COURTESY OF AYDEN MIN
Min discusses her (admittedly cliche) dream of true love, and how this has grown and changed to mean something much different.
COURTESY OF AYDEN MIN
Min discusses her (admittedly cliche) dream of true love, and how this has grown and changed to mean something much different.
My first breaths were taken in the languid heat of a Los Angeles August morning. My mom tells me I was born with a head full of hair and that my birth was thankfully a lot easier than my older brother’s. A home video exists on a clunky camcorder somewhere in our house that’s just a close-up of my newborn face while my mom wiggles me into a soft white onesie. When I watched it for the first time, it was a little surreal hearing her voice from another time, even if it was just her saying “bless you” and cooing after I sneezed for the first time ever.
I’m always amazed at the sheer amount of baby pictures that my parents took of my older brother and me. As the youngest child, I sprung headfirst into a family of three, making it four. I was born into a nicely-round bubble of love that had been embracing this family for just over two years, captured in albums upon albums of glossy photographs.
But if you’re looking for a swoonworthy romance, Los Angeles is probably not the first place to go. I guess you could say it’s “romantic” in a sense: Cherry-red sunsets lining cobalt waves are taken for granted and star-studded Hollywood lives just around the corner, but it’s not the place for an Audrey Hepburn kind of meet cute. Especially not if you’re living on the cusp of the city, where I spent my adolescence shuffling between the pilling carpets on high school classroom floors and the chestnut hardwood panels of our house built in ‘60s suburbia.
So I did what every young hopeless romantic does: I watched any and all romcoms I could get my peach-pink-tinged hands on; read chapters upon chapters of romance webcomics; discovered our lord and savior Jane Austen; and prayed to any god listening (who I didn’t really believe in, but desperate times call for desperate measures) that true love would find me someday. I dreamed it would come to me, steadfast yet unassuming. Surely it would. Surely it will.
The air grew a bit warmer, and the ends of my hair lightened to a caramel brown under an egg-yolk sun, when the big things like college, swimming, career paths and this idea of “the future” gradually fattened in my basket of priorities and stressors. This dream of mine sat patiently in the corner, knees to her chest, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for her time to come once again. She hugged her cramped corner in my jar of life, even though she really wanted to stretch her legs, jump around and feel the wind in her hair every once in a while. But such is life when you’re convinced you only have the next four years to map out your entire existence.
I have always wanted nice things. I want to live in a big city, in an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and to be able to see the sunset from the comfort of my living room. I want to own one of those heavy wool trench coats, a set of perfect-fit leather gloves and a sophisticated fragrance that I can call my own. I want to see as many live performances as I can, the world’s rarest paintings ten feet in front of me and the bustle of human life around me.
These are all nice things I want. And so I told myself that if I wanted these nice things as soon as possible, then my career comes first. There was no time for mistake or hesitation, let alone a single minute to lift my hopelessly romantic dream back to her feet and onto my timetable. Such was how I entered my first year of college.
I wish I could tell you that I had suddenly found someone and that my anxieties about the future disappeared. This is not the case, yet I have no ill feelings about it. To live life is to feel its turbulent winds — smoothly sailing with some and falling face first on others. I still stalk LinkedIn every so often, I still ponder over whether or not it’s smart to learn German for another semester and I still ruminate over countless paths left untouched. It is futile to say that I’ve reached a point in time where I know exactly where I’ll be 10, 20 years from now, and perhaps the only constant I have is the uncertainty of it all.
But one thing that I do know is that every evening, I come back to a warmly-lit apartment with my two roommates, our Christmas stockings still hung up from the holiday season and just the right amount of mess that makes it a home. And when we three girls share late-night ramen noodles straight from the pot, venting about our frustrations for hours straight, bonding over a mutual cuteness aggression toward our apartment cat and laughing at the horrible French accents in Bridgerton — I know that love is there in those moments. Because in those moments, I’m just a girl, sitting with my two best friends, talking about everything and nothing at all; and yet, there’s no place I’d rather be.
There is love around me, and most importantly, there is love in me. For the people around me, for the things I learn, for the people I have loved before and those I will come to love. For my family, born and found. For a crisp breeze walking home, and for spontaneous chocolate chip pizookies with an exorbitant amount of leftover vanilla frosting.
At the end of it all, my dream will find me in due time. But I have stopped dragging her everywhere before her time, and I must admit that things have felt much lighter, sprinkling my soul into different things every day. And what a blessing it is, to hold what I already have, something so precious and kind.
Ayden Min is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. majoring in International Studies. She is a Copy Editor for The News-Letter.