Pangs of something

I am sitting at a table in one of the classrooms at NYUSH. I feel the table shaking slightly because Julius sits next to me, writing as he does in the notebook where he seems to do all of his thinking. He is wearing a peacoat inside. He looks extraordinarily European.

It’s finals week here and the office building--university is extremely quiet. It does not have the manic, unhinged quality of finals week that I always relished at Bryn Mawr. I used to love going into the library at that time, when it would be open 24-hours a day, and soak in the absolutely reckless vibrations of every other stressed undergraduate. Once during a writing center shift, an older woman called me over to the beanbag chair where she was wrapped in one of our communal blankets. “Wake me up at nine PM,” she said, as if I were nursemaid, or her mother. “A fews ago my alarm didn’t go off and I woke up at midnight. All the lights were off and I had to call public safety to let me out of the locked library.” Finals week should feel a bit like that, like waking up in the dead, cold library at midnight because you decided falling asleep at someone’s workplace was the way to go. But now, the hallways are empty and there is a sense of letdown that is decidedly un-December.

A few weeks ago an Amazon package arrived from the US for me. I fetched it from the university mailroom and brought it up to the fifth floor. Inside was a tiny Christmas tree and miniature ornaments, made in China and sent to the US, where my mother picked them out and had them sent from the warehouse to me in China again. Opening it, it felt briefly like an integration from an old life to the life I have now.

November

Every few weeks I think about writing a post about how strange it is to find myself living here every day. When I first came, I thought a lot about how it was “only 10 months,” as though it was something I needed to suffer through, counting down the days to the ending. Sometimes I still feel like this. The semester is coming to a close and there is a sense of relief in that; it is half over. I admit that some things about it are hard. But mostly I just feel weird that I am living each day, still my whole and complicated self, eight thousand miles away from “home.”

I have felt this way before, showing up in another country and looking at the sky and just marveling at the fact that I made it to a far away place, where things are happening just the way they are in the US or anywhere else in the world. It is the surprising feeling when you realize just how many people live in the world, are living at the same time as you. This feeling is greatly enhanced now that I am properly living in another country. I buy groceries here; I go to work here. I go out with my friends and I watch Hulu on the couch on Saturdays. Yet I am also incomplete in certain ways. “It’s really not my home,” think to myself (a la Joni Mitchell) every few days. And who do I talk to about it? Almost no one. One of the strange aspects of this fellowship is how little all the fellows talk to each other about how bizarre it all feels. We mainly talk about the GPS course the first years take, or what restaurant we want to go to, or what graduate schools we want to apply to. I think on some level we are trying to maintain an image of intrepid world travelers. Which we are, of course. I wouldn’t take that identity away from any of my colleagues. I still think we all have done something sort of strange and wonderful and something most people would not do.

I remain proud of myself for coming here, even though I am “so far” out of college. It all happened so quickly and part of me is still living in June, waiting for it all to commence. I am very glad not to be living then, though. I could not do quarantine again. I do not know what I will be doing when I am next in the US, though I don’t have as much anxiety about it as I’d expect from myself. Except for health insurance, which I am very concerned about.

I am trying to write these graduate school applications and have more or less lost sight of anything to say about myself.

Skate Country

Today I felt at peace for the first time in weeks, maybe. I biked with a friend to the West Bund (the riverside on our half of the city, Puxi). They went for a run while I put on my brand new roller skates and tested my hand (feet) at the pavement there. A group of us have taken up rollerskating. Sunday was our first trial run, but the landscape we chose for the venture was made of brick and it was exceedingly hard to skate. I felt myself wanting to wrack up the momentum I am used to, but it was simply too challenging. I fell on my ass plenty of times, much to the amusement of my friends and every Chinese person in the neighborhood (yes, a lady filmed us and sent it to her friend on WeChat).

But tonight I was alone in a lovely dusk by the river with miles (kilometers, even) of paved road. It was what the Rillito River aspired to be, before it realized it was limited like many of us by its geographical circumstances. It was a funny parallel to all the hours I used to spend on that riverwalk in Tucson. The river is the hub of the city—all the major skyscrapers are there and at night they are beautifully lit. One phallus-shaped building flashed like a rainbow barber’s sign. The road was smooth and I quickly remembered that I know how to skate. I cruised down the river at my own pace, passing lots of people and tiny dogs. It was breezy and perfect. I was alone but not lonely in a way I haven’t been since I moved here. I felt very much at peace, in touch with myself and my feelings. I am supremely grateful for this experience.

Today I decided that I will most certainly be applying for graduate school this application cycle. I paused my Chinese lessons so I could devote more time to it. It is a bit of a crunched process but there isn’t really anything I am as good at as writing things, particularly application essays. I miss school and I miss having things and goals to work towards. I have learned so tremendously much in the past two and half years. I am so glad I took the path I took, although sometimes it feels like the years of my life are slipping away at an alarming rate and I am aging externally without growing much inside. I will be 25 in exactly two weeks. I am trying to pretend it doesn’t scare me a little.

Twilight, Typhoon, WFH

I have been thinking lately that it is probably easier to feel lovable when someone loves you. It is harder when you are alone in a new city in a new country, twelve hours ahead of anyone who cares about you. It is lonely here. I have been feeling bad and I have no one to talk to: I fear the people who surround me would make me feel ashamed for the things I feel, or offer unhelpful solutions. I do not feel like anyone understands.

I haven’t felt this way, maybe ever. I keep trying to picture how things felt almost five years ago, when I was so depressed, recovering from a year of gaslighting and a sense of emptiness so profound that I used to wander up and down the street just to remember that I was part of something. Even during those times I had people around me, some form of support. I used to describe those times as feeling “marooned, “ because it felt like I was shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean with no one around. (On that note, do not watch the film The Blue Lagoon. It is not a romantic Swiss Family Robinson and is, in fact, racist.) I no longer feel marooned. I feel landlocked in this vast country. Instead of floating in water, I feel I am rooted into massive amounts of earth, in a country with almost 1.5 billion people, all roaming about on the same terrain. I am attuned to the physical distance of America in a way I didn’t think I would be. I wonder if this is compounded by the emotional distance: maybe Fishtown wouldn’t feel like a theoretical place if my friends in Philadelphia were not so distant.

Clearly I have given up on making this blog the kind of upbeat travel blog one would expect of a 24-year-old who quit her job to move across the world because she was afraid she’d die before getting to live in China. Instead, I have chosen to write here instead of calling my mom or emailing my therapist or making up with my best friend. It is simpler to commiserate with myself on a platform no one reads than to try to tell anyone what I am feeling. This blog cannot say anything back. It does not force me to talk about the things that are painful. Instead I can sit at the dining room table where everything happens and write whatever the hell I want.

On the subject of being lovable, etc., I have become obsessed with Twilight. I rebelled against it so strongly during the Twilight period of popular culture, mostly because my childhood best friend became obsessed with them and dumped me in a complicated, adolescent identity crisis. Plus, my mother (forever a professor of English literature) gave me her full analysis of the books as they relate to purity culture, which has of course never left me. I saw the movies during my stay in Dallas on the way here and then accidentally ended up in a Facebook group called “Twilight Sewerposting.” It is called that because it is an entire tier lower than Twilight Shitposting. It is really very bad and I LOVE it. I have been watching Twilight meme videos and starting to rewatch all of the movies and it has given me some sort of comfort. I can’t pinpoint exactly how.

We have been working from home for the past two days because of a typhoon warning in the city. This has given me ample time to complete nothing, relive my trauma, and watch Twilight. We go back tomorrow.