Graduates in Wonderland (20 page)

In my mind, there exists a clear divide between before I met him and after and I don't know how to go back to the before. When he was here, he sent me twenty texts a day. I was excited to see him every night. Sitting next to him in my office every day. And now, nothing.

Beijing suddenly feels very loud to me—­the people, the traffic, the construction, the bustle. In comparison, I feel so morose. Work isn't even an escape, because for the past five weeks, I would walk in and see him sitting at his desk every day. But he's gone. It was all I could do to not turn my head and stare wistfully at his empty seat next to Isla. Instead, I faced forward and looked at my computer, trying to make myself care about work again. Even now, nobody in my office knows that Sam and I dated.

He's in Hong Kong now, before he travels to Vietnam and Malaysia and then flies on a one-­way ticket to Sydney.

In the days before he left, I tried to summon the courage to tell Sam how I really felt about him, but every time I came close, I couldn't. I needed him to say it first and he never did. He must have some idea of how I feel, though. I slipped a postcard into his backpack and I made him an incredibly mushy playlist for his plane ride, so if he's intuitive at all, there's no way he won't pick up on my feelings.

I've never been this scared to tell someone how I feel, but I don't think I could have handled it if Sam said he merely thought of us as a fun fling. On our last night together, when I once more looked at him and failed to articulate my feelings, I tried to will him to read my mind. “I like you. I am crazy about you. I am terrified that I will never find someone who makes me as happy as you do.” Every time I tried to say something serious, my voice started to crack and I kept clearing my throat and making up some excuse about maybe getting a cold.

The closest thing to the truth I could say to him was that I had lived in Beijing for two years and that people had left me before, but that I had never felt as sad as I do now. I told him, “Whatever happens, if you still miss me in a few months, tell me. Let me know. And if you don't miss me, then don't tell me. That's okay too.” I delivered this so casually, but it was incredibly hard to say.

What I meant was, “If you feel a crushing sadness and hole in your life the way I will in mine, please, please, please tell me.” I don't want to be the one to make contact first. I want the next move to be his. It's so hard to be the one who's left behind, while he goes on to travel and have adventures alone before moving to Australia. I can't ask him to forgo that and stay behind for me.

He was silent. He didn't say anything in response to this, which I interpreted as rejection. We had drinks last night before going back to his place, and it seemed like he was not in love with me. I kept looking for signs or evidence and read too much into everything. I kissed him good-­bye this morning still looking for answers, but I still don't have any.

Right now, I'm listening to the saddest Ryan Adams album in the world. Wallowing while listening to it is the only thing I'm remotely enjoying right now.

I can't imagine going out to a bar ever again. Flirting with someone else. No. I don't even
want
to get over him. Unless he gets over me, and then I want to get over him immediately.

It usually goes like this: They leave and I'm left, but then eventually I move on. The leaving always hurts, but the person actually being gone, I could accept. I always knew I'd meet someone new. But this one—­this one feels different.

But why didn't he ask me to meet him in Australia? Why didn't he ask me to meet him in Southeast Asia? Why didn't he ask me to be his girlfriend? Why did he let me go? I guess I wasn't enough to love. I feel lonelier than I ever have in my entire life. I'm in Beijing, China. Astrid's gone. Victoria's gone. He's gone. You're so far away. My family is so far away.

It's so clear to me now how we are all alone. We die alone.

Oh no. The sad album is on repeat. nononononono

Write me anything but please write me as soon as you can.

Love,

Jess

MAY 16

Rachel to Jess

Jessica. You're enough to love. I can't formulate that in a way that makes it sound not crazy, but you are. I think Sam was probably preoccupied with his next adventure. Or just being typically British: reticent and not forthcoming. Haven't you read any Jane Austen? British men lock their feelings inside.

I felt that lonely when you left New York. It wasn't so bad when other people left, because you were still there. But when the last close person leaves—­that is when the breakdown happens. I don't know what else to say because I didn't handle it so well (Xanax, Claudia, bad sex with Saul). I think you just have to make yourself get through it. You're going to have to leave the house and act interested in meeting people when all you want to do is stay in bed. That's the only answer. But it's going to be okay.

And remember that this feeling is temporary—­no matter what happens.

I'm sorry. I wish I could distract you with stories about Paris, but not much is happening here. I feel on the verge of so many things. I feel like I'm so close to dating Olivier, figuring out my thesis, and reworking my book's final draft.

I've still been corresponding with Lee, who continues to say profound and encouraging things about my book's plot development. It's about a girl in London who has memory problems, but I can't figure out how to end it. Do I make her murder somebody and she doesn't know if it's real or not? Everything I've learned about plot just makes me more hesitant and confused, because I can't seem to fully understand my protagonist's desire. Lee thinks this comes with life experience and time.

In the meantime, I got Jacques and Marc to proofread the early parts of my thesis, which I've been laboring over for weeks. The thesis is almost like a story: tracing four films that show characters confronting themselves as children, in literal and metaphorical ways. Fellini, in
8
¹
/
₂
, watching his younger self as though he were in a film he is directing. Bob Dylan, in
I'm Not There
, turning away from his younger self, denying that he was ever someone else.

There's something in this subject I find so moving. How do we deal with all the people we've been? What happens when we have to confront them? It's a poetic topic, but it becomes very prosaic when I write it in my French. And bad prose at that. Apparently, I am incapable of distinguishing street slang from antiquated expressions, and use both indiscriminately. Sometimes Jacques laughs out loud, circles a sentence, and hands my paper to Marc to enjoy. “Rachel, if you translate this into English, it literally means, ‘She is a woman of ill repute who spends a lot of time with her gang.'”

However, I did not point out that last night Marc called a steep hill in English “so much, too much, too high. So much, too far.”

In return for their editing my French essays, I'm correcting their applications for US exchange programs. They both want to go to Yale this fall. What, Brown isn't good enough for you? More than that, you want to trade in Paris for New Haven? Who are you people? They're both enchanted with being near New York, though. They find Paris “boring.” However,
boring
is the same word as
annoying
in French (which actually explains a lot about how French people think). We're basically switching dreams, though I don't want them to leave. They're becoming such an integral part of my Paris dream, and not just because I'm still holding out for Olivier either.

Anyway, I know this talk of people leaving isn't helping. Just remember that no matter how dark everything seems now, you will get through this.

Have you heard from him since you last wrote?

Love,

Thinking of You

(Rach)

MAY 26

Rachel to Jess

I'm waiting for my e-mail!!! Tried calling you but your phone is off!

Where are you?

MAY 26

Five minutes later

Rachel to Jess

How do we feel about nude stockings for going out? It's not quite warm yet, but somehow I feel very Queen Mother when I put them on. Also, did you see the photos of Rosabelle and Buster in Argentina??? He grew a mustache and a potbelly!!! It does not look good.

And why you no write back?

Jessica, where ARE you????

Love,

Rachel

JUNE 1

Jess to Rachel

Um...Malaysia?

Malaysia!

I'm here in Malaysia with...SAM SINGER!!! Who is right now wearing flip-­flops and my baseball cap and trolling the beach to find us banana smoothies!

I'm with Sam! We're about three thousand miles south of Beijing, on a tropical island that can only be reached by boat, right in the middle of the South China Sea.

After a week of coming home and wallowing in my apartment with Ryan Adams, I received a text message—­it was Sam in Hong Kong asking me, “Has it been long enough for me to tell you that I miss you yet?”

I stared at the message for a long time.

How do I know if I'll ever feel this way again? I had to tell him because I had nothing to lose—­I had already lost him.

I wrote him a very honest e-mail telling him that I was crazy about him, that I missed him, that my e-mail was by all means a love letter, that I thought about him all the time, and that when I looked at my life in Beijing without him, I found it severely lacking.

The next morning I awoke to an e-mail from him, in which he confessed, “I miss you so much. Your playlist has had countless run-­throughs. I'm soppy and I know it. But I don't care. If my plans weren't so firmly set, and my flights bought and paid for, I would have stayed in Beijing instead of flying out to SE Asia. Australia just doesn't seem as appealing a prospect anymore, but I already have my ticket to Sydney. But I can't stop thinking about you.”

Of course, the first thing I did was find cheap flights to Malaysia, his next destination. It's not peak season, and tickets cost about as much as five banana smoothies.

I wrote about my flight search to Sam, and he immediately replied: “Come as soon as you can!”

I wanted to write you earlier but I felt too low and then too frantic. I called Isla to see if she could close the magazine issue for me, because I needed to go to Malaysia (although I was vague and did not mention Sam at all), and she assured me that she could, although she was puzzled. Then I scrambled around frantically trying to finish two articles and buy a swimsuit.

Three days ago, I took a train to Tianjin, a city outside Beijing, where I spent the night and then woke up before dawn the next day to catch a six-­hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Then I spent five hours in the airport eating
laksa
and trying out all the lotions in The Body Shop before boarding another hour-­long flight to the eastern coast. As soon as my final plane landed, I ran out of the airport and got into a cab. The air was balmy, the stars were out, and I immediately started sweating in the tropical heat.

When I stepped out of the cab, I sprinted to the door of the hostel, where Sam Singer, tan from his adventures and with a newly shaved crew cut, appeared. I jumped straight into his very tan arms.

Then we immediately got naked.

The next morning we took a boat together to the island from where I am now writing to you. Crystal-­clear blue waters and hot white sand. It's sunny and hot all day, and then when we are lying together in our wooden bungalow, it pours and thunders all night. The only other people I've spotted are couples on their honeymoons. And while walking along the beach with Sam, I also have the eerie feeling that
we
are on our honeymoon. We are doing everything out of order.

We spend twenty-­four hours a day together, which I'd never done with a guy before. In the hut where we are staying, our bathroom doesn't even have a door—­just a flimsy curtain! Now it feels like we're
married
. There's no TV in our room. There are no distractions but the sun and the ocean, and in our abundant free time, we have sex three times a day.

It is literally the desert island test, and by default my five objects I can't live without are Sam, banana shakes, sunscreen, goggles, and this Internet café that has at least four resident cats. There is a white kitten sleeping on my foot as I write this, and right now my biggest problem is figuring out how to stand up without disturbing him.

Despite all the sex, right now I feel supremely unsexy. My face is bright red with sunburn. This morning, at breakfast, my skin was peeling off. I kept trying to shield my face from Sam, apologizing for how disgusting I was, even to myself. I was in the middle of saying something about how I was a molting snake, when finally Sam reached over and said, “Stop. Nothing you do can disgust me.”

This contradicts everything I have ever read in a magazine, ever. It is also the most romantic thing I've ever been told.

It almost scares me to like him so much. We talk and talk about our families or how strange a place Beijing is or we make wild speculations about all of the people we've met during the day and he runs his hands through my hair until eventually we fall asleep. I can't think of when I've ever been happier in my entire life.

We nearly miss dinner every night because after being at the beach or snorkeling all day—­we come back as the sun sets, shower, sleep together, and eventually end up sprinting to the only restaurant on the island as it closes. Last night we were informed that the kitchen had already closed, and we begged the woman to at least let us have milk shakes for dinner. Sam and I both chose Mars bar milk shakes. This felt like some sort of confirmation: We'll never live in a household without chocolate.

We leave in two days. I'm beginning to feel melancholy after all the giddiness of traveling to a new place and being reunited, but I feel so much more assured about his feelings for me and mine for him. If I'd shown up here, and he'd been inconsiderate and boring, at least I would have known what I wasn't missing.