after all

at the airport, soon to fly to vietnam

I’m currently 2 hours away from departure, legs crossed atop my suitcase, mouth slightly dry, brain telling me I should have packed that water bottle after all. I should have eaten one more pork bun after all. Should have charged my AirPods after all. 

After All. If my life was lived in chapters, I think that would be the title of the chapter I’m paging through: it’s August 12, I’ve graduated, I’m saying goodbye, I’m going. I’m getting nervous. I’m getting excited. I can’t believe it. I believe it. I can’t believe it.

Today, life doesn’t feel like a happily ever after but rather a happily after all. After all of it, after all the things I haven’t written about because I was living the moments instead—the moon gazing and burgers to boot, the sleep deprivation leading up to graduation, the stranger who helped us find the right San Francisco bus, the midnight volleyball, the midnight photoshoot, the midnight, the stars, all of time collapsing, the world whirling around us, the future close enough to touch—after all of it, this. 

In an interview with OnBeing (my favorite podcast studio), David Whyte talked about what it means to become more “visible to the world.” I think this is what’s happening to me right now—not because I’ve graduated, or because I am older than I was a year ago, or because I’m doing this whole big move to Vietnam. Just: I think I’m becoming more visible to the world because I’m becoming more visible to myself. Isn’t that strange? How the world can spin the other way when we see ourselves anew? The truth is, I think I’ve encountered love. 

I know I’ve been saying this over and over. But I hope that the love talk isn’t “getting old” to you. Someone once told me that everything I write is like a love letter. I have never forgotten that. Maybe that was one of the greatest compliments of my life. I want to always write about love. So anyways, the truth is, I think I’ve encountered love again and again and again this year—and the truth is, the reason I cried in the car a couple days ago, face hidden in the darkness, is not because I am sad but because I have been loved. I’m becoming more visible to the world because I’m becoming more visible to myself, and I’m becoming more visible to myself because other people looked at me and listened to me and saw me. It’s not the kind of romance with one boy and one girl and one happily ever after, as Hayao Miyazaki said, but rather something “slightly different,” situations “where the two (or three or four) mutually inspire each other to live.” 

As I sit at this international terminal, Gate 150, typing on my battered laptop and watching a mother give her little son chocolate biscuits, I’m thinking of all these chance encounters that have given me so much more of a reason to live. “Your genius is the way everything is met in you,” David Whyte said. And I’m thinking to myself—in one year, what kind of genius will I be? What kind of genius will this little boy with the chocolate biscuits be? His mother? My mother, who called me on the way to airport to hear my voice—what kind of genius will she be when I see her again? When will I see her again?

Here is a poem I fell across this morning, as I was scrolling through Instagram waiting at the check-in luggage line:

To Hold (Li-Young Lee)

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I

make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,

we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,

measuring by eye as it falls into alignment

between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,

she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.

One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize

what we love, and what it takes

to tend what isn’t for our having.

So often, fear has led me

to abandon what I know I must relinquish

in time. But for the moment,

I’ll listen to her dream,

and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling 

more and more detail into the light

of a joint and fragile keeping.

---

After all this time, after the TSA line, and the car ride here, and the magical summer, and senior year, and all of college, and the heartbreak and the inspiration and the poetry and 22 years of trying so hard to do and be, I’m finally letting myself breathe a little. I want to take chances, and be scared, and not figure it all out right away. This morning, after 1 hour of sleep and a taro bun, I hugged my mother the way this little boy with the chocolate biscuits just hugged his mother. Over and over. Just before I pulled away, my mother tucked my hair behind my ear and said, “Love yourself extra hard for me.” 

I think this chocolate biscuit mother is saying the same thing. I can’t understand Korean, but I watch her as she holds him, as she plays rock-paper-scissors with him, as leads him to the restroom and then back to the well-worn seat beside me, and I think she is saying the same thing. “Love yourself,” she is saying. “I love you. So much.” 

And David Whyte is saying that this is our genius, this love: “all the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment.” “When I go back to Yorkshire,” he says, “just the taste of the water off the moors is completely different.” 

I think the water will taste different in Vietnam too. I’m not going back to Vietnam the way David Whyte goes back to Yorkshire. I’ve never been to Vietnam. But to my grandparents, and parents, and all the aunts and uncles and church grandmas, con sẽ đi về—I am going home. Or, rather, I am going to an old home, a home in which all of my history meets inside itself, in order to let all of me meet inside myself too.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.

One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize

what we love, and what it takes

to tend what isn’t for our having.

I am trying to listen to my dreams, your dreams, their dreams, all of them, and after that—after all of that, I’ll return to this airport. Everything will meet inside of me then, too. Differently than now, but still, it’ll be me. It’ll be you. I’ll hug you tight.