Continued from Pre-Valentine’s Day Migraines

We’re in bed, arms wrapped around each other. You make me feel so relaxed, like I can forget about all the other burdens in my life. Look at your eyes, they’re so beautiful when they are looking at me. I bite my lip.

“I have something I want to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“Promise me you won’t be scared or stressed or angry with me”

I turn away from you and take a deep breath.

———

“I don’t understand why you want to break up with him. You guys seem to be really close,” my roommate questions me from the bed below.

From my bunk, I hesitate for a moment.

“I just haven’t felt that moment yet, where I knew that I wanted to be with him. I feel like, yeah – we enjoy being together and its fun an’ all. But maybe I’m just wasting my time with someone who I can never feel anything more for.”

“But there’s no reason to break up with him. Just give it some more time.”

“It’s been four months. I’ve been waiting and hoping that that moment would come. That special moment where I suddenly feel something profound. There’s just no spark.”

“What kind of moment are you waiting for?”

——————-

I lay paralyzed on the bed with my head in between my hands. The pain is so much I can barely understand what my mom is asking me to do. He is sitting at the end of the bed, helpless in our exchange.

“Mom, I can’t do it. My head hurts too much.”

“It’ just a headache. You cant get out of your responsibilities! You’re so lazy!”

Her loud voice hurts my ears. It’s like when the feedback from the microphones makes everyone shut their ears and cringe. I let out a cry.

“Stop faking it!” She yells louder. I’m crying heavily now.

“What a cheap strategy for a selfish girl like you.”

“Stop!” He rises from his seat and point his hand at my mom.

“Can’t you see that she’s in pain? Let her rest.”

We are shocked, because he is always so quiet and usually doesn’t stand up for even himself. Dumbfounded, my mom shuts up and closes the door behind her.

————-

“And that’s how I fell in love for the first time.”

“Well Valentine’s Day is coming up, maybe something will happen.”

“Psh. That’s too cheesy.”

—————

My pain is so acute its as if someone stuck a pin behind my brow. I’m crying and screaming under the covers, holding my head between my hands. Eventually, the pain settles down and so do I, only holding back the occasional sob.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

“The light from your computer is bothering me.”

“Ok. I’ll leave.”

You pick up your laptop and make your way towards the door while my heavy eyelids lead me towards somnolence. You’ve done everything you could for me: delivered water, helped me into my sleeping clothes, removed my contacts; and now I’m kicking you out of your own room.  My vision of you blends into the wall and all I can see is a dark brown blur heading away from me. I smile, even though I’m in the most severe pain I’ve ever experienced, because I have found it in the least expected of moments: I realize that I’m falling in love with you.

————-

“Aw, why would I be angry at you? I LO-HOVE you too.”

“That’s a joke, right?”

“Yeah.”

It’s 4:09 am Sunday, February 14th.  I’m wrapped in a sleeping bag and my boyfriend’s sweatshirt in the living room of his apartment while he sleeps in the bedroom. Earlier this evening, we had plans with some other friends to eat dinner at a top-rated Mediterranean restaurant and karaoke afterward at my favorite Japanese establishment.

I had spent most of the day volunteering at a free clinic on six hours of sleep and one spring roll. After clinic and ballroom dance practice, I returned to my room to get ready. I was excited to wear my new black top (that is, one given to me second hand by a friend of my mom’s) with my dark sheen jeans from New York Company and try out the mineral makeup I had just bought from Costco. Staring closely into the sharded mirror, which my roommate had recently snapped by leaning against, I started to notice a light pressure pinpoint in the right anterior portion of my head, just above my eyebrow. I must be too hungry, the sooner we eat the better.

While my boyfriend drove us to downtown Sunnyvale’s boulevard of quaint restaurants, most of which were quite full of satisfied patrons enjoying their long weekend, I began to feel mareo, or dizziness (as I just learned today from interviewing a Mexican illegal immigrant about her symptoms). I could barely even walk the two blocks from the parking lot to the pedestrian walkway where the restaurant was located. We had arrived ten minutes late and kept our party waiting and hungry, so of course the polite thing to do was to order the first thing that looked decently satisfying. As soon as I blurted out my order, I excused myself to the bathroom. To my dismay, there were two other women and a man in front in line ahead of me. Stealing into the men’s room as soon as it was available, I waved my hand across the paper towel dispenser scanner, lay the torn sheet in front of the toilet, and squat embraced the bowl. Although a large volume of saliva came out, no vomit extruded. Any observer would’ve mistaken me for a bulemic. The door handle started shaking. Guess a customer must’ve gotten impatient.

I spent the entire dinner either cradling my head or burying it between my boyfriend’s and the chair’s backs. Everyone’s food looked so appetizing, but I couldn’t have any of it. I didn’t touch my salad, except for one lettuce leaf. Amazingly, the manager offered me some excedrin. We left a generous tip.

The car ride back home was the worst part. Finally in private, I started moaning every time the car changed acceleration. My boyfriend stopped the car to make sure I was ok, but I told him to get the worst part over with and hurry home. He obliged, dealing with my groans the entire way.

As I got out of the car, I couldn’t even stand up straight. I hobbled back to the apartment bent over like a hunchback, and only made it with his support. I immediately stripped off my jeans and curled into bed.

“Can you take off my bra?” I felt like an old person, or an invalid.

In the middle of that task, I asked, “Can you turn up the heat?” He immediately started to stand up.

“Wait, finish helping me with my bra first! And then can you get me some water?” (Which he orally delivered to my mouth, like a lactating mother.)

I’ve never experienced such a combination of acute migraine and nausea. I wanted to fucking die.  But as I fell asleep, I realized the silver lining in this whole mess.

(continuation of the migrant worker thread)

“Let’s take a gamble,” he whispered.

“Let me come inside of you, and if you are pregnant, we’ll marry and live the rest of our lives together.”

Any objective 3^rd party would look at this situation and warn the girl, “DON’T DO IT! ARE YOU CRAZY?!” In any case, that’s what I wish I had told myself. There’s something numbing about sexual moments that leave any trace of rationality in that fuzzy place far away. It’s there, but you can’t quite make out its outline, like an old friend from long ago. In its place tugs my guilty desire for romanticism and adventure. The thrill of a risk, and the remote chance of abandoning my ivy-grown life for the simple, rustic lifestyle in the Chinese countryside – like one of those princess-meets-peasant type fairytales. Truthfully, I almost wanted him to get me pregnant.

As soon as we finished, I fell back down to reality. Well, not quite. I went to the opposite extreme and obsessed over the paranoid possibility that I was now HIV positive. My researcher-hat thinking took the reins. He came from a low-income, low-education background, I reasoned, both factors associated with HIV infection. He had had one other partner before, and they didn’t use condoms. He’s never been tested for STD’s. I was going to die of HIV.

That was the last time I saw him, because the next day I flew back to school. I immediately made an appointment for an HIV test. The nurse was nice enough, but I was turned off by her – perhaps a little too unfairly.

“Why are you getting an HIV test today?”

“Because I had unprotected sex.” Why else…

“Was this consensual?” Her straight-faced detachment almost annoyed me.

“Yes, of course.” Why is she asking so many questions. I thought I could just get the test and leave.

“Have you thought about taking emergency contraception?”

I hadn’t even thought about the risk of pregnancy. She showed me the relative risks of HIV and pregnancy. In 20 years, she had seen nine students test positive for HIV, while pregnancy? Too frequent to even remember. Pregnancy was the much more real possibility, but somehow in the whole paranoia mess, I had completely neglected it. I just hear so much scare-talk, about how AIDS is so deadly. Everybody’s talking about it nowadays.

Later I thought about what made me so uncomfortable in the nurse’s office. She was just trying to help. I was defensive – I knew I had done something I shouldn’t have, and I didn’t really want to explore why I did. However, I didn’t really have any protection against repeating that behavior – other than vowing to “never again”. There was also the hypocriticalness of my role as a researcher on HIV, someone who should know the risks, someone ultimately hoping to promote safe practices – and here I was encouraging others to do something I couldn’t even do.

I am now an HIV counselor in my school, providing students with counseling and testing. I don’t tell them what to do. I try to understand and reframe their behavioral motivations. Sometimes, prescriptions can only go so far.

Written as an empathy building exercise for my class on HIV.

I learned today that a computer never really destroys its memory. It marks items as deleted, but the data remains. And if one day, someone decided to take the hardware and reconstruct the data from all the 1’s and 0’s, then they could perfectly recreate all the ‘deleted’ memory.

That seems pretty similar to how I operate. Memories can never really be forgotten. They can only be labeled as such; I vow that I will forget about you, and then suppress all our memories, mentally dragging them to some trash bin hidden in the center of my consciousness. But the memories are still there, they are not destroyed, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t go back and replace all the 1’s with 0’s. If a computer can’t even do it, how do you expect me to?

Apparantly the only way to really get rid of computer memory is to fill it up with so much other memory, that ‘deleted’ memory is overwritten. A computer only has so much capacity. I wonder if human memory is like that. Is there only so much neuronal space, or can new neural connections be created infinitely? Perhaps the only way to erase old memories is to create an abundance of new memories.

I thought of that scene in “Titanic”, when Rose says that a woman’s heart is like a bottomless ocean; you can never know what secrets she harbors in the dark depths of her soul. According to Rose, then, a woman’s capacity is limitless; but as she dropped the diamond into the water, I thought to myself, even oceans have a bottom.

Last night, when you told me the same things you’ve told me over and over, a feeling overcame me – a feeling I thought I had gotten over and forgotten. I was back in your car, hearing you say “I think you’re a bad person, I think you’re a bad person, I think you’re a bad person…

Midnight. Our cars are parked in the shopping center. You hand me my board game and wave goodbye. I’m confused. We had a fight two days ago, and today you act as if we were just friends. Did we break up?

“Wait…” Halfway between me and your car, you turn around. I run towards you. “Are we breaking up?”

“I thought we did a long time ago.”

Frozen. Speechless. I don’t know what to do except stand still. It starts to rain.

“I have to go home now, it’s late.”

I refuse to let you leave. I don’t know what else there is to say, but I know I’m not done saying it.

“Alright, I’ll drive you to your car.”

You say something to me, I can’t remember. All I can remember is “I don’t like you anymore. I think you’re a bad person.” I still can’t leave. Time is passing but I don’t know for how long. You open the passenger door to make it easier. After you realize that I have not helped myself out, you push me. I’m bracing myself against your car frame, crying harder as you apply more force. I can’t let go, knowing that if I let you drive away, you will drive out of my life forever. You give up. You’re going home, you say, let your mom handle me. You start driving.

“Drive back. I’ll get out.” I watch as your Toyota drives away, and I stand there, frozen. Eventually I realize that I should go back in my car, where it’s at least warm and dry. I unlock the door and sit down to find that my entire car is soaking wet. I forgot to close the sunroof.

I break down at that point. As I start the 45 minute drive home, I start to hyperventilate. I want to scream and moan and rip out my insides.  I can’t drive like this.

…I think you’re a bad person. You are not the type of girl I would want to marry.” This whole time I had deluded myself into thinking that you were just saying that. That you wanted me to get over you. I guess you were telling the truth after all.

“You need to forget about me. I can’t love you as much as this other guy loves you.”

After we hung up, I felt all those things again. Wanting at the same time to explode, let the world feel my pain, and to implode, disintegrate quietly into the darkness with no one knowing. It was the first time in the two years since we’ve broken up that I’ve felt that way; the only other time where I felt like I truly lost you.

mood: 2 alone in my room, drinking pumpkin ale

tired: 4

spiritual tiredness: 3

.. Continued

Tian Hao was a migrant worker I had met in Beijing when he delivered Italian food to my apartment. A week later he was introducing me as his nu peng you, girlfriend.

For the two weeks that I had remaining in Beijing before returning to school, he moved into my apartment. We came home from work and ate dinner while watching TV. He was always grinning and joking about how he would make a lot of money by turning his family apple farm into an apple juice company. Then he would fly to America to live with me and work as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant.

While he was helping clean up the night before my flight, he suddenly took a serious tone, and said, broom in hand, “I will miss these past few weeks with you. It gave me the feeling of having a family again.” The disparity of our lives was like an elephant in front of me. I was returning to my world of intellectualism and comfort (almost pampering). Being with him for two weeks was like my voyage into a rural and romantic world. But it was just a voyage, and people have to return from voyages at some point.

It was a voyage for him too. The next night, he would return to his one room (could you even call it an apartment?) shared with three other migrant workers. Where at night it was so cold, they layered blanket upon blanket brought from their rural hometowns. Where the walls and floors were dirty and grimy, the bathroom was shared with the entire hall, and nobody ever bothered to clean since they would probably find a new job in a new city few months later anyway.

When I left in the cab, he brought me some fruits from his family farm. Inside the bag was a few chopped apples and a lone pear. “I couldn’t part the pear,” he told me, “because then that would really be goodbye”.  (Pear, in Chinese, is li, a homophone with apart. To split a pear is to split apart).

On the airplane, I was thinking about that moment when the cab drove away, and our hands pulled away. I suck at writing poetry, but the image inspired me to scribble a few verses:

His hands.
Tanned mud faded with sweat,
short stubbed fingers,
dirt caught in between his nails,
callused palms that were rough to the touch.

Her hands.
Porcelain pale padded with comfort,
long delicate fingers,
tips finely manicured, except
a lone callus swollen from a lifetime of script.

Their hands.
Fingers laced,
a checkerboard of two worlds
colliding for a brief moment.
As the cab pulls away she pulls her arm inside,
and rolls up the window.

And the Chinese pop song by Jay Chou played in my head, “海鸟跟鱼相爱”.
The seagull and the fish fell in love

I can’t do this. Here I am, laying in bed next to him, trying express my annoyance. Amid his pleas of, “I’m sorry”, all I can think of is how your response would be to laugh and shower me with kisses because you think I’m cute when I’m pissed. My stomach turns, and I have to get out of bed to write this blog post in the middle of the night.

I was walking back home from class the other day, when I decided to call you. Last time, you called me just to chat, because you were feeling “blue”. We haven’t talked for a few weeks since then, but you weren’t glad to hear from me. Maybe you read my blog recently and found out that I’m dating someone else. Maybe that makes me a bad person, because I’m initiating contact with you while I’m taken.

But how do I stop comparing everything he does to you? (You usually win). How do I remove you from the pedestal in my mind, and appreciate people for their unique personalities? Am I just using him to feel more comfortable in your absence, like if I can’t have the one I love, then at least I can have someone who loves me? But that makes me feel so disgusted with myself…

And yes, (I’m sure this one will boost your ego). Sometimes, when we’re making love, I can’t help but play flashbacks of you in my mind. Even though I try to suppress it, you still sneak into my conscious and for a moment, all I sense is you; I see your face in front of me, feel your hands touching me, and your smell.. oh that smell.. a natural mixture of skin and pheromones that I have yet to encounter anywhere else. Why is it so hard with everyone else, but so easy with you?

A few years ago, I broke up with you because for some stupid reason, I was still obsessed with an ex-boyfriend. I was crying, but you told me it was ok, as long as I learned my lesson: not to let our past relationship hinder my relationships in the future. I guess I need to listen to you now, and continue my life without suffocating myself with our memories.

I posed this question to both my roommate and my boyfriend.

“If you’ve been dating for one year, because then you’ve been through all the seasons. All the ups and downs.”

“Nine months. Sounds like a good round number. What do you think?”

“Three months,” I responded. They burst out laughing.

“That’s only because you can’t keep a boyfriend for any longer than that.”

Ok, so maybe I haven’t had a long-term relationship for a while. I just haven’t met someone who I absolutely meshed with, someone for whom the opportunity cost of being with them didn’t outweigh the benefits.

A new relationship is exciting. You’re getting to know a new person. Exploring new territory. Engaging in unfamiliar interactions, even if the two separate people are familiar. Ultimately, you’re learning more about yourself and gaining skills for the future. It’s a setting to mold yourself, without much investment and commitment. Isn’t that the attraction of playdough? That we can create any shape we want, adding indentations or chopping off arms, and know that in the end it doesn’t matter because it’s all just going to get smushed back into the playdough container anyway, and the next time we start afresh with a new playdough ball?

What distinguishes a long-term relationship? Greater commitment? A sense of purpose and direction? More emotional support and stability? And how long does it take to achieve that? How do I know when I want to throw in the towel and admit to myself and him that it’s not going to work out? Do I wait and expect that something will happen that makes me fall madly in love with him?

I suppose I should provide some context for my rambling. These questions have been running through my head recently, and if I’ve at all had contact with you in the last week then you probably know.

In the past, I always fell pretty hard and early for the guys that I’ve been attracted to. I meet them and know that I am attracted to them. Something about our interaction, it’s like they just seem to know me. Some physical attraction too, I won’t lie. I keep making excuses to see them, and I work hard until I get what I want. And I usually do get what I want.

I like my boyfriend. A lot. But the story goes a bit differently with him. We met two years ago living in the same dorm, and were decent friends since. Sometimes we hung out in the dorm, but we obviously had different interests and different friends. We never called eachother just to hang out, and I never really made it a point to see him. Just a couple of times, hanging out playing video games or singing karaoke. Oh and once, we went to a Mae concert.

Through various happenstances of chance, we ended up renting a room together for two weeks. I never had any romantic inclinations towards him, never made any advances toward him, and I didn’t even know if he was heterosexual. But I did know that our friendship became a lot stronger as we learned more about eachother, and started to find our differences rather amazing. So that’s why when on move out day, when he jumped under my covers to keep me warm, I just smiled.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything is so different. I’ve never dated a friend before – only people to whom I was attracted since the beginning. I’ve always chased after what I want, yet this came to me as if it were natural and effortless. That’s why I don’t feel that strong passion, as I usually do. But maybe it’s just the nature of this relationship. Maybe relationships that aren’t so intense don’t burn out so fast.

But what I’m wondering is: How long should I wait before I know if this relationship is something that I want to pursue and invest myself in? Should I end it before it gets too complicated, while we can still end on good terms and maintain our friendship; before anyone gets hurt? I have the impression that he likes me more than I like him; am I just cheating him, taking advantage of him?

I need some insights.

Just finished my shift at the Sexual Health Center. We were asked to write a pick-up line at the bottom of our shift entries. Here’s mine: I’m a backward machine. Turn me on first and then I’ll plug it in.

The Migrant Worker Saga, continued.

It was 2:30 am. I had to work the next day. The Migrant Worker stood in the doorway as I said goodbye and thank you for a great evening. “I’ll miss you,” he said. I only smiled. As I was about to close the door, he leaned in and kissed me. It was a rough, gritty, kiss – the kind that used too much teeth and not enough affection. Or maybe he just didn’t know how to kiss well.

1:15 pm. He had just gotten off his morning shift as a bicycle delivery boy at the Italian restaurant down the street, and had to return to work for the dinner rush at 3. We were watching the Chinese equivalent of animal planet together on my couch. He puts his arms around me, and moments later we’re frantically grabbing at each other. He starts to carry me to the bed, when I ask if he has a condom.

“No,” he responds with a scoff, “I never use those.”

“Then I am not going to have sex with you until you go to the store and buy some.”

It is almost time for work. We’ll have to wait until later.

11:15 pm. He bikes with me standing in the back to the pharmacy next to the restaurant where he works. I start to walk in when I notice that he’s not following me.

“Aren’t you coming?” I ask.

“No, are you kidding? I work next door. People know me.”

“Whatever you say,” I shrug.

Inside the pharmacy are two nurses and a male customer. The store has a U shaped glass case housing most of their products, with a central island glass case showing off condoms. The male customer was half-jokingly, half angrily scolding the nurses.

“Why do you display these kinds of things right here in front for everyone to see?”

At that moment I coolly walked up to the nurses and asked to purchase a package of “those things”. The man stared at me dumbfounded. That girl is a slut. Who uses condoms anyway? Why is the girl buying the condoms? She must have AIDS. I guessed at what he was thinking.

The Migrant Worker was no where to be found. I scanned up and down the street before I noticed him on the other side. “I didn’t want people to see you walk out of there and then come home with me,” he explained.

“How do you use this thing?”
“Can’t we do it just once without it?”
“It makes me feel less pleasure, I can’t come.”
“My ex-girlfriend never made me use one.”

Despite his protests, that night I had great, protected, sex with the coolest Chinese migrant worker I know.

My college roommate and I would wake up simultaneously as our alarms blared into our dreams. From the right side of the room, came a croaking, “fuuUCK”; from the left, a whining “Shi-it”. We liked to say that I started every day off with a fuck, and she started it with a shit.

Over the summer, I found myself homeless and living off the charity of friends for a period of time. Eventually a good guy friend and I settled down into the kitchen of a pot-engulfed renegade artist colony. We had been friends for a long time, so I didn’t have any qualms about it. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if he was heterosexual. For the two weeks before school started, he and I spent almost every moment of every day together: working, cooking, and hanging out. I did his laundry, and he gave me rides. We timed our schedules so that we could work out together. I started to feel like I cared for him, much more than in a friend or roommate way, like I wanted to take care of him, and him to take care of me. But we were just friends, so nothing more ever crossed my mind…

“I’m so cold!” Every morning (when I could manage to wake up in the morning, that is), the even-in-the-summertime chill crept underneath my comforters and led me to cry out. From his bed (well, really just a futon cushion spread on the floor), my roommate always faithfully offered me a blanket. When I woke up on the last day that we were to share that kitchen together, I whined, eyes closed, “I’m so cold!”. Unsatisfied with his usual blanket offer, I replied, “No, I need a fucking heat generator!”

I suddenly felt my comforter lift and a body fall onto the bed beside me. He wrapped his arms around me and said, “I’ll warm you up”.

And that is how I started dating my friend and roommate. A pleasant surprise, like an unassuming box of chocolates.

This is the 4th chapter in the series about The Migrant Worker.

What kind of 30+ man makes friends with 20 year old girls? I felt pretty dejected after I realized the cute policeman was already married. So dejected, in fact, that I decided to take revenge by asking to dinner the Migrant Worker whose calls I had been avoiding all week. Needless to say, he accepted immediately.

He picked me up on his yellow Annie’s delivery bicycle after work. At 11pm, I would’ve thought most places had closed, but he took me to a part of Beijing that I had never encountered. The people who frequented this night market were those who got off work after most people had gone to bed, mostly young men like him who had come to Beijing in search of work. They only had a chance to eat dinner at midnight and play a few games of pool afterwards. The smell immediately caught my attention; it was a mixture of the glistening sweat on their bare backs after a long day’s work, and vegetables fried in peanut sauce. Although that sounds gross, it was the most down to earth scent I can remember.

During dinner, I asked him how much money he made, not considered a rude question in China. About 200$ a month was the answer.While he stepped outside for a moment, I quickly paid for the meal: only about 3$. Coming back inside, he finished eating and called out for the check. When I explained that I already covered it, he was enraged that I didn’t let him pay for the meal. He worked for his money, whereas he didn’t want me to use money that my parents gave me on him. This was the portrait of the honest worker that I had been searching for.

He sent me home on his bike at 2am; he pedaled while I stood on the bars behind him, holding his shoulders to keep from falling backwards. The quiet of the sleeping city accompanied by the bleakness of the dark gave me an eerie feeling; I thought Beijing never slept. Crossing the highway, we passed by three other guys on their bikes, and he gave out a loud whistle. I heard three whistles back.

Laying down on my couch, I thought back about all that had happened that night. Even though I had lived and visited China countless times, I had never known this side of China before. I couldn’t sleep, and spent all night texting him until 7am when I told him to come over and we fell asleep on my couch.