“You need to let go of the past”

The past few nights I have kept myself awake thinking about him, reminiscing on old memories. One by one, I replay them in my head until I miss him so much that I am inspired to call him, hoping that he might tell me he misses me too.

“Sup?” he says.

“Oh I gotta go, the basketball game is on.”

He leaves me alone with the dial tone, with not even  a piece of self-respect to cling to.

Perhaps I keep thinking about him because I am afraid of forgetting. For one last time, I am going to allow myself to enjoy our memories as I record them here in writing over the next few days. After this, I will never think about him again – until a future when all this is behind me, and I can revisit this entry without mixed feelings.

“The first time I saw you, my impression of you was just that you were very Chinese,” you told me, referring to the oversized red fleece handed down to me from my mother that I always wore to track practice. We were laughing about how we had both noticed each other as freshmen, but despite being on the same track team and in the same Chinese school class, had only met as seniors.

I sat with my friend R_ in the Chinese school cafeteria. He was working on homework with a little punk kid because his Chinese sucked. Then you sat down across from me. Turns out that punk was your brother.

I could see the resemblance. You had a punk smile on your face, one that read “I’m the man, yo”. You wore clothes that were too big for you, but not in a ghetto way, just in a – I don’t know how to buy clothes of the right size – way. I thought you might get up and break dance, miserably. I wasn’t far off the mark. You tried to impress me by folding a paper crane, which I threw away as I left. Undaunted, you challenged R_ to a sprinting race and then to a basketball game to show off. But I wasn’t interested and left for my orchestra rehearsal.

You always did love to talk about yourself, even as soon as we first met you were showing off the fan your grandfather penned with calligraphy. I listened, nodding my head and asking you questions, if only out of pity that you actually thought people were as interested in yourself as you were.

“That’s when I first started liking you,” you told me, “because you listened to what I had to say”.

In truth, I was just being polite.