springen - to leap, to jump, to burst forth and grow
something i love so dearly about boston and berlin is how much i feel the seasons. my pride and my joy has always been seasonal, even growing up in sunny san diego. i think it’s lovely that nature paints my emotions in the world around me. the sky, once a cloudy glass dome, has become a pleasant baby blue; a lazy breeze whistles by, and cherry blossoms peek out from branches once carpeted in white. and i know that i have survived another year and come out stronger
in this aspect, the years feel cyclic. sometimes that feels beautiful, and sometimes that feels a little hopeless. but every year is also different. winter and spring used to feel like annihilation and rebirth; spring in boston felt nothing short of a miracle, those cherry blossom petals floating all over the esplanade. this year, spring came as a thawing of the heart—a welling of emotions, bursting forth. many of these emotions were sadness and grief. grief for all the feelings not felt, all the time not well spent. my friends are an ocean away and sometimes, it feels like a lifetime
around mid-april i realize that my favorite people belong to SF, and not to me. i go to sleep one night feeling terrified that i’ll be alone forever, and the next morning i wake up to V’s text—i think i know what i need—and he’s staying in SF instead of starting grad school with me at princeton. the next weekend A comes to berlin, and for four days spring becomes a miracle again, her among the flowers and the sky and the city that used to feel so empty. i blink and we’re at the airport again, shuffling down the line, slowly disappearing from each other just like the summer i was 17. we wave and we wave and we wave and there are tears streaming down my face, because i don’t know if i’ll ever see you again. because this time we know where we belong
we belong to our dreams, and not to each other; it’s mid-april and the petals of the cherry blossom tree around the corner are brown and wilting, drooping limply from their stems. i read what V has written for me and my heart is a knife in my throat. i wish i could say that i cried in the sunshine instead of the bathroom but i can’t face them, the hanging corpses of those flowers that, too, have turned from the sun. soon they will give way completely to those lush green leaves that will stay forever, at least until fall, and i hate this
i hate that the most beautiful things in life are fleeting. i hate that i will accept this as a part of life, and i hate that i already have. sometimes when i cry i start feeling like i should have picked berkeley. but i know that if i had to make this decision again, i would have broken your heart again. and i know you would have, too
*
from mid-april to the end of may i’m everywhere again, between home and foreign places and my home in between. A visits, i turn 23, she leaves. i see madrid by myself, and barcelona with S. i go on a retreat with my research group. i do puzzles and star wars movie marathons with my friends here and it makes me happy. i try american pizza and a bagel pop-up on orianenberg straße. i’m home again. i go back to san diego for a week, and the morning after i land i get to my local philz coffee before sunrise. on my mom’s birthday i drive with my sister to get cake and flowers and her beloved multigrain walnut bread. i attend a wedding. i go back to berlin and the morning after i land i feel like death and fly to rome. in rome the sun is unrelenting, and so is the ocean of tourists. i spend the days reading in a small bookshop. in the poppy war and the song of achilles, in the ruins of rome and the glory of the vatican, the suffering of people makes its way into my heart
i return from rome and i’m tired, urgently. i’m yearning for monotony and air conditioning, so it must be summer. it’s mid-june and i’m finally back to my usual rhythm: groceries on friday, laundry on the weekend. i try to go for a run when i get off work, even though it’s getting quite warm now. i have a feeling that this is what the rest of my life will look like: short springs, and long summers. a steady, beating sun like san diego. i wonder if that’s something i ought to grieve. i wonder that if the day when i finally grasp that resilience i’m reaching towards is the day i won’t have to write anymore
*
i still have much to write about this spring. but my europe travels deserve a separate blogpost, and so do my visits home, both in may and in january. i’ve also been reflecting a lot about my identity, and also what i want from my scientific career. but these are things i would like to write, as opposed to things i must write. i am writing this blogpost because i’d like to have a clean snapshot for my future self, and also my friends. i am writing this blogpost by laboriously foraging the forest of my emotions, scattered here and there in my photo album and journal and mind, ever so slippery and fading away. but when i must write, i close my eyes and everything is already here, streaming and screaming out in rivers. when i open my eyes, i am alive once more
my fulbright term is drawing to a close. now, more than ever, i feel that i don’t have enough time. there are so many cities and cafés i haven’t visited, so much physics that i’ve squandered my opportunity to learn here. my research project from here isn’t finished, either
some people say that you should have a goal in mind when you take a gap year, but i disagree. i did have a goal for this gap year, which was finding clarity on what research i want to do in the future. i think things have become more clear and less clear, simultaneously. i understand why i have chosen science much better than i did before; at the same time, the possibilities for me are so much greater than i had previously imagined. it’s been announced now that i have won the hertz fellowship, and this grants me both the freedom and the burden to stray outside the confines of the conventional astrophysics PhD. my thoughts complete yet, but they’re something like this: my love for science stems from my love for the world and the people within, and my desire to understand it is the purest expression i have of love. so i guess this could be anything: the nature of dark energy, the fabric of spacetime, the suffering of people. but i have a feeling that it isn’t what i’m working on right now
nonetheless, the driving force behind my gap year wasn’t any explicit goal. i took a gap year for the same reason that i took a gap year four years ago—a vague, but sure, intuition that i would find something. it’s hard for me to explain what it is, or what i’ve found. there are things i can point to—like how sure i am of myself now, and of what it means to love. how i know now how to find comfort in loneliness, in wandering unfamiliar streets filled with unfamiliar people—and also how to find comfort in familiarity, in the chinese restaurant on convoy street back home, in the ringing of that chinese-american chaos and cacophony that i know so well, and feel a kind of unbridled joy that i am sure i have never felt before
how there’s an image—no, a world—seared into my mind, of the sun streaming in through the glass onto the dining table cloth, of the light glinting on my mother’s new favorite teapot, the matching porcelain plates filled with her favorite mochi-stuffed 油条, round and sticky and dusted with sesame sugar. how finally, after two short decades of sharing this table with you, i finally understand that the joy written on your face flows from my presence, and your love—and that is enough, more than enough
how, even though plane rides have become so ordinary, i still always press my face against the window. i hold my breath as we burst through the clouds and the sky opens, crimson to black. i glimpse california, twinkling through the clouds below; behind, the last lune of the sun sinks through the earth. all the light that i leave behind. all the promises, tacit, unspoken
i breathe, and the glass clouds in cycles. i’m flying east; i always have, borne into the darkness which threatens to swallow me whole in hours of midnight. i press my face against the window. i think it’s the most beautiful thing i’ve ever seen
*
home, i think, is proof that i was born somewhere. that i’m alive, that i love and am loved until the end of time
this year, i am 23. i was born in the spring; i always have been, and i hope i always will be




"because this time we know where we belong / we belong to our dreams, and not to each other" ;-; been thinking about this too and this hits
WE GET IT YOU WON THE HERTZ FELLOWSHIP AND HAVE BEEN TRAVELING A LOT