How far along the timeline of our lives can we lay blame on a given moment in our lives?
That moment was in September, some time ago. My mind had already been all flustered before meeting my best friend for lunch to discuss something serious. I can't remember what the topic was as it was being overshadowed by the grim surprise that awaited me. The discussion ended well. We smiled. And we picked up our forks and breathed deeply so we could start enjoying each other's company.
Then she broke the news to me that she and this guy I didn't care for were going out. My heart froze. I can almost remember that it stopped for a few beats, which could explain why I was so cold. A heart that had been beating for that same woman and had to relegate its true feelings to the darkest ghetto of the soul, such heart couldn't beat at the reception of such news.
How did this happen? Let me trace back, one step at a time. There was an evening, a few years before that, when I nearly begged.... No, such a timid soul is too proud to beg, for some reason. But it was something desperate, something desperate in the sentence I had uttered. I think I asked my best friend then, if there was really no hope of something different between us. She shook her head; I can't remember if it was a guilty shake or a defiant one. And I stormed out, closed the door behind me, sat on the bench where all the winter shoes were, and methodically tied my shoe-laces. Was I crying? If so, it was as much for my own salvation as for the benefit of making her feel guilty on the other side of the door.
Another step back, further, over bridges of many lonely moments in life in the abyss of time past by, before I understood how all these things happened, before I had enough experience to dissect myself, in the tumultuous times of college. That was about 15 years ago. She was not my best friend in the way the previously mentioned episodes were about. She was my girlfriend who was about to become my ex-girlfriend for good. We had a fight. I don't remember that she said anything to me. There was a cold silence in that very cold winter night in Cambridge. The rickety shuttle bus stopped in front of her stop and she, standing up without saying anything, walked out into the silence outside this noisy hunk of junk. And I saw her leave, and I didn't know just how bad it would get afterward. The emotional torment that followed the permanent breakup of my first serious relationship was like a thunderstorm that had no foreseeable end. There would be brief lulls, but quickly the lightening slit the sky like a joker's smile on a pasty face. Then thunder would roll in with sharp mockery of my misery that would herald half a year of hopelessness and desperation.
Do I end here? Is this the original point from which I can start laying blames? No, of course not. Not for this shy little boy who couldn't imagine anyone could take him seriously because he was an immigrant. Not women, not society. There was the cop at the subway turnstile who made a racial gesture toward me when I was going into the subway. There were the many black kids that pushed me around. Sometimes the Hispanics too. The feeling of unwelcomeness settled in pretty early on since my arrival in this country. There was the girl I fell in love with, OK, at least had a crush on, in fifth grade. She didn't think much of me, especially when she remarked about my English and that I was Chinese. My Dad wasn't happy when I told him that I liked a Puerto Rican girl. He repeated the word "Puerto Rican." Is that far enough back? All this racism, hatred, just squeezed me into a corner, a dark corner of invisibility.
When I feel invisible, I feel unloved, and when I feel unloved, I feel invisible. My best friend, the latest best friend, preferred to date someone else and even told me about it, although she wasn't sure how I still felt about her. I felt invisible, at lunch, on that September day. My rejection of her, my anger with her, was a peevish attempt to make myself stand out.
Lack of love. As familiar to us and as common to our upbringing as is breathing. Love was supposed to have come from our parents first.
So here's the real initial point. Being an immigrant child was tough enough. But being a child of immigrant parents had its added disadvantages. Where is Mommy? Where is Daddy? I never asked myself those questions while they were busy working to support the family. I learned to bite the bullet very early on and accepted life as it was. But deep down, my heart was shriveling into a raisin in this desert without love. And with this shriveled heart I entered high school and found my first best friend whose door many years later I closed behind me after being told nothing would happen between us. No matter how much water you give a raisin, you can never turn it back into a grape. Structural changes had been made by force of nature.
But is that really the starting point? The immigrant experience.
Maybe there is no definitive starting point. Maybe living without a mother for four years as a small child started the process of draining that heart of its love serum. Or maybe even before that because even though that mother was there, she carried an even drier, darker, heart that sometimes extracted love from her children by force in order to satiate its thirst for love. That extraction came in the form of emotional abuse.
Now we are too far back; I can't remember much beyond that. What's the point?
What is the point?
Maybe to put things in perspective.
Maybe to stop blaming myself and calling myself weird.
Maybe to give myself some hope that even if the raisin can never become a grape again, it can still taste sweet and juicy. I suppose that's what life is about: living with an ever changing heart, experiencing ever changing love, while recognizing that nothing in the past that produced this current heart was fair to me. It's never fair when not enough love makes its way to the heart of a person.
