The early spring into summer, I returned from home to America just like a gazillion times I did before.
I carry the long drive to the airport in silence, my parents in the front seat and me in the back, watching the gray highways unspool outside the window, something being slowly unraveled. Nobody says much. We have done this enough times now that the silence has its own present texture. The city dissolves behind us: the familiar intersections, the noodle shop on the corner, the ginkgo tree still raining down a thousand golden leaves. I watch them go without saying goodbye, because saying goodbye to a city feels embarrassing, and because I know I will be back, and because I also know that when I return I will be slightly different and the city will be slightly different and we will spend a few weeks quietly relearning each other.
I carry jars of pickles my mom made, packed in zip-lock bags and then wrapped in fabric so they won't leak. I carry chinese instant ramen stuffed between the folds of clothes, tea leaves from my aunt in bubble wrap and scarves that look like something precious. These things are strategies against homesickness, against the dining hall, against the specific loneliness of craving something that no restaurant within twenty miles will make the right way. I will ration them. I will eat the ramen on nights when the work feels like too much and I need something that tastes like being taken care of. I will brew the tea slowly on weekend mornings and pretend, for a few minutes, that I am somewhere else.
I carry small stacks of documents that decide where I stay: my passport, student ID, visa papers, and I-20. I have memorized the anxiety of international departures, the particular fluorescence of the terminal, the way my hands move through the motions without my brain needing to tell them to. I carry the faint smell of laundry detergent still on my clothes, and the damp feeling of freshly washed hair against the neck pillow on the plane. Fourteen hours. I have learned to exist inside those fourteen hours as a kind of suspended person, not yet there, no longer fully here, watching movies I would never choose at home, eating the plastic-wrapped meals at whatever hour the flight attendant brings them, losing track of whether it is today or tomorrow or still yesterday. I have learned that jet lag is not just a physical condition. It is an emotional one. It is your body reminding you that you have moved across the world again, that time works differently now, that it will take weeks before you stop waking up at 3 a.m. with your heart pounding and your brain convinced it has somewhere to be.
I carry nostalgia, though nostalgia is the wrong word because nostalgia implies distance, and Beijing is never quite distant. It lives in my body. It lives in the foods I miss, a specific brand of tofu, the breakfast place two streets from my house, the sound of the city at 7 a.m. through an open window. I carry the apologies I never fully said to my parents during break, the conversations that began and then dissolved into logistics, into packing, into the practiced busyness of departure. I carry the hug at security, quick, tighter than I expect every time, and the way I don't look back.
I carry anxiety, every single time, the same anxiety wearing slightly different clothes each semester. Fear of the unknown work ahead. Fear of loneliness, the specific loneliness of being surrounded by people and still feeling like you are standing slightly outside the frame of every photograph. Fear of whether I am changing too much, growing into someone my parents won't fully recognize, or not changing enough, still dragging old versions of myself across twelve time zones when I should have left them behind. Fear of the in-between, of being not quite from here and not quite returning to there, of belonging everywhere a little and nowhere completely.
This is the thing nobody tells you about living between two places: you do not get two homes. You get two places where some part of you is always missing. In Beijing, I miss the ocean outside my dorm window, the cypress trees, the cold mornings in Pebble Beach where the fog sits so low you feel like you are living inside a cloud. In California, I miss everything else — the language that lives in my chest, the streets I could navigate blindfolded, the version of myself that does not have to translate. I move between them carrying both, and neither ever feels complete, and I have not yet decided if that is a loss or a strange kind of richness or simply the terms of the life I am living.
I carry things in my suitcase. I carry things in my heart.
And somewhere over the Pacific, suspended between one life and another, I carry them all at once—and I fly.