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.