August 26, 2007

• A case for requited love

  Stayed until 1:30am at the Donut Wheel because it is absolutely the only place in Cupertino open 24 hours (Lyn, did you mention this to me before, maybe I just forgot?). Yes, we are the bad apples of our crime-free suburb, which has a curfew at 11pm. So bad, in fact, that the reason I was out, was to work with my bro on his college essay.

  College essays are funny things that I (dorkily) miss. Don't laugh. I write, all the time, but mostly lyrical nonsense I don't even fully grasp. In case you couldn't tell, most exerpts remain discombobulated and meaningless downloads of erratic thought, collisions of raw emotion I don't have time (or am too intimidated) to analyse too deeply. They are sanitized and detached from me, rarely written in the true first person, stories I have yet to live, crafted not from truth but from a psychedelically exaggerated hyperreality.

  So anyway, that is why I needed the college essays, because they forced me to come back down a plane and link these wild and unrestrained emotions to a coherent life story.

  Love has been the topic of choice lately, for I learn a little bit more about it day by day, on a strenuous and frequently painful journey. This is all quite new to me, for those close to me will tell you that I rarely upset. While I care deeply for all my friends, feeling pain is uncommon for me. It is possible that years of childhood as an awkward pianist-nerd in a school in which I was nearly a complete outcast has given me layers, not necessarily as opaque and blunt as indifference, but of more subtle cellophane sheets of cautious reason that enscone each emotion.

  I had thought that I upset frequently only with my parents, the only ones who got to me before those cellophane sheets obscured my heart from the world's easy access. They are also, as I realized in college, the providers of the most colossal loan of my life. But lately, I've realized the pain also extends to another.

  Is it because I realized that he was ultimately the manifestation of my parents' one weakness? With him, they worried about things they had never needed to worry about before with their cliche and proverbial first child. This is, of course, a thoughtless exaggeration, as the "failures" I'm speaking of are really just a scattering of B's across an otherwise impressive course record (but since when did Asian parents have remotely reasonable expectations?) Ultimately, as the Chinese proverb says, you remain but a inch-long blade of grass unable to reciprocate the beneficence of the sun, so I could never even begin to repay my parents for the magnitude of my debt...except through the care of my one and only little brother.

  Children are cruel things. The jealous first-born accustomed to love and attention as an only child is probably the worst. I had never been kind to him, not until high school, when I realized he had grown to an actual living and thinking being that wasn't just a blob of soiled diapers and unreasonable bawling. By then I feared it was too late. In the years I had spent enraptured by the selfish pursuit of my own goal to get as far away from our sleepy town as humanly possible, had I lost my chance?

  I hope it turns out that I hadn't. My mother (perpetually the wiser one) was right - in this bewildering world of 6.6 billion milling souls, he was the only one besides my parents who I was born obligated to love, no matter what. And the only one who was born obligated to love me back.

  Then one April day he was visiting me in my apartment in New York, and we had crashed after a tiring day of touring the city. I had promised to take him in for a haircut and was attempting to coordinate that, but now work called, pulling my mind in that other direction, so I was at once planning the next day and wrapping my mind around what needed to be done upon my return to the office the day after that. The permutations are always endless and insomnia-inducing. I tried so hard...I was tired.

  And then, a voice drifted over to me in the darkness-
  Je, is there anything...you know, you want to tell me? What's going on with your life?

   

   

   

  *~*~*

   

  This type of love is dangerously egotistical, because it assumes the worst - that you alone must protect, must weather hardship, must do a duty resigned to martyrdom. It claims absolute dominance and an impregnable perfection, of the grudging ability to take care of anything and everything, because they are the weakest link.

  Then, once in awhile, you will find that from under your tattered wings the object of your love extends wings of its own...(to your surprise) reciprocating in its own right by tending a vulnerability you did not even know you had.

  • 6:23 am
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