On Leaving
Tomorrow night, exactly three years to the day I got my F1 Visa, I will board the longest flight in the world, and spend eighteen hours forty minutes being, let’s face it, extremely emotional, as I cross the 15,000 kilometres of sea that cleaves both versions of me. Cleave: to divide, to adhere. Tomorrow night, I will go home.
I’ve cried every day this month. The smallest things can set me off: clearing out my mailbox, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” conversations with my writing partner, wrangling a satisfactory sentence out from my draft, setting my idiot-proof instant ramen on fire, reading in public, a stomachache. A litany of last things: my last time setting foot on campus, my last time wrestling with the school printer, my last time attending workshop. When the last class, ever, of my MFA, was moved to Zoom due to COVID concerns, I cried for a full twenty minutes.
There, there, my partner said. Maybe it’s poetic that you’re ending this chapter on Zoom.
Is it? I asked. Is it poetic?
He thought about it. Not really, he admitted. Sorry. Keep being sad.
Sadness isn’t quite the word I’m looking for though.
I think, I told my girlfriend, that I cry so much because I spend all day sitting around and thinking about feelings. That’s literally all I do when I sink into a character’s head. Where they’re going, how they feel. I’ve become so sentimental. Everything breaks my heart, which mends itself by dinnertime, just to be shattered all over again.
What are you talking about? she replied. I’ve sat next to the sixteen-year-old you pretending not to cry, but full-on sobbing behind oversized sunglasses for seventeen whole hours. The only difference is that you’re no longer trying to hide it.
Although she’s referring to something that happened over a decade ago, I remember it well. We were both first sopranos, coming off our final competition. Those years, sustained on a singular high note, filled me with such childish euphoria that every moment spent warbling felt like a dream. A deep joy that fed me even as I struggled through other vagaries of teenage life.
It was a dream that was coming to its close. Before I’d even stepped offstage, I was overcome with pre-emptive nostalgic anxiety. Singing would slide me into a good junior college sans grades, I would go on to a more competitive choir, training under the tutelage of a renowned conductor. It was what I had been working towards. It’s not like I wasn’t thrilled or excited for what was to come. But I already knew it wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be the same.
I couldn’t articulate it then, but I can see it today: I was watching myself grow up.
I suppose I was lying earlier. This is no recent development: I’ve always been sentimental.
For twelve years now, I’ve clung to the idea that I would someday move to New York. I had the same silly reasons everyone else did — New York is a city sustained on the illusion of energetic possibility, and I believed that it was where one went to be an artist. At eighteen, I researched scholarships and job opportunities, and understood that barring a major miracle, it’d be impossible. No matter. I found the email of a fabulously wealthy Singaporean known for his investment savvy, and wrote him an email with my SAT scores attached, detailing the costs of university attendance in New York, a pittance compared to his average investment venture, explaining how I was worth his time and money, and how if he just invested in me, I’d make it worth his while.
I never heard back.
It stung, but I was used to rejection; in any case, I’d rather suffer than give up. I refused to believe the door had shut on me. In the interim years of freelancing and hustling, not knowing if I was actually making any progress while scribbling in secret, battling frequent bouts of uncertainty and what-the-fuck-am-I-even-doing-itis, the dream of writing and living in New York served as my north star.
And nine years after my love affair with the idea of New York took hold, I moved across the world and started my MFA in Fiction at Columbia. I remember being sweaty and harried from the move, yet bursting into tears the minute I saw Columbia’s iron gates on Broadway. I remember the swelling sense of arrival. I remember thinking: Finally.
I’ve always known that my stay in New York would not be permanent. The MFA is in itself a time-limited construct, but it’s also one that was purchased against my future — my scholarship bond requires me to eventually practice as an artist in Singapore. But beyond legal obligation, my sentimentality stretches both ways. I have family and friends that I treasure in Singapore, and as an artist, I feel strongly about the place I come from, about how I might make myself available to younger writers back home. When I moved to New York, I left my partner of nearly a decade with the promise that we’d be wed when I returned. Our wedding, which he is helming in order for me to write, is this July. (Finally, he says.) A couple of months ago, I was awarded the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and come Fall, my husband and I will move to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In other words, life unfolds before me. For the first time in my life, I can trace, clearly, the line from cause to effect. I know exactly where I am going to be geographically (the Bay) and economically (unemployed, but stipended) for the foreseeable future. When I got the fellowship news, I cried for a long time. In joy, but also in relief. After treading water for so long, I could finally see dry land. The thought of being afforded two years just to write leaves me stunned silly. It feels like a miracle.
Still, I find it so hard to say goodbye.
My time in New York has been difficult – staggeringly expensive, fractured by the pandemic, punctuated by frequent spikes of fear and rage. It was a dream clung to and deferred, it was the biggest and most indulgent gamble of my life. It was falling asleep on the subway and waking in shock at the end of the line, it was teary karaoke, it was screaming words of affirmation at each other over and over again as we wrote, rewrote, revised. It was standing our ground when we were expected to bend, it was walking thirty blocks to avoid paying for the train, it was the sheepish admission that pizza wasn’t really doing it for me. It was matzo ball soup when hungover, and crying in public, and growling at my manuscript too loudly in a library; it was writing even as we rewrote ourselves, it was reading and weeping, it was many hardboiled eggs, it was literary community, deep kinship. It was everything I had come so far to find.
It was never meant to be permanent. I know that. I do. I am cerebrally aware that the same sentimentality that is presently coating my heart with ache will ferry me into the next stage of life – writing, marriage. Adulthood. I understand that the city I was drawn to for its energetic possibility is not the city I ended up with, but better for the fact that it was my own. I know it will be the same when I move, that I will interpret a new city on fresh terms, that I will love it and make it my own even as I write, rewrite. I welcome it. I brim with anticipatory joy.
Yet.
Here I stay, tonight, unwilling to go to bed. Stretching each breath out, holding this childish version of myself tight, if only for a heartbeat more.
