Dear Ana

Dear Ana,

I’m about to graduate. I’m on the balcony of Kairos, watching the sun rise, watching the world soften into what is known. I talk to the morning like it’s you.  

I spent the last week asking the alumni network whether you’d ever written a letter to me, but they couldn’t find anything. That’s okay, though. I don’t think you ever believed I’d exist (read: survive to read a letter from you), but here I am, twenty-one years old and recognizing that one of us should write to the other.

There are so many things I want to tell you: namely, that I can’t imagine how you did it—leaving home at sixteen, keeping it all a secret, running and running until even now (stagnant and surrounded by a house and people who mean the world to me) I struggle to sit with my restlessness. You brought us here for reasons neither of us knew, but your story bears an odd similarity to Mama’s and Baba’s: escaping a fractured home to some sort of promised land, gambling everything on the name of a prestigious university. You are a mother who carried me here, but I also know you as a child—and it is heartbreaking, knowing that you carry both a mother’s and a daughter’s fear. I thought I might give you some reassurance, being some evolved, prodigal form that claims to be speaking from your future. So:  

First, I want to tell you that this year is the year we finally stop fearing death, because we realize we were only ever meant to return to this world. You were always so scared of an ending, that you’ll run out of time to make things right, but who can blame you? Nothing will ever be right, and that is both terrifying and liberating. So, I want to tell you that you’ll kiss the girls who terrify you, and the girls who admit they are terrified of you. I want to tell you that I’ve lost track of the times you’ll wander through campus at 2 AM, high heels in your hands, wondering whether you were made for this world. I want to tell you that you’re not going to win any fancy research awards for your theses, that your suspicions at the end of high school were right—you were never meant to excel within the rules and emerge with a 4.0. Your destiny was always to break things at a slant, to work within the chimeric, and because of this, you will feel monstrous for years. I want to tell you that your back will be tattooed with the addresses of every place you’ve ever called home, by a girl you no longer talk to, but whom you loved as a sister. I want to tell you that you’ll spend a year crying every time you see a Chinese kid in Chinatown. This is unfortunate, because there are a lot of Chinese kids in Chinatown. I want to tell you that the pain of realizing your hurt will always be worse than the hurt itself, and that each time you realize this, you’ll want to scream with the unfairness of it all. I want to tell you how much more you have left to grieve, and how much more you have yet to cherish, but that I don’t know the exact quantities of either. We can count together, if you’d like. You’ll make a knife and then a harbor out of a body that could never be a home. You’ll realize that the world will always feel small, no matter how far you run, because you always carry the same heart through all of it. No, you never stopped aching for greatness—this ache only became more secret as you learned the bounds of your abilities—but you now know what Ulyana Lopatkina meant when she said, I just want to be remembered as a good person. You’ve stopped dancing, by the way. Ballet was never going to be your home. But you were able to look your art in the eye before you left it, and you have never known wonder like the wonder you carried onstage as Clara. I want to tell you that you won’t find the love of your life here, but that even now, you don’t stop wishing for her—for a woman you see in bits and pieces in all the women you’ve loved through the years, for a woman who will cook Cantonese food for you and hold your writing in both her hands. But that’s okay, because you are surrounded by so many people who love you even though none of you can fully articulate why, who are twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two, who carry each small goodbye as if it’s the most precious thing. 

Above all, I want to tell you that I’m still confused, and terrified, and that I’ve been coping with the last week by drinking Trader Joe’s wine and scrolling mindlessly through Instagram and refusing (for the first time since I was you) to journal. I can’t believe I’m graduating. How can I be allowed to graduate? I still haven’t learned to love. I still haven’t learned to grieve. My time at Stanford was so fragmented that it was hard to love or grieve it. But that’s okay, right? It’s my turn to seek reassurance from you. (Please tell me it’ll be okay.) I guess you’ll say that it’s all right, and then give me some abstracted advice that you don’t fully believe—maybe some advice bound up in literary language, like the one I’m using to speak to you. It’s funny and sad that we don’t know how else to talk to each other. But I have reached for you, anyways, and I will wait for you to reach back. 

Until then,

Ana