This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

I try to stay off social media as much as possible. Every new post from an old friend serves as a painful reminder: This is their life now, without you. This is their group of best friends, their boyfriend they didn’t tell you about; this is them moving on completely. This is proof that when they said they’ll remember you, stay in touch with you, they were lying. Sometimes I’ll stare at an Instagram photo of someone I was close to in London, New Zealand, Singapore, at their fresh-dyed hair and wide grin and the kind of cropped jacket they wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing years ago, and get the odd sense of seeing a total stranger on my feed.

People I haven’t spoken to in years—people from primary school—have reached out to me, all with screenshots or some variation of omg you made it! A few have followed up with questions like How has life been? or It’s been ages! but the distant politeness of it all, compared with the keyboard smashes and emoji spam we used to send one another without thought, only drives another pang through my gut.

It’s not as if I don’t believe in love itself, because I’ve witnessed it. My parents first met in high school, when Ma was class captain and Ba was the quiet, mysterious kid who always came to school in wrinkled shirts and turned in his homework two days late. After they were assigned to the same desk, they started passing handwritten notes and doodles to each under the table. Notes turned into lunches together, which turned into proper dates, which eventually then escalated into a serious, long-term relationship. They ended up going to different universities on opposite ends of the country to study very different things, but they handled the distance just fine. And now, decades later, at the age where most marriages tend to stagnate and turn sour, they still love each other that much. They don’t always remember their anniversary or go out to fancy restaurants for dates, but Ma once spent four hours lining up in the rain just to buy Ba’s favorite brand of roasted chestnuts, and Ba has been to every single one of Ma’s work events and cocktail parties, even though he hates those kinds of social functions. I guess my point is that I do believe in love. Really. I’m just not convinced that kind of love could ever happen to me.

I write a small, quiet wish on each delicate paper crane: I hope you always catch your train in time. I hope your birthday always falls on a weekend or holiday. I hope you land every role you audition for. I hope you have an umbrella with you whenever it rains. I hope you always snatch up the last bag of your favorite snack. I hope you always get the window seat. By the time I get to the last crane, my alarm clock is flashing. Six a.m. I’m exhausted and nearly out of ideas, and maybe it’s because of this that I let the truth slip out onto the page. I hope you remember to miss me when all this is over.

Just the other night, when I was drafting a blog post, I’d gone to listen to our Spotify playlist, only to find that the name had been changed from “zoe + eliza g8 hits” to “recs for divya.” Which, rationally speaking, is a small thing. Insignificant. But aren’t small things exactly what friendships are made up of? Frayed string bracelets and late-night texts and compilations of your favorite songs? When you take those things away, what do you have left?

Caz must see the hurt all over my face, because he asks quietly, “Do you miss her?” I wrap my arms around my body. Exhale into the frigid air. “I miss a lot of people.” And this, I think, is my ultimate fatal flaw. Missing people who don’t miss me back. Clinging on to strands of string that shouldn’t mean half as much as they do. It takes so little for me to love someone, yet so long for me to move on.

“Sha erzi, what do you know? When you care about someone, you want to be inconvenienced—you wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced by them every day for the rest of your life. That’s what love is. That’s all love really is.”

“What if we don’t really know where home is? Or what if—what if we don’t have one?” I’d asked. A few people laughed, as if I was being funny or difficult on purpose. The teacher just stared at me for a beat. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Everyone has a home.” I’d tried to explain what I meant, but by then, the teacher had lost his patience. He said I was lazy, that I was trying to get out of a straightforward assignment by making up nonexistent problems. He didn’t understand; none of the other people in my class seemed to either. They hadn’t spent half their childhood attending family gatherings and eating Peking duck rolls and flying kites in Beihai Park, only to be whisked away to a country where they couldn’t speak the language, couldn’t even spell their own name. They hadn’t learned to ride a bike on the wide, sunbaked roads of New Zealand, only to have to sell that bike two months later when they moved to Singapore. They hadn’t spent their tenth birthday on a plane, and their eleventh birthday crying in the bathroom in England, because they didn’t know anybody there and some kid in their new class had made fun of their accent. Home for them was one piece, one place, not something scattered all around the globe, fragmented into something barely recognizable.

But as I gaze out at the room now, I wonder if maybe the answer to that assignment was as simple as this. Right here. Thinking of all those rooms I walked through at eight, ten, fourteen years old and all the people I met in them … if maybe I left a piece of myself in them and took a piece of them with me too; isn’t that what homes are made of? A collection of the things that shape you?

This is the closest I have ever gotten to voicing the truth: that I’m afraid. That for a long time now, between maybe the third and fourth move, the fourth or fifth friend I lost along the way, I’ve suspected that there’s something fundamentally unlovable about me. Something that makes it easy for people to forget me the second I leave, to drift out of touch no matter how hard I try to keep them in my life. I’ve said before that my default setting is loneliness, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s really fear.

Caz isn’t the only one I’m heartbroken over. There’s Zoe too. And even though I miss them both intensely, with all my heart, in different ways, missing Zoe is almost worse. Because there aren’t thousands of books and poems and movies out there to describe exactly what I’m feeling, or lyrically beautiful songs for me to cry to and sing along with in the car. There’s no guidebook on how to survive this kind of fallout, no prescribed remedy to soothe this particular kind of pain. Romantic breakups are romanticized constantly, talked about everywhere by everyone, but platonic breakups are swept to the side, suffered in secret, as if they’re somehow less important.

All this time, I’ve prided myself on my ability to lie, to spin a story out of nothing, to act like I don’t care about anything. But insincerity is easy. Bullshitting your way through things is easy. It doesn’t require any emotional attachment; there aren’t any stakes involved. It can’t hurt you, because you never believed in any of it anyway. But telling the truth—saying exactly what you mean, how you feel, to the people you care about most … That’s one of the hardest things in the world. Because you have to trust them. Trust that they won’t hurt you, even when they have the power to.

Maybe there is some small, weak part of me that wants to be wanted, to hold hands with someone beautiful in the blue-dark, to breathe and hear its echo, to walk through the alleys of Beijing with another shadow falling naturally beside mine. No, not weak. This is what I need to get into my head. Hope is not weakness. It’s oxygen, a crack in the window, the pale slash of moonlight across a dusty room. Maybe I should start learning to invite it in.

It’s the same with Caz. There’s still every chance that what we have won’t last the year, or even the season. Maybe we’ll graduate and end up on opposite ends of the world and slowly drift apart. Maybe he’ll change irrevocably, shedding the self that once wanted me and discarding it like an old winter coat. Maybe I will. But certain joys, I’m discovering, are worth the potential pain.