Category Archives: Journal

Essays, Journal

With every heartbeat

There is a knock on my door, and I haul myself out of bed from my nap to answer it.

“Yo, how do I use my credit card for Uber? Like, what’s a CV-whatever?”

It’s my brother, and internally, I am smiling. (Externally, I am giving him the you are the biggest idiot on the planet look I really enjoy giving him in moments like this one.) This situation is faintly reminiscent of the time a decade ago that he borrowed my laptop to write a paper and asked me, “Yo, how do I print?” “Well, you plug this cord into this port, plug the other end of the cord into the printer, turn the printer on, and then click ‘Print’, oh my God, so complicated, aren’t you so glad I’m majoring in rocket science?” I replied then. The laptop returned to me with Microsoft Office completely deleted from it; a mystery that, to this day, neither of us can quite figure out, but one I have teased him about relentlessly ever since.

“These three numbers,” I say, gesturing to the back of his card, “are the verification numbers. Now that I know them, I just need to memorize your card number and I can go on an online shopping spree.” He gives me the this is my greatest fear in life and I am never letting it happen look.

“And do I type the entire number on the front as the credit card number? I really don’t like having my credit card information anywhere on the Internet.”

“Yes. Dude, you’re 25, you owned your own business for two years, and you have way more money than I do, how do you not know this? How am I actually still better at adulting than you? Welcome to technology! Also, can I put my Uber account under your credit card instead of my extension to Mom’s?” I joke.

I then explain the mechanics of Uber, and help him set our new address as “Home,” as it has already been on mine for months.

He has always taken late to any technology that doesn’t involve gaming (he is the reason I have Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII on my laptop — recovered from the original PlayStation discs we owned as children). I know soon enough he will come around, just as our mother, who also once feared the Internet, has. (“Mom, you need to stop spending money on Candy Crush. I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this. I can’t believe that I, your offspring, am telling you, the parent, how pointless it is to spend real money on virtual things like extra lives on Candy Crush.” “But I’ve been stuck on this stupid level forever and I’m one move away from finishing it!” “Oh my God, I’m changing our WiFi password and I am not telling you what it is.” “Don’t you dare!”)

We don’t talk about why my brother suddenly needs to start using Uber. We don’t talk about the extensive damage to his car from the accident the other night. We don’t talk about how he could have died, although I was the one assigned to do the getting-mad when my mother herself was so mad that she didn’t know how to; because I’ve always been part-confidante, part-best friend, part-third-parent, and all only sister. We didn’t even talk about it when I was meant to.

Because while I walked up the stairs with purpose and knocked on his door with a Big Sister Speech already running through my head, the words, they were a flood of tears instead. In a family that loves intensely but, for some reason, rarely hugs and mostly expresses affection in the form of making fun of each other, he is the one I have hugged the most in the 25 years we have known each other — his whole life — and I held on to him for dear life, literally dear life; his life, dearer to me than my own.

“What happened? What happened? You can’t do that to me, you can’t ever do that to me, I love you so much.” Near-incomprehensible blubbering that I knew he understood, because we have always had a sibling shorthand for everything, one that often doesn’t even require actual speech. We are our own language.

And my mind still runs the gamut of everything that could have happened, but didn’t — injuries, death — and the lesson is the same, but never, ever any easier to learn: that life is fleeting. That the people we care about are mortal and so very, very fragile. That we will never have enough time. That we must be so, so grateful.

So I resolve to love, to hold on to every precious second I am gifted, with every last heartbeat.

(Photograph: Joseph Pascual)

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Journal

A thousand lives

It is nearly four in the morning on a Saturday night. (Okay, technically it is Sunday morning.) Typically, you would find me on a dancefloor somewhere — Future, Black Market, TIME — but today, I’m packing up what amounts to half my life because we are moving in two days. And about 80 percent of that life has been books.

We moved into the house we currently live in when I was entering high school. I was already a voracious reader then, but not yet the kind earning her own disposable income (that will happen at the age of 17, when I get my first newspaper column), or the kind being sponsored generously by National Bookstore (because publicly acknowledging your nerd status does have its perks — let that geek flag fly). So naturally, the design Mom decided on for my room didn’t really incorporate a lot of shelving. (This is debatable. But no one else in this family reads like I do, so I tend to lose the debate.)

Mom gives me this exasperated, despairing look every time I come home with what is clearly another bag of books, but honest to God, I did not plan to own so many. (I’ve piled a small portion of them on my bed — as seen in the image above — so that I can’t sleep until I’ve packed them away. It was both a brilliant and terrible idea, but I digress.)

In hindsight, I should have seen this coming. It’s always been in my nature to want to disappear, to want to be someone else. I don’t know where my self-loathing comes from, but it’s there, and it has always been there. (My shrink, lovingly referred to as Dr. Sam, says it’s clinical, a chemical imbalance in my brain that I need to stop blaming myself for.) Those who know me well, or those who have been reading my writing long enough and are particularly perceptive, know how caged I’ve always felt. I live a wonderful life that I am grateful for (it’s just myself I’ve never learned to love, tragically), but all things have their trade-offs, and this was one of them. Books are an escape. A book is another life. Running away into a book is disappearing into another world for a few hours, where you are not yourself, and the world is not your world (sometimes it is a better world, sometimes it is worse, but always, it seems more interesting), and the problems are not your problems, and on occasion, there are actually happy endings, or at the very least some answers, closure.

You don’t always get that in real life. Real life tends to leave you hanging, worried and wondering about what’s waiting for you around the bend. Real life is uncharted terrain, and you have to just figure it out as you go along, without any assurance that the destination will have even been worth the journey. With any luck, you’ll still manage to keep your moral compass along the way. (Too many people tend to drop that somewhere early on.)

So I have all these books, and I have lived (and am living) all these lives in lieu of my own (although I’ve lived my own much more often in recent years — the stories I wish I could tell, but must keep to myself…). And I really feel like books have taught me empathy, and for that, I’ve always been grateful. Empathy’s not something that a lot of people appear to possess. You kind of find this out the hard way if you’re on the Internet long enough, and I’ve been around since 1999. But a book allows you to step into someone else’s shoes for a while, live their lives for a while, know their hurts and happinesses, their loves and their losses. A book helps you understand someone who is a complete stranger to you on an incredibly intimate level, and I feel like the more you read, the more inclined you are to take these experiences and bring them into real life. You’re not so quick to judge because you know that everyone is so much more than what’s on their cover. There’s a complex story in there, a heart, a whole life, countless moments leading up to this moment in which you cross paths, an entire context that you can’t possibly know about; all these things that create a living, breathing, feeling human being.  A world.

That is why I read so much. That’s why I can’t bear to part with any of my books, even though I know I will have to because I already know that I won’t have enough space for them. Even though some of them are really stupid and I’m kind of ashamed to own them. They have been friends. They’ve understood me.

And they’re always just there, ever reliable, waiting patiently for me to pick them back up when I miss them or when I am lonely, curl into a comfortable position on my bed or on my chaise, and return for another visit; come back home.

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