I’ve had some tension with some colleagues who sit near Bonsai Row as we call it at the office. In January, Chris sent a mini yellow rose plant to my office for my birthday. I originally placed the plant along the row of bonsai plants that get indirect light near my seat, but two guys were being territorial and didn’t want my plant near them. They claimed it was attracting fruit flies, and they didn’t want flies near them. We debated it for a while, and I finally gave in and brought it to the other side of the office. A colleague consoled me and insisted that the other side of the office got better direct sunlight, so the plant would do better there.

Well, two months later, this rose plant is flourishing! It has huge, lush green leaves that look far healthier than any did when it was first delivered, and today, three huge full blooms. It even has four buds on its way. This plant may have been rejected by my male colleagues when it first got here, but now, it gets lots of morning and afternoon light, and is even attracting visitors and gawkers. 🙂

This morning, I had a phone interview with a mentoring organization to which I applied. One question I was asked pertained to how I would handle a situation in which I was assigned to a mentee who came from a very different ethnic/socioeconomic background, who may have spoken another language as a first language, and who also may have zero common interests with me.

I had to think about it for a second, but I suppose I expected a question like this based on what I was told during the initial training session. My general response was this: human beings tend to point out and recognize differences first; it’s almost ingrained in our brains. If you are white sitting in a room, and a black person walks in, the first thing your mind subconsciously registers is, “That person is black. That person does not look like me.” You aren’t aware of it. It’s just how your mind works. Our real challenge is to put all that type of thinking aside and realize that as much as we think we are all different, we are really all the same. We all are human beings who breathe and have hearts that beat. We all were born and raised onto the same earth under the same sky. We all have parents in some form, whether by blood or not, and these are all the things that bond us. All of us have relationships – parents, siblings, cousins, friends, teachers – whatever they are, that we could then share and discuss. These are things that we do share that bond us. It’s just up to us how we want to use that to get closer and know each other better.

It’s my sixth night back home – feels like time has flown since I arrived on Saturday. I guess it helps that I’ve had activities planned with friends and family, as well as work definitely picking up. Some people question efficiency and work ethic when working from home; I feel like I’ve worked harder at home the last three days than I have right in the office.

All these nights have passed without Ed being here. I suppose it will always be a bit of an adjustment every time I come home and know he isn’t here. I’ve even found myself straightening out his bed before I go to sleep to make sure his side of the room is nice and tidy before bed time. I’ve gone through emotional moments in the last six days – thinking, remembering, wishing. I still wish that we could meet up once in a while, maybe at a midway point between heaven and earth, and we could just sit in the middle together and talk and laugh and hug and even cry together. I could tell him about the latest thing our mother is worrying over (the most recent thing has been that Chris doesn’t want to marry me and is just dragging our relationship out until forever), and he could tell me his latest discovery in his new world. We’d hug and say our goodbye – until next time. Maybe tonight in my dreams, it will happen again.

Ed came to visit me in my dreams again last night. I was in the bathroom at our parents’ house, and I heard someone walking past. I opened the door, and there he was, smiling at me, wearing a white dress shirt. I immediately felt this surge of joy, and I threw my arms around him and hugged him tightly and whispered in his ear, ‘I love you, Ed.” He wrapped his arms around me, too, and said, “I love you, too, Yvonne.” It’s the first time I’d ever heard him say “I love you.” It was also the first time since his death that I saw him in my dreams, embraced him, and didn’t immediately burst into tears, both in the dream and upon awakening.

My parents and I went to visit him at his niche today. We replaced the flowers that were there with some new ones that I clipped, and I sat there, looking over all the details of what I had put together for him and trying to see if anything looked different than before. I’m not sure if it was just me, but it felt brighter than before. Maybe he is at more peace than when I last came in September.

I feel his energy all over our house. I feel it when I am sitting at the dining room table, right by his desk where he used to sit, reading his Bible or surfing the web on his laptop. I feel it when I am in the living room reading, where he used to watch TV or nap in the afternoons. I also feel it when I am getting ready for bed. I look over where his bed still is, and wonder if he is getting ready for bed, too. Even though he isn’t here, I can feel him constantly. It’s like he never really left, and I am still waiting for him to walk through the door and throw his backpack or karate bag into the hallway as he would take off his shoes before coming in. I don’t know if that feeling will ever go away. Maybe it will remain with me whenever I am in this house forever.

I feel more emotional this time around coming home than I did in September, and I’m not really sure why. Maybe I’ve just suppressed a lot of emotion because I keep telling myself I need to be strong – not just for myself, but for my parents and even Ed himself. I’ve immersed myself in work and activities and goals and travel maybe as a way to try to escape all of those painful feelings. In my head, it all just sounds like a broken record that just keeps repeating the same questions and scenarios and play-back events over and over again. There is little solace in speaking about it out loud, and the only true comfort I get is when I drift off into sleep and can see and touch him again.

Tonight, my friend and I went to see The Glass Menagerie. This week is its final week on Broadway, so the show was packed. I just finished reading the play using my New York Public Library membership last week, so I was already prepared for the story line.

The moment that struck me most during the play that I didn’t even think much about when I read it was at the very end when Tom is narrating. The “gentleman caller” has already left. Tom has had a fight with his mother, who accused him of misleading her and Laura with inviting his coworker over, believing that he was available (for Laura) when he was in fact engaged to another girl. Tom has stormed out of the house to “go to the movies” as he does every evening. Except this time, he says he has left for good, almost in the same way his father left them 16 years before. “I left you behind,” he says, referring to Laura, “but I am more loyal to you than I intended.” I could feel my eyes fill with tears. He left his little sister behind to be vulnerable in the world with his delusional mother. And now he feels guilt, yet he insists that he is still loyal to her even though he is no longer with her.

It’s like how Ed left me behind in some ways. I’m not as vulnerable as Laura is, but like her, I no longer have my brother around as someone to turn to or speak to or protect me. Her brother is still living somewhere. My brother is no longer living, but I hope that wherever he is that he is also still loyal to me, too.

The last time Ed gave me a gift that wasn’t a gift card was for my 26th birthday. He bought me a set of Lenox cups and dessert plates in their Butterfly Meadow design because he remembered I liked butterflies. Tonight, I used the butterfly cups for the first time. Chris washed two of them so that we could have homemade hot chocolate together since it was another cold winter’s day, and the heating wasn’t working properly in the apartment earlier.

Maybe I didn’t appreciate them enough when I received them in 2012. They’re a really beautiful design, one that I’m sure he picked out with a lot of love in his heart. Ed always preferred real gifts rather than money – to give and to receive. As I snapped a picture of the cups filled with hot chocolate and topped with whipped cream tonight, I thought about what he was thinking when he purchased them and had them shipped off to me. I wish I could tell him now how much I love these cups and how great they look in this photo I took with my phone.

Last year, I started a goal of reading at least one book per month just to increase my reading and my general knowledge and awareness of the world. These books can be fiction or nonfiction. Sometimes, I’ve given myself leeway to count a single book as more than “one” (Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom last year was a long book, and not always the easiest to follow since I’m largely unfamiliar with the culture of South Africa and its political history apart from the Apartheid).

This year during goal setting, I realized I really want to learn more about Chinese and Vietnamese history. I’m sadly pretty ignorant to most of it. At first glance from an outsider’s perspective, it seems ridiculous to want to learn more about myself and “my people and roots” because isn’t that just learning more of what I grew up with? Well, not really. In school, we never learned anything outside of U.S. history and Western European history. Even in art history, we used a massive book that half was filled with just Asian art history. My instructor at Lowell glossed over it completely because “that section is not covered on the Advanced Placement exam.” Outside of U.S. history and Western European history, the American education system really don’t care at all about history, and we’ve brainwashed children into thinking this. My mom never had the opportunity to learn history, my dad never cared much about it, and I wasn’t with my grandmother long enough before she passed to ever ask her (or even think to ask her, by the age of 8) what her life was like in China before immigrating. What was that experience even like?

So I’m trying to fill the void now by doing my own research. A subset of my list that I am building out is books that cover Chinese history from 1900 onward. I still have to create the Vietnamese part of it. And for American history, as I was never a huge fan of it, I suppose I need to add more to that, too, apart of American History Revised. I wish history was taught in a fun way in school. Maybe then I would have retained more of it rather than just memorizing them as facts for an exam and then immediately forgetting it all.

I’ve been spending some time filling out applications for youth mentoring opportunities in New York City. Last Thursday, I had an interview with an organization that provides mentors specifically for young girls. I’ve always enjoyed volunteering, but I realized what I did not like about the things I was doing was that none of them were continuous – all were just one-off projects that, while fun and helpful, didn’t really do much for me personally.

As I am going through the many pages of questions that these applications are asking me, and discussing what I want out of life through mentoring on these phone interviews, I’ve realized that all I really have in the back of my mind is Ed. I think about how I wish he had someone he trusted who he could look up to. I wish he had someone he could call a mentor. Maybe he would still be with us today if he had one. I guess in many ways, he looked to me for advice and help, but I don’t think it helped his self-esteem to know he was asking for advice from his little sister who is seven years younger than he was.

I’m going to try to preserve him by helping others. It’s one tiny thing I can do to keep his memory living on.

After three years of not really communicating (unless you count random Facebook wall posts), a friend from college and I have reconnected and are now exchanging e-mails. We haven’t seen each other since graduation day, which I guess is somewhat understandable since most of the time after college, she was living all over China while I was here in New York. I realized how many times I would reference her during conversations, reminiscing on studying abroad together in the same program in Shanghai and food-adventuring through the Boston area together, and I realized that we needed to connect again. When you remember someone so fondly and think about them that often, why the heck would you not still want that person in your life?

So that’s one of my many goals for this year and for the rest of my life – to do whatever I can to maintain the important and fulfilling relationships I have. If that means re-connecting randomly over e-mail or spending a little more time on the phone, then that’s what it will take. People are what make our lives so great, so it will be worth it in the end to invest more time in them – as long as it’s reciprocated.

And I am going to see her when I visit Phoenix in April!!

Today marks 28 years since my mother’s water suddenly broke at her office, and she was rushed to the hospital to give birth to little me. Sometimes, I look at myself in the mirror and think I am incredibly immature, and other times, I think, how have I only been around for the small number of years that have passed?

The last year has been different for me in a lot of ways. I’ve noticed shadows on my face that I’ve never seen before, and even traces of tiny lines on my forehead that mark that I’m no longer “so young.” I’ve noticed wrinkles on my best friends’ faces. I realized I gained weight, then worked rigorously to lose it, and now am maintaining a more active life. For the first time when discussing marriage and children, I’ve actually had people say to me, “yeah, you still have a few more years.” Just a few more years, huh? Just two years ago, these same people were saying I had a “lot” of time!

It’s strange what a difference just a year can make in your life when it comes to how people perceive you. Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t like to share their age. I never thought I’d be the type of person who would refuse to share her age no matter how old I got, but for the first time, I can actually empathize with them. I still won’t do it, though. I don’t want to be full of crap and pretend to be something I’m not. I am who I am. Everyone else can deal with it.

Here’s to hoping that in my 28th year, even if the shadows on my face persist and gradually become fine lines, that this is a better year than this last year was, and that it is free of pain and needless negativity.