shared so much with me and the one who gave me a safe space away from all the fear. We drink boba, eat delicious food, go bouldering, play through childhood flash games, and stay up late in the night talking about hair lengths and high school marching band and life. For my last three days in Vancouver, we do what we’ve always done together.
When I arrive at endings, I often find myself wishing for more of those same old, same old things. That granted wish soothes my anxieties like cool water. It’ll be okay. Don’t think too hard. Just be.
It’s simplicity that I miss. A routine, knowing what tomorrow and next month and next year will bring – this is the secret to belonging. Uncertainty was exciting, because uncertainty is opportunities and open doors, but the mysteries ahead are less alluring the fifth time around.
I say I want to eventually come back. Inside, I wonder if I will ever truly belong here, or if home lies instead in the flat flyover lands, the place that always has cheap flights, thousands of miles from the oceans and the mountains and the significance and the hustle and bustle and worry, somewhere where you can buy a decent place for a few hundred thousand and live quietly thereafter. Can someone there matter? Not via the inviolable, fundamental worth of all of humanity; can someone with a forgettable name from a forgettable Detroit suburb, a descendent of nameless peasants who waked and planted and sowed and died forgotten – can someone like that make the universe acknowledge their existence? And the mark they leave: can it be something beautiful, something greater than a scar?
I went abroad because I believed in “yes”, moved here because I believed in “yes”, am departing because I still believe in “yes”. Deep inside is the longing for a resolute, gently spoken: “it’s okay, go home”.
We wake up at five in the morning to head to the airport. One last hug, one last goodbye. As I see the plushies in the back window pulling away, I wonder if she is thinking of me.
I hate the cost. I know this is right, I know this is necessary, but for the sacrifice to be the time with all of you – we’ll keep in touch and visit and game and eat lunch together on Discord, but I thought I would be there, staying there, growing out of youth and discovering myself there with you, and for our connection to be held over WebRTC instead of the tables of our favorite places around town is still enough for tears. It’s not fair. You mean so much.
I take my seat at the board and meet the gaze of my glowering opponent. I tire of Parthian tactics. I will come at you, and I demand that one of us be shattered into incandescent rains of crystal. Let me prove myself, let me be a vagrant no longer, let me once and for all plant my flag in the dirt or lie in it. I smirk, then laugh and weep joyously and tragically in caroling sing-song dirge at how I am still eager to play, how, how in spite of all the forlorn pasts and futures I still don’t want it safe, easy, restful – arbiter, bring the honored guest in ashen robes, for it is time for the ceremonial first move! The tournament proceeds, the games continue, the question of champion remains to be settled!
Outside the airplane window, home again fades away, dewdrops evaporating on the morning grass.