I tell you again that I’m moving to Seattle and I can see the words blur at the edges as they leave my lips, and I know that you won’t remember again. Our realities have been pulled apart by the thousands of miles I put between us a thousand years ago, but now they are also being pulled apart by you retreating, leaving, departing into a world where only your memories are real. You are leaving me, and I don’t know how to stop you. You are leaving me, and I feel angry, lost, blurred at the edges, just like my words. You are leaving me, and I feel orphaned.
So many of my memories of my mom start with me getting in trouble… The time when I was 5 and managed to lick all the icing off my aunt’s birthday cake when the adults weren’t looking. The time when I was 6 and was determined to find out whether a balloon would fit into my mom’s china cabinet – it almost did! The time that I was 7 and had built a flying apparatus and was determined to do a manned test flight as a proof of concept. Mom was always the disciplinarian, the strict parent, the one with the rules, the one in charge of making sure that I don’t run off with the circus or hop out of a window to see if I’d finally learned to fly. I, on the other hand, have always been skeptical of rules: if I couldn’t join the circus, then I would start my own by training the neighborhood stray dogs; if I wouldn’t be allowed to launch my flight prototype out of the window, I would at least challenge gravity by hopping off the top of that same china cabinet (again, that didn’t end particularly well). My mom and I, we clashed often, even if I did see the soft warmth in her eyes while I was getting punished.
But there was something that had always brought my mom and me together: our wanderlust. We would pull our world atlas off the shelf and pore over far away continents, planning trips of discovery and adventure. We planned rafting trips on the Amazon, trips to see Mount Kilimanjaro and the Eiffel Tower, trips to the pyramids in Giza and the Big Ben and the Great Wall of China. We played anagrams with names of countries and cities we had never seen. We pretended to eat with chopsticks the kinds of foods we had never tasted. The world was ours to discover, and all we needed was each other.
Continue reading “Pack… the Memories You Haven’t Lost Yet”
Packing List for Immigration 