I just finished reading one of the most gripping fiction novels I’ve read in a long time, Cutting for Stone. I’ve always been an avid reader, but with current events/daily news, podcasts, and food blogs and publications, sometimes it becomes a challenges to juggle all the content out there that I want to read. The amount of information to consume can be very overwhelming, so I’ve made a goal to read at least one book per month. Although I’ve been leaning more towards nonfiction (I suppose it’s in an attempt to better understand the world around me and how people think and why), I do still crave fiction and how imaginative it can be. I like the feeling of being transported into another life, another reality, even if it’s only temporary.

This book came recommended to me in March 2017 by my friend’s grandpa. I was in Arizona for her wedding, and during her reception, I had over an hour-long conversation with her grandpa, who was a retired heart surgeon. Being a Jewish heart surgeon in a red state, he certainly had a lot of opinions and perspectives that we discussed. It was a very intellectually stimulating conversation, as I learned so much that I hadn’t before just by speaking with him. He truly was as great as my friend always said he was, and so open about sharing. During this conversation, when he shared with me how passionate he was about treating patients with empathy and care, he told me the book that he strongly recommended I read to understand a doctor’s perspective, what pulled him into medicine and being a surgeon, and how strongly he felt about making a patient feel cared for and respected during treatment, and that book was this one. I immediately noted it down on my phone and finally got to it this month, and I have zero regrets.

The general synopsis of the book is this (there’s no reason for me to summarize it if the publisher already does it so well):

“Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles–and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.”

It’s a complex story that combines familial ties and drama, politics, religion, medicine, and love in a way that I never really thought about before. It details disease and medical treatment and surgery only in a way that a doctor could (the author is also a doctor and professor of medicine), but even as someone who knows very little about the study of medicine, I actually found these detailed explanations extremely interesting. And the story really draws you in after a slow start. The bond between the two twins is so strong that as they were conjoined twins at birth with their head connected, throughout their childhood together, and even as adults in troubled times, they found solace in sleeping together with their heads touching. Towards the end of the book, with all the tragedies and deaths that occurred, I found myself in tears thinking about their sibling love for one another. I know I truly enjoyed a book when I’m sad that I’ve finished it.

The power of sibling love. It’s like what they say in the book: it can be so strong that when one sibling dies, it’s as though something in the surviving sibling has died, as well.

These are a few of the quotes that really stood out in the book to me:

From the Middle East folktale “Abu’s Slippers”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?”

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

In another sampling of “Yvonne remembers her dreams” again, last night, I dreamt that I was standing in a music studio with Brian Littrell, the lead (or who I considered the “lead”) singer of the Backstreet Boys, and we were discussing the poet Billy Collins’s poem “Dancing Toward Bethlehem.” I’ve recently started re-reading poems that I enjoyed back in high school and college for nostalgia’s sake, and also because I’ve been reading the more modern poetry of Rupi Kaur. This was a very odd discussion, though, because we were exploring how to dissect and potentially rearrange this poem to make it into a song. I have no ear for anything, but Brian was attempting to make certain lines of the poem into a chorus and hum tunes for what he thought was fitting, while I was trying to figure out which parts of the poem would be good for a chorus and/or a bridge.

The strangest part of this entire dialogue and exchange was that we never once took our eyes off each other’s eyes. It was as though we had the poem memorized, and the only place our eyes could look towards was each others’.

I don’t even know what that means.

If you were interested, this is the magical poem we were deliberating over:

Dancing Toward Bethlehem

by Billy Collins

If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.
My palm would press into the small of your back
as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile
of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way
and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.
There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea
and all our attention devoted to humming
whatever it was they were playing.

My engagement ring was always too small. When Chris first proposed with it four years ago, we struggled to get it on my finger, and then really struggled to get it off. It’s always been the most frustrating when it’s hot outside because that’s when my fingers swell, just like my mom’s do, and I’d need to pry it off after applying soapy water to my hands. So finally, a couple weeks ago, I decided to have it sent in to be resized just a half size bigger, and when it came back, it was amazing: you’d be shocked to see what a difference just a half size in a ring makes. Not only that, the company also tightened all the prongs and professionally steam cleaned my ring, so now, this ring looks almost better than it did when I first received it. When I opened the box, I couldn’t stop staring at how clear it looked. It was almost newer than new, and in some ways, looked like a different stone.

Since I’ve started wearing it again, I’ve gotten no less than half a dozen different people asking me if I just got married or received a new engagement ring. Today, while having my highlights redone with my hair stylist, she randomly exclaimed, “Wow, girl! I love your ring! It looks like brand new! Did he get you a new one?”

It’s definitely not new, but it certainly feels like it’s new all over again given all the attention this ring has suddenly started receiving again. This professional steam clean really paid off, even though it cost nothing.

This week, I’ve spent four intense days in our San Francisco office, and also at our offsite at the Grand Hyatt in downtown with my team coming from across the globe. It’s been extremely enjoyable for me to connect in person, in meetings and over tea and meals, with my colleagues, some of whom I call friends. It’s been non-stop catch-ups and walks with so many people since I’ve arrived. I love seeing colleagues and friends I have not seen in a while and reconnecting with them. I enjoy sharing random anecdotes, travel and customer stories, and laughing about ridiculous experiences. I love learning new things about people that I didn’t know before. I’m always curious to find out more about everyone, to uncover the things that others do not know. As an extrovert, I derive so much energy in the presence of others, particularly those I find intellectually stimulating, humorous, and fun to be around. But as an introvert, when all of this is done, as it is for me tonight as I am headed to the airport to return back to New York on a red eye, I relish my alone time and enjoy not speaking to anyone, putting my earbuds in and listening to my book or my music. I enjoy being in the company of no one I recognize or know, and not being obligated to speak to anyone or have any type of conversation. Though I am the type of person who enjoys striking up conversations with complete strangers, when I’m in transit, especially when flying, I’d prefer not to chat at all unless it’s initiated by someone else.

I feel my extrovert and introvert all the time. They’re not necessarily at odds, but while some like the labels of being one or the other, I feel very firmly in the center of both.

After lunch at home with my parents yesterday, we went to the Columbarium to visit Ed. After spending some time cleaning the glass of his niche and peering into the little world I built for him, it was time to bid him farewell for now. On our way out, I went into the main building and ended up meeting the new family service counselor. She’d actually been there for a couple years now, and we had just not met yet. Part of her job is to go around to each of the halls in the Columbarium to do routine checks of each niche to make sure each is in good shape. She asked me what my brother’s name is, and I told her. “Edward?” she repeated, surprised. “Wait, is he in the Hall of Olympians? He’s the one who has the Simpsons family with him?”

I almost lost my breath. I just stared at her and felt chills all over my body. How is it possible that in what is probably thousands of niches throughout this historic building that she could remember Ed’s over all of the others?

When she first began about two years ago, she walked around and browsed the niches, trying to get a feel for the place that she called her new workplace. She said she immediately noticed Ed’s niche. Ed’s niche was the one that touched her the most, and she kept wondering what happened to him and what the stories were behind the Simpsons and the other trinkets that decorated the surrounds of his urn.

She said that she felt for me because she also lost a sibling recently, as well. A couple of years ago, she was on a family vacation with her four siblings and parents when suddenly, one of her sisters was found dead in her hotel room by their father. She was just 34. “34?” I said. “Ed was just a month shy of his 34th birthday when he died.” Our eyes just locked. “That is just too strange, too much of a coincidence,” she responded pensively. Her sister also had a decades long struggle with depression. Another sister had attempted suicide. It was all too real for her, too.

She told my dad and me that we did a really good job decorating Ed’s niche. My dad shifted a bit and cracked a little smile. “Well, that was all Yvonne,” my dad said, looking down, still smiling. “Yvonne did everything and organized it all for him.”

“Well, then, you did a really great job,” she said to me. “I don’t think you realize how many people you unknowingly touch and how they can feel your brother through his niche.”

She said she was so happy we met, and that she got to meet the person who decorated that memorable niche. I’m still feeling strange that this meeting occurred, that we have these tragic commonalities, that she was so touched by my brother’s niche that she’d remember it and say it stood out from the others. I wonder if Ed was listening to that conversation.

When I was in middle school, I thumbed through Rainier Maria Rilke’s book Letters to a Young Poet. I’m tempted to read it again now, as when I think about relationships, my thoughts often return to what I read in that book. He was the kind of writer who, when you read his writing, it kind of just stays with you and soaks itself in your head. And then at random moments during the day after reading his words, those words just come back to you without you even consciously thinking about it.

The quote that always comes back to me, which apparently on the web is oftentimes cited, is this one:

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

It aligns with what I’ve thought to be the ideal relationship: one in which two people do not become one (the idea of being “joined at the hip” has always made me want to vomit in my mouth; those couples I meet at weddings or parties where they cannot allow the other to have a 1:1 conversation have always disgusted me), or the idea that after marriage, a spouse must stop doing all the things she’s loved doing individually or with others. The ideal relationship is one in which the two spouses can still be their individual selves with their individual loves and hates and opinions, but when joined together, enrich each others’ lives with their similarities as well as their differences. They relish in each others’ company, but they also respect each others’ boundaries and allow each other to be themselves and have their own time and opinions. They have shared experiences, but not everything will be shared, whether it’s experience or outlook or opinion, and that’s healthy and fine. They are still individuals, right? They grow together, with each other, and motivate each other to be the best version of themselves. They challenge each other to be better, to be happier and more developed. They accept that they have an understanding of each other, but they may not always understand each other fully, and that is healthy and normal because even one cannot fully understand oneself fully, so how can we expect our partners to? At the end of the day, they trust each other. They may betray each other’s trust at times, but they will love each other to the point where they can have forgiveness and learn from the times of betrayed trust. We’re all human beings. We’re imperfect. We’re going to mess up. It’s okay. And that’s just part of life and growing.

As a society, we have such unrealistic expectations of romantic relationships, of marriage. So it’s no wonder that the divorce and separation rates are so high, that people are always in and out of relationships, that we keep seeking out “the perfect one” but it usually ends up in vain, or we “settle.” But perhaps we should be more forgiving, more open minded, more questioning of these unrealistic expectations to create our own that are more in line with what we think should be right and good for ourselves.