the cartography of grief

Today, October 14, is Vern's birthday. He would've been 22 this year. It's his fifth birthday since his passing.

It's already been five years, and something about that feels so strange to me. Five long years, five short years; I don't know which of these to choose because it feels like both. Five long years because so much has happened that if you were to take a snapshot of me at 16 years old and another of me at the present, they'd seem entirely unrecognisable. I've gone through university, I've graduated, I've traversed through countries I never imagined I would have had the opportunity to, I've done some amazing things and some lame things, like shaking the hand of the governor of Victoria while accepting a scholarship award, like sleeping overnight on a public park bench in Kobe with my friends because our travel plans had gone awry and we had nowhere to stay (and which of these two is amazing and which is lame is up to you to decide).  Five short years because if you were to look really hard at these two snapshots and poke around and investigate a bit, you'd find that everything about me is the same beneath the surface. 

So much has changed, so much hasn't. And this is just me—what else in this great big world would be unfathomable to any of us five years ago?

I keep trying to imagine what Vern would be like right now. 22 years old, probably just graduated or going to, thinking of entering the Working World™. And what else? I have random guesses and assumptions scattered about like puzzle pieces, but not nearly enough to form a full picture. Who would Vern be, how would he have changed, and would he still like me, would I still like him, would we still be good friends, or more or less than that?

There's something incredibly dissatisfying about looking him up on Facebook and seeing nothing has changed. No new photos, no new status updates, nothing. I don't expect anything to be uploaded, yet I still get disappointed. And I'm not even the type of person who stalks people on Facebook and trawls through a person's history out of boredom—I use Facebook once a week (if even that), and what other people update are rarely of concern to me. But looking at Vern's empty page with nothing new but posts from other people for the past five years...here I am, looking into portal into the past, into something unchanging, stagnant. How do you deal with the fact that the person you loved and love is unable to experience the adventures and changes that should be a part of life?

Sometimes I like to imagine how Vern would've reacted if he had been the one experiencing what I've gone through, just a bit of Ctrl + H-style replacing him into my life. What would he do, how would he wriggle his way through things, how would he have lived in my shoes. Sometimes I'd laugh and think "hah, yeah, I did a way better job handling that than he would have." And other times: "yeah...he probably would not have screwed that up the way I did. Good job, me." I think I'm trying to find ways to give him life within my limited capabilities and imagination.

---

May 30th was the fifth anniversary of his death. 

I had thought of writing something then, but nothing came out. The spout of words had been capped. Normally, I'm quite good at forcing myself to write even when there is nothing to say (writing essays for university will give you that gift), or when I am completely uninspired (because if I wrote only when I felt inspired, I'd write once a month at most). But I truly was at a lost on that day in May. 

Five years.

What is there to say any more? I can echo the same things again that I've written before, I can recycle the same lines again and again. 

I had thought that grief would be a straight line down—you move on and on, gradually and slowly to whatever pace suits you best, but with that lingering memory (May 30th, 2009) eventually passing far behind you. Still visible, still in your thoughts, but further, further, further as the days go by.

It seems to me now that grief is not a straight line down, but instead a large circle that I've been roaming around on. I move on and on, but instead of May 30 fading far behind me, it stays the same. I'm walking in a big rotation around it, and no matter where I go, May 30 is equidistant. It is the point around which I revolve. 

Maybe this is okay. I'm still going on and traversing this circle, and I've been throwing myself into a loads of experiences and fields and worlds by following this path, and I've been growing and stretching and evolving. Maybe it's okay to have May 30 hovering in the periphery, rather than expecting it to linger by my back, out of sight, out of mind.

In a way, I'm imagining that God has given me a big piece of parchment and told me to go on and use it as a map. And when I've unscrolled it to have a look at it, I find instead that it's utterly empty besides thick black borders on all four edges and a large message written at the top: "Map this out yourself". It's up to me to draw out the world and chart my own course within these boundaries, and I'm to keep going forth into the darkness to see what I find. 

With Vern's death, I think that casts a different light on what I find in this terra incognita. Clearer or dimmer, I don't know what kind of light it is, but the way I perceive things and experiences is entirely different now. Maybe I've just matured, maybe I've learnt something or nothing at all, but the way I view things is not the same. 

---

I had a good cry earlier. It's been a while since I've cried over this, and for a while, I had wondered if I had let Vern slip out of my periphery at last. But no, I've had a quiet day, thinking about him and the time before, and reminiscing about the past. I wish I could reach backwards and snatch him out of that prison cell of memories he's in and let him loose in the present. Let him experience life as he should, as he deserves. 

I had a very good cry, and it was quite unexpected.

---

When I say I miss Vern, that I miss him more than anything, I mean many things with that. I mean that I regret many things that I've said and done and the many things I didn't get to say or do; I mean that I wonder what would he be like now; I mean that I want to know above all does he still care about me the way I do for him; I mean that I think it's unfair that he'll remain stagnant and still as I keep living and changing.

There is no direct equivalent for "I miss you" in Japanese. There are a multitude of ways to express the same idea in that language though, and the two most common ones (that I know of) are: 寂しい or 会いたい. They both can mean "I miss you" if you were translate them into English, but their direct meanings vary a little.

寂しい (sabishii) means 'I'm lonely.'

会いたい (aitai) means 'I want to see you.'

Sometimes, as I'm learning and practicing my incredibly shoddy Chinese and Japanese, I get a bit frustrated about how frequently there aren't any direct equivalents for what I want to say, and that I have to learn various other ways of expressing myself. But here, I think the Japanese options trumps the English "I miss you." 

Dear Vern,

I am lonely, and I want to see you. I miss you. 

Love,

yuan yuan

A look back and forward

Something has been bugging me for a while now. Something has been bugging me for a long time.

I have many, many fond memories of my childhood and of all my friends, of Malaysia and my life there. One in particular stands out, one in particular still haunts me.

I had a friend named Nina, who I loved and still love despite our geographical distance and the time between our last conversation and now—and we were very close when we were younger. At one stage, I called her best friend, and she really was one of the best. She was a few years older than me, and she was always of a very breezy personality, not so easily affected by what other people said or thought (or at least, she never displayed it outwardly), and I really admired her for that. 

Our friendship was made up of hanging out at school, going to her apartment after class whenever my dad was too busy to pick me up and I had nowhere else to go, and calling each other almost every night when we were at our own homes, carrying those massive corded handsets around from room and room, discussing anything and everything and racking up tremendous phone bills for our parents. I loved those phone chats. 

It was over the phone that she told me something I still think about to this day. She distilled me and my personality down to one very succinct line: "You're always like this, Roanne, you always start something and never finish it."

Quick disclaimer: my memory isn't the strongest, and I am only paraphrasing what she said, but the gist of it is right there. 

She didn't say it to be mean, she said it very simply, like it was a plain and clear fact, indisputable and obvious. I think I was too stunned to answer for a moment, but we moved the conversation along anyway, smoothly and unabated in only the way young children could manage.

I still think about that. Every now and then, her words come back to me. I remember holding the phone against my ear—dark green, the receiver squared and angled in shape, porous texture, black spiral cord that I liked to twist my finger into, Telekom—and hearing that. 

She didn't mean harm by it. But I felt hurt, later that night, when I replayed that single sentence in my head. I felt hurt, later in the years to come, whenever I'd look back at my recent actions, my failures, my struggles, my difficult moments in life. I wanted so badly to prove her wrong, I wanted so badly to prove myself wrong. Because she was right and I knew she was right; she was absolutely spot-on with her diagnosis—not even stubborn me could deny that.

I am easily scared, I am easily cowed, and when I encounter an obstacle, my first instinct is always to find out whether it's still possible for me to quit, throw up my hands and walk away and leave unscarred.

And in defence, I will say that this is not always bad: knowing when to give up is sometimes the best victory to be won. Knowing how to choose what to pursue and knowing what you're willing to give up is important in life. There are many things that I would love to become: astronaut, inventor, philosopher, polyglot, concert pianist, mother of an army of children, writer of a novel that would outsell the Bible, CIA agent (citizenship be damned), a horsemaster (not just a horse rider, please note that). And as a person limited in years of life, I know that I have to pick and choose what dreams to give up and what dreams to hold on to. 

So giving up is sometimes good; it is, at least, necessary. 

I guess what I'm driving at is that sometimes I'd look back at all my years, all twenty of them thus far, and think: "Where am I now, where am I going, and what paths did I take to lead me here? What other paths have I ignored to get to where I am?"

I have very few regrets in life, and all of them are more of the social-interaction variety; none are concerned with my major decisions in life, like deciding what university to attend or what degree to take, or whether to go on intermission or not. These things, these decisions I make and stick to and follow and don't regret. But I do wonder.

I have accomplished many things so far that I am really, really proud of: I've graduated with my double degree with good grades, I got accepted into the Honours program (though whether I go through with it or not is another matter), I studied abroad in China, Taiwan and Japan (by far my most  interesting and proudest accomplishment), I've made friends from all over the world (by far the most important accomplishment), and many other things that I can't even begin to record down...

But I am always asking myself about the things I have not yet achieved. The things that I am only slowly making progress on, if any, the things that I've put on the back burner, telling myself that I'll eventually 'accomplish' them, as if that verb isn't vague and ill-defined. I have so many goals, and I always worry about never meeting them. 

Productivity has always been a concern of mine. I love reading and thinking about it, trying to make my ways more efficient. I use all sorts of apps to organise my life, I integrate all sort of things like 'non-zero day' and 'pomodoro timer' into my lifestyle, all with the hopes of being more productive and actually making headway into finishing my goals—

—because I am afraid. I am only 20 now, and I can look back and see only a few years, look ahead and see still many, many years to go and remind myself that I still have time. But my worst fear is to hit 50, 60, 70, 80, and look back at my life and the paths I've taken and realise that I've never really moved forward, I've never really checked off everything on my list. Since I was young, I've been bolstered up by praise coming from so many people: friends, family, teachers, relatives. The expectations for me have always been high, and everyone has always told me that they expected great things out of me. And in turn, I grew up forming these own preconceived ideas in my head of what I was going to do when I grew up, when I became an adult. I was going to be a doctor, no, a lawyer, no, a CEO of a massive global organisation, no, a best-selling novelist raking in tons of money, no—I was going to be amazing in some way. And yet there was always another voice in my head, loud and clear and strong, reminding me that I am a coward, that I am a quitter, and more likely than not, I'm going to achieve nothing of value in my life. I am not going impact anyone, I am not going to contribute to the world, to society, to an industry, to the arts, to my country, to my family, to my friends.

I want to prove Nina's voice, grainy and coming in over the telephone lines through that green receiver, wrong. I want to prove myself, that loud and clear and strong voice inside my head, wrong. Yes, I've quitted many things many times, and I will continue to do so—because there are some things that I know aren't for me, they aren't what I truly want, and giving them up would be the wisest decision. But the things that really matter, the hopes that I'm clinging the hardest to, the artificial checkpoints that I've always imagined meeting, I'm going to run at them, I'm going to charge forth and yank them into my bare hands and I'm going to never let them go. The goals I've made, the dreams I've constructed, the milestones I'm striving for—I'm going to start them and I'm going to finish them.