#18 | labors
When I landed in New York to visit her for the first time, she met me at baggage claim with my favorite onigiri, fruit tea, and a hug. I look back and think about how thoughtful that was. Throughout our relationship, I don't think we picked each other up from the airport again, but that's the feeling I have when I think about how we treated each other. With endless respect and care.
After her dad died, I started making a list of everything I needed to do: meal prep, clean the house top to bottom, ask my friends visiting that weekend to find other places to stay, on and on and on, and also, meet her at the airport. I remembered she had brought three suitcases, so it was a no-brainer for me to also put her flight info in my calendar and plan to ride 45 minutes to JFK, so I could carry her things and make her feel less alone. Of course, like I've mentioned in other posts, she called me a week before coming back and broke up with me instead, and said she'd be going straight to her sister's apartment.
I'm thinking a lot about this part now — the tasks she wanted for herself. In her grief, she wanted to land after a 13.5 hour flight from Taiwan, alone, and lug three suitcases home. She wanted to singlehandedly move all her possessions out of our third-floor walkup to her sister's place, two or three bags at a time, 7 minutes each way. She wanted to do her own laundry, make her own bed, cook her own food, and sleep alone. She didn't want me to help or hold her, though I would've stayed up all night to talk to her about anything, even just filled the space with random unrelated thoughts until she could sleep, and she knows that. I think she knows I would do all of this. It's not a matter of knowing, it's a matter of preference and space.
In my spiraling about whether I'm a failure, or what I could have done better, I've tired myself out. I've done so much journaling and writing that sometimes it actually makes me feel worse to write out my thoughts and feelings. At a certain point, I know I have to relinquish the burden of rejection and failure and accept that I'm just not wanted by her at this moment, maybe not ever again. I don't need to have a feeling about it. I must resist endless interpretation. It just is. I have a life to fucking live even though every day is hard.
Which is ironic because that’s how she felt when her parents evicted us, and an approach I didn’t understand at the time: “There’s nothing to feel. I did everything in my power and they didn’t react the way I wanted, but I cannot change anything, so there is nothing I can do.”