Before reading this story of my life, please listen to “Bees” by The Ballroom Thieves in its entirety.

There’s a voice that pulls me stumbling through a symphony
And the less of it I need, the more I get

Soft pluckings from a guitar sail through the still morning air, accompanied by a solemn voice. I stare out of the second story window as mist clings like sleep to the drowsy Mountain View town. That morning, I had thrashed myself awake in a web of tangled bedsheets. Jagged light reflected off the claustrophobic bedroom walls. Pulling myself out of the dregs of medication, I desperately fled as if served an eviction notice. Getting into my dearest car, Rosaline, I drove aimlessly towards some undiscovered destination. 

Till I’m swept up by the shape of all the centuries
Like an echo in the chambers of my chest

That’s how I ended up on the second story of the tranquil cafe, surrounded by empty chairs, looking out into empty streets. Well, I wasn’t entirely alone. The mocha I cradled between my fingers radiated warmth and effervescence. Lyrics floated ethereally through the air like whispered caresses. The serenity of the moment drew me out of the chaotic static in my own head. I become aware of repeating lines of tables and chairs, the arching windows and the buildings it frames. I see that it’s fall, and that not only am I holding coffee, but a chair is holding me. Quite like settling into your own body, my place in this cafe felt like a reconciliation, and I silently promised to always return. 

I quickly develop a routine. I fall out of my insomniac stupor and drag myself out of bed. Over the steering wheel, I watch the sunrise as Rosaline purrs affectionately beneath me. By the time the light has awaken the birds, I’ve already gotten to work on the second floor of Red Rock. I build huge to-do lists. While I don’t see my workaholic father much, I sense that we’re similar in this tendency. Running on caffeine and the pressure of a deadline, we both like to induce panic in the present rather than live in the past. Juggling college applications and three AP courses, I research East Coast colleges far away from here. My longing (or desperation) gets ahead of me and I end up applying to twenty-six schools in total, with most of them at least six hours away from California. Work in itself becomes a form of escape- if I lived and breathed work, maybe I wouldn’t have to breathe the air around me and realize that my surroundings were an inescapable vacuum.

I think she fears I’ll be a servant to my history
Or worse, a slave to someone else’s misplaced doubts

By 11:00 p.m., Red Rock kicks me out. While I stayed for thirteen hours there, I can’t help but stall longer—I drop off a friend, pick up food, finish homework in my car. I drive circles around my neighborhood, like a begrudging star orbits its sun. It is midnight when I pull into the driveway. But unlike most teens, there is no curfew, no angry parents threatening to ground me for eternity. Ever since that wretched morning, my father buries his grief in triple shifts and sleeping at the hospital as if he were in residency again. Still, the slow creak of the shadowy door is deafening to me. I tiptoe into the darkened house trying not to awake the ghosts. I don’t turn on the lights. Growing up in this house has allowed me to navigate it with my eyes closed. In this eerie space, all I feel is the pressure of wood against my feet and the cool night air around me. I can almost rise out of my body and look down at myself: just a girl wandering in the dark she knows so well. I soundlessly make my way to the soft folds of a comforter. I can never tell when I enter the void in which one sleeps and when I leave blackness that envelopes this house. When I was little, I was plagued with nightmares and feared falling asleep. Now the only thing I fear is waking up.

So I try too hard to kill what’s out to kill me
Till I’m blind and hiding in the lion’s mouth

And the words she aches to hear pour through my canyon
And they’re singing in the caverns of my limbs

My little cafe was located in Silicon Valley, where innovation was valued over social adeptness. When I sit there alone, studiously working away, people mistook me for an adult. As a result of both that culture and the intimate, homey vibes Red Rock manifested, I always seemed to have company. One of those fidgety PhD Stanford students with wild curly black hair wanders over to my table to contemplate what Nietzsche would have said to Sisyphus. A laidback bald man with crinkly blue eyes seeks out the chair across from mine and we discuss why the school system is corrupt. After chatting with a tuxedoed individual, he offers me a job with the local government (he ended up being my first Linkedin contact even though I don’t dabble in politics). Is it strange that I felt more connected to these random people than my own family? It’s something about the way they have nothing else to do but talk to a stranger on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe it’s the way they wander over to my table, sitting down with an air of both hesitation and indifference. I will gladly be a temporary refuge to them if they nourish my intellectual hunger. A wisp of a woman in a polka dot-dress asks me in Mandarin if there are power outlets behind me. She leaves but the encounter takes me back in time to a separate conversation. My mother was desperate for me to not lose the language she grew up with in Singapore. As the only Mandarin speaker in the house, she spoke to me constantly in it. She put me in a Mandarin immersion elementary school, which I grew to despise. I hated the pages and pages of writing the same character and the memorization-heavy Chinese Speech Competitions. I was so terrible at learning the language that it actually pushed me to get tested for dyslexia, which I found I had. If Mandarin is my birthright, what does it mean when the characters resist leaving my tongue? I feel like an imposter, undeserving of my last name. Within me, a more insidious fear threatens to bubble over. Would I be able to navigate my homeland when I returned?

When I entered high school, I daringly signed myself up for Spanish, much like a teenager slams their door on their mother. Somewhere along the way, I lost my ability to speak my mother tongue. It took with it faded memories of my great grandmother, rapidly instructing me in Mandarin as we make fish balls together. All that is left is fragments of another life. Ai Yah! An exclamation, a chastisement. No one in the house speaks Mandarin anymore. Another part she took when she left.

And though I do my best to try to understand them
They only follow me like vultures in the end

I once read that I should write something worth reading
Or I should do something worth writing about

Outside, the rain peppers everyone with inky blots as people scatter in all directions. My best friend and I sprint toward the warm red glow of my favorite café. Laughing as we burst through the doors, we are suddenly teleported to a Land of Christmas. Cheerful people donning Santa hats, string lights, miniature Christmas trees, and the magical smell of peppermint mochas in the making. I wait in line for one, slightly dazed by the entire scene. My family sometimes tried but didn’t really decorate a tree or eat together during the holidays. Still, the scene before me had that classic feeling of a Hallmark movie. The gaiety in the room seemed to come from simple conversation between strangers. I thought it strange that company could make a smile so infectious. My best friend seemed unperturbed by this celebration and handed me a steaming cup of mocha. Goofing around, we clamber up to the second floor to watch the open mic. Sipping on festively flavored drinks, we ease into the lullaby of various holiday singers. In that moment, I feel a little steadier than before.

As my ears they buzz like bees upon the ceiling
I start to pour a little more than I’m allowed

I said our hearts know deeper seasons than our memories
She said “This harvest might sustain us for a year

Sometimes I visit the places she would take me when I was little. Parks and ponds and grocery stores. I pull up in old Rosaline, her breaks screaming like a child having a tantrum. A play structure bears children scrambling like ants on a cube of sugar. There are families with picnics and sounds of enraptured conversation. Uneasily, I walk down the roads my feet know so well and look around at this childhood scene. I can’t seem to overcome the paranoia that a family will somehow know that I’m not just a child, waiting for her mother in a park, but just a child, waiting. Half of a pair. Why do I fear an imaginary confrontation—a parent asking suspiciously, “What are you doing here?” God, maybe I should go. Looking at my old favorite park was like looking into the face of a foreign land. I wonder if this old park would recognize me either. What does it say about the temporality of life, that a decade of your life can become so distant, the same way a past lover becomes a stranger? I shiver and drive away, returning to my little café. 

And of all the thousand ways the world could tempt me
I’ve never met a better fighter than her fear

I have a confession: “Bees” by The Ballroom Thieves is so much catchier than the Star-Spangled Banner. Whoever decided that the most patriotic sound would be written in the basic key of C? I guess you don’t get to choose the nation you’re born into, if you’re lucky then you’re entitled to be American and America gets to have you. Still, I think it’s kind of unsettling that I didn’t realize I wasn’t “white” until around five. I thought everyone had dumplings for dinner. It turns out what I simply saw as food was actually Panda Express, not Applebees. Perhaps the point of it all finding a note within the song that resonates with you. Find your own place within the nation, seek out a personal anthem of your own.  Do all people hear how hollow I sound when I sing the national anthem? 

So as I try to breathe the air that she is breathing
And we dance a lightless dance upon my floor

I dig deeper into the past, peering into forgotten corners, buried memories. 

Looking behind forgotten dolls, picking through dusty journals,

I ride a carousel pony round and round, spiraling downwards.

Running through darkened hallways, flying past formless passageways. 

My mind has become a labyrinth I willingly get lost in. 

All this time, was I running towards it or away from it? 

I finally find the center, the impenetrable bedrock, the foundation of the maze. 

Once found, I finally allow myself to collapse. 

And like all nightmares, it finds me when I rest.

I am burning to tell her she’s all I’m needing
But I’m drowned out by all the noise outside the door

The last morning is covered in a black veil of sleep. I awake to see a shadow in the doorway I know is my mother’s. I feel her familiar weight as she sits down on my bed and I drowsily slide towards her. Something in her voice pulls me stumbling through my sleep ridden haze. It’s weighed down by guilt and resignation and sorrow. It whisks me away to memories of her arguing with my father behind closed doors. My head swirls with a cacophony of hurt notes and angry indecipherable tones. They crescendo, overlapping into a monstrous melody, an overwhelming song. I was fifteen then but in that moment, I could’ve aged several lifetimes. A part of me knows that there are some memories that overtake a part of your heart, the kind that you wake up to, echoing in your ears. I knew this was one of them. She says other things that I can’t hear, as if the subtitles were blurred. She says it with a sense of finality. Then she leaves the house. She doesn’t ever return. And for a year or two, I stay within those blankets, staring out those windows into the blinding light. Then one day, in the mysterious way the human heart sometimes repairs itself, I put one foot in front of the other and just got out of bed. Afterward, I learn to make food for myself, take care of myself. I get my GED and prepare for my future. I learn to mother myself. But the house, the bedroom, the bed, and its dark light—is unbearable. 

Carried by the current of the morning
Miles below the surface of the dawn

The night before I left for NYU, I drove to Red Rock to say goodbye. I knew the drive like I was walking around my house. The lights from various shops twinkled as I whizzed by. I parked in the same spot, walked the same path, said goodnight to the same people. It could have been any other day, not just my last. I broke down and cried that night. I felt like I was willfully abandoning my home. I had whispered more about my past to the eerie empty air than any friend. As a confidant, I knew it would understand why I had to go. Is this how you felt, Mother? On that morning long ago?

This is not the place that I was born in
But it doesn’t mean it’s not the place where I belong

The next week, I’m all packed up and heading to New York by myself with Frank Sinatra playing in my ear. I scamper out of the terminal and into crowds of people like me who long to get absorbed into the city. Moving into a new cozy nest at the “Third North” dormitory, I pull an all-nighter and unpack until the rosy tip of dawn peeps over the concrete buildings. For the first time, I embrace the light that illuminates the day. Staring steadily into the sun, I sip coffee from my Red Rock mug.