Selina Xu

(Typed in midnight delirium on a plane over the Arabian sea on September 26.)

There are moments that make up leaving.

I stood surveying the room I had come of age in, a toothbrush hanging out of the downturned edge of my mouth. Shelves empty of books, bed stripped of bedding, frames emptied of photos, dressers without dresses. Imprints of a life once lived that I was now shedding. The sense of loss stabbed me, bereft.

Was this what growing up meant?

Across the dining table, my mom read her daily dose of tabloids. Opposite her I was wiping my wet face with tissue. “Don’t cry,” she murmured, not meeting my eyes.

My eyes were already swollen like walnuts, but they wouldn’t stop leaking. Enough, I thought. But still I felt I was losing something permanent in the slip of the moment: maybe call it childhood.

Childhood, or the realization that your time with your parents was finite, an ever diminishing hourglass, time lost to time that I couldn’t grab onto no matter how tightly I tried to clutch it close.

So I sobbed like a baby. My mom, with whom I had fought like a caged cricket over months, was at last a symbol I could decipher: she embodied all that home meant to me. Strictness and intimacy written into one, the weight of hopes, the gravity of comfort, the constancy of oxygen, the unique ability to evoke joy and frustration in me like no other and, when you strip away everything else, all that’s left is love. To recognize that I was perhaps now set on a diverging path from hers, like two intersecting lines, broke my heart.

The truth of adulthood is knowing that something is necessary even if it breaks your heart.

College had its fair share of airport farewells. But this was different. College was a prolonged state of partial departure, punctuated by winter and summer breaks and reading period spent back home. No departure ever felt permanent: there was always an old life to be reverted to. Harvard was a rest stop on the highway between my teens and adulthood — we loitered in reprieve from the consequences of choosing a definite direction.

But this time, in picking America all over again, I had a clearer sense of what I was losing alongside the gains. Maybe everything has a price, I thought. New perspectives, horizons and stories meant leaving the familiar behind. To go forth and find adventure on the seas meant to sail out of the harbor that had sheltered me for the first 25 years, to bake under the sun and find quiet in the starry stars above, to keep my shaky hand on the steering wheel in both calm and choppy waters, to swallow fears and taste solitude in all its glory.

***

Adulthood was blinking back tears, feeling heartbreak recede, grasping the brevity of all moments despite their unbearableness.

It’s been a few days now in New York — a city that feels like a somewhat home despite all its unfamiliarity. Walking down the avenues gives me deja vu. I’ve assembled my first ever furniture, caught a cockroach, signed a lease, and amidst all that homesickness has faded into an occasional throb.

So brine on my tongue, sea salt spray in my hair, eyes squinting in the glare of the grand unknown, I stand on deck, no sea legs.