Something about free-floating 35,000 feet in the air watching the sun come up or city lights sparkle down below is oddly calming. Sometimes, I wonder how much time I’ve spent untethered to anything except for whatever metal tube with wings I’m currently sitting in, and, coming from the opposite side of the country, it’s probably quite a lot.
Airports have become a place of familiarity to me — shoutout to the Auntie Anne’s at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) and to the big light tower things at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) that I still don’t know the names of. I collect three-lettered tags on white strings looped around my weathered suitcase handle — from LAX, LGB, BWI and layovers in DEN, AUS, MDW, even a Kansas City not in Kansas (in Missouri! Is that allowed?) — as proof of my transcontinental voyages. No matter how long the flights may seem, no matter how far away from home I might feel, there will always be that second ticket, that flight back home — a place where palm trees, neighborhood car washes and H-Marts are a common triad.
And yet, I have dreamed of one-way tickets to a place that I see as a whole new iteration of what I hold in my arms today. It’s not that my life right now is necessarily all that unassuming or uneventful; I’ve had my fair share of whatever I thought all the classic ‘80s coming-of-age movies promised me. Watching the girl finally get to go to the prom or the guy crash a parade is rarely dull, but I know there is something bigger out there for me. I know that there is something more for me than living in a town on the southernmost cusp of Los Angeles (L.A.) County which gives me some reason to introduce myself as “from L.A.” How I crave something that gives me more than beige air slowly slipping through my bedroom window blinds, following an invisible current in the southern California summer humidity.
What I would give for a real Hallmark movie Christmas: upside-down U street lamps that pigeons perch on and string lights against a background of windows on windows of high-rises lining every corner, heavy wool coats, puffy chimney fog, freshly-printed newspapers and real snow where you can see people’s footprints speckle the freshly-fallen powder like little exclamation marks. Knowing that one day, my size seven footprints will fall in step with the others into a place where I’ll make my mark in the world, even if it’s making just one person feel heard or amplifying the voices behind the lives around me. With every passing day, I’d step toward the “Big Thing” in my life, the one thing that’ll weave together everything that I’ve worked for in one big beautiful tapestry.
There certainly was a time when all I wanted was to take the next flight departing LAX to anywhere on the opposite coast, when I sat with the slow lull of the washing machine creeping through the wall and mosquitoes speckling the damp golden coast air as I scribbled across whatever godforsaken calculus assignment I was plodding through. During those nights, I let my thoughts skip across time zones into the heart of some place, some future, some vision that I am — even now — saving half of myself for: skyscrapers peeking out from the late-evening fog high above the horizon, eliciting the quickening du-dump, du-dumps behind my breastbone every time I entertain the thought.
But the cost of abandoning that latter half of a round-trip ticket — letting go of that lifeline back to my second born roots that grew under midday sun rays and the sprinkler water pooling on my driveway — is what I truly fear most above everything else. One day, this dream of mine that I’ve been grasping for years will finally have come and I’ll have to lay my sun-kissed childhood to rest. I’ll set it down gently — even though I’ll feel like haphazardly stashing it away last-minute along with the rest of my earthly belongings — out of fear that I’ll crumple its delicate yellow petals that I’ve tended to over all the years.
I think about when the “lasts” of my childhood will be. Some things I have already had to part with, like living with my older brother every single day or clanking away at the keys on our old piano to cure lethargic Sundays. But there are some things that I still tenderly hold close to my chest — like my mother’s cooking that I used to indulge in daily, the rusty neighborhood park swings or the humble donut shop across the street where the owner knows our order by heart (one pink sprinkle donut and one apple fritter, please) and always throws one in for the road, free of charge.
The hard truth is that all of these things are finite. The even harder truth is that there will be a day — or perhaps all different days — where I’ll have to part indefinitely with some of the things I love the most. The hardest truth of them all is that I can’t exist in two places at once: this cocoon I call home and the chapter that lies ahead of me, waiting to be unraveled.
It is daunting to realize that nothing is guaranteed. We can try to increase the chances of things happening, give the likelihood of things some fluffy padding in hopes that it will go our way; but, maybe tomorrow, the great San Andreas Fault will finally give us the “Big One,” and it will be all for naught. So how precious it is to have loved these things for all that time. How lucky I am to know that, even though this premature grief that holds hands with that one-way ticket hibernates in the back of my mind, I have felt the warm embrace of well-worn living room sofa pillows, savory miyeok-guk birthdays with ice cream cake on the side and hand-sewn Halloween costumes? To love and be loved, and to carry this weight behind me as I choose to chase a new chapter — fate no longer feels as frightening.
Ayden Min is a sophomore majoring in International Studies from Los Angeles, Calif. She is a Copy Editor for The News-Letter.
