Remembering

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I’m going home tomorrow. I feel a little happy about it because I get to see my parents again, but I mostly feel depressed since I know Ed won’t be there. I spent most of today in a frenzy with work since a lot of my responsibilities are changing and I have a lot of different things to accomplish with my newly defined role, but aside from that, I just kept thinking about the idea of going home and knowing that Ed will never be there again. Actually, he’ll never be anywhere other than in my dreams. I hope he’ll be there when I eventually die and join his world. He’s supposed to open the door to heaven for me. We never talked about this out right, but we agreed… sort of. Okay, fine. I told him he has to do this for me, but he’d do it anyway because he loves me. But I can’t even count on that happening.

Is this how I am going to feel every time I go home – miserable because he will never be there again? Am I always going to wonder if I in some way contributed to his life’s misery or if there was really, truly, absolutely nothing else I could have done to help him?

I keep looking at the Lenox Butterfly Meadow cups he gave me. And then I started Googling the entire line, wondering if maybe I buy everything Lenox Butterfly Meadow related that maybe he’d be happy for me to continue what he started to buy for me. I don’t have enough space in this apartment for all this china. I don’t have space for all of this stuff in any New York City apartment. I think I am just looking for something to obsess about that is Ed-related.

Abandonment

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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.

Pulsing

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It’s another sign of age when you start experiencing ailments that always used to make you wonder why everyone else experienced that and you never did. For me, that ailment was the creepy headache.

I don’t think I’d ever gotten a real headache before the age of 27. If I said I did, I was probably lying to get out of something. But yesterday morning, I started getting one. I could feel the pulsing beginning slowly. I managed to not only go to lunch, finish a number of things at work and complete the work day, but even survive a 2.5 hour mentor training session after work. Then I went home, tried to sleep, and failed. I don’t even remember what time I actually fell asleep.

Then my trusty gym alarm on my phone goes off at 5:45 this morning, and I think, yay, the headache is gone! I shut off my alarm to start getting dressed for my workout, and as soon as I get on my feet, this overwhelming pain takes over my temples and all over my head, and I decide to skip the gym. And work. Yet I have all these work e-mails piling up that even though I have a headache, I know I will be working from home anyway.

Whoever decided headaches should be something that people should experience is such a jerk.

 

Volatility

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Sometimes, when I have those really brief moments when I miss home and contemplate moving to be closer to my parents, I am brought back to reality quite abruptly when my mother decides to pick a fight with me over something completely inane and caused by herself.

My dad informs me over the phone today that my mom has planned a dinner for us with her loser Jehovah’s Witness friend and her best friend and husband next Wednesday. I told my dad that I was never informed of this plan and had already made dinner plans with my friend and her husband. My mom snatches the phone from my dad and says that I cannot prioritize “outside people” before her and that I do not care about her and do not realize how depressed she is. Just because she seems okay does not mean she is. I simply said, I already made plans. I am not cancelling them. This is far from the first time this has happened.

I don’t know if she will ever realize that I am not going to cancel on everyone else in my life just to accommodate her no-reason schedule that she just assumes she gets to create and the rest of the world must revolve around. Ed didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so he left us. I don’t want to deal with it anymore, either.

 

 

Gluttony

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I really think it’s a sign of age when you realize that you can’t eat anywhere as much as you used to before. Tonight, my best friend and I had cheap, delicious hand-pulled noodles Henan-style at Spicy Village, then proceeded to Kung Fu Tea for hot taro bubble tea and shared half-off egg custard tarts from Manna House Bakery. And I felt so stuffed that I couldn’t really sleep very well. Actually, it took me three hours to fall asleep. And then I woke up feeling sluggish and disgusting.

Once upon a time, that would not have been that much food. But when lying in bed, I could just feel the food sitting there, sticking to my stomach, making me regret getting that bubble tea (but not the noodles or egg tart). Oh, age.

Butterfly meadow

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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.

Book list

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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.

A Valentine’s visit

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Ed came to visit yet again in my dreams last night. That marks two nights in one week, which hasn’t happened in a while. Maybe it’s because I finished my evening by reading over half of The Glass Menagerie, and Laura’s awkwardness and inferiority complex further remind me of my brother. Like Tom, Laura’s younger brother, says in the play, he and his mother love Laura because they know her, live with her, and are related to her and know her quirks and different facets. The outside world isn’t as forgiving and patient, and so people won’t really give her as much of a chance to be able to get to know her in the way they do.

Ed and I are sitting in the living room together. He is watching TV on one couch, and I am reading a book on the other. It’s like any other day that I would be at home with him. He seems content. We are coexisting in the home in which we grew up together. We’re not speaking, but we acknowledge each other’s presence and existence silently. When you are really comfortable with someone, that need to always be conversing ceases.

I’m going back home in a week to see my parents. I don’t really care to see anyone else honestly; I’m really just going to see them and a few friends. The rest of my family doesn’t really care anyway. It always feels strange to anticipate going home yet again to a house where my brother once lived but will never be back to again. In the back of mind, when I forget for just a second that he is no longer living, I get excited and think I will get to see and embrace him again. And then the excitement almost immediately is blown out by the cold, depressing knowledge that he is, in fact, dead.

Another storm

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It started snowing again around midnight and continued throughout the rest of the day. As I left work today, it became a mix of rain and ice fall. It feels so miserable walking through all these massive snow and mud puddles all over the city and seeing everyone bundled up and just trying to avoid slipping and falling. It’s estimated that we will get somewhere between 14 to 18 inches of snow once today has ended. Chris’s flight to come home tonight got cancelled, so I can’t see him until tomorrow night.

I’m so ready for spring to come. This winter just seems to have dragged on forever and ever, and it’s making me feel very impatient. I guess that’s also the way I feel about work right now – I’m impatient about communication improving and processes to get established. I feel like I am waiting for something to happen, but what if it never happens?

10 days?

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Last night before bed, I started reading Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. It’s a memory play I’ve always wanted to read, especially after I really enjoyed Streetcar Named Desire. I was only ten pages into it but already felt like Laura, one of the four characters in the play, reminded me of Ed. Laura is the main character’s older sister, and she experiences some illness at a young age that results in her being disabled for the rest of her life. Because of this, she also is extremely fragile mentally. The way she responds to things is like the more feminine version of my brother.

I went to sleep and dreamt that I was home again, and to my surprise Ed was there. I kept thinking in my mind, he is still alive? And suddenly we start having a conversation during which he tells me that he has just ten more days to live before he will take his life. He continues about his business in the house, reading his Bible, cutting and eating fruit, going to the bathroom to floss. I sit there and don’t do anything. I just think. I think of all the ways that I can prevent him from taking his life in the next ten days. Maybe we can do some activity together that I know he will love, and in his moment when he is about to jump, he remembers how much fun we had just a few days before and decides he wants to do that again! Or maybe I can have him listen to Shania Twain and ask him, is this really the last time you want to hear that amazing voice? Or maybe on the tenth day, I could just prevent him from escaping my presence, tackle him, and then just sit on top of him and not get up. Well, it may have worked. Who knows.

I woke up and felt distraught and unmotivated, so I skipped the gym. Again. In reality, he really did succeed in leaving me. I wonder what it would have been like if ten days before July 22, I really did know for sure that he would leave me forever.