The clouds close over China, then that's it. Gone. Just a couple of hours ago, I was standing at the door of my home with forty-seven packets of seaweed and grandma's hands on my cheeks. Now there is only white outside the oval window and the low hum of the cabin, along with the sort of silence of being thousands of miles up in the air and very far removed from everything familiar.
I know I should sleep, but I don't.
The thing about silence is that memories often accompany it. They don't ask if you're ready or willing. They just arrive, and then the things you have been keeping locked inside that little box escape and want to keep you company. So, you sit in 1A at thirty-something thousand feet with nowhere to be, or to run to, for three hours and forty minutes, and you let them come. Because you have no choice; they will come anyway.
It starts at the café. That's where the memory usually starts.
It was the kind of lived-in place that has been there for an indeterminate amount of time. It was filled with comfy chairs and bright tablecloths, and a cat that belonged to everyone and no one. The place smelled of coffee and old wood. I still smell it in my dreams. The smell somehow soaked into the feeling of being sixteen and the belief that I knew what safety meant. We discovered it together, and it became our place. We had a regular table, the third from the window on the left, because the afternoon light would hit just right, and I could sketch while he read, or fed the cat, or rambled on about random animal facts. He loved animals too.
He liked to talk – a lot. I was less quiet then than I am now, although I was probably just as shy. He had a way of filling the space and pulling me out of my shell, effortlessly and without any pressure. I liked that. He made my world louder, but I didn't mind. I liked the vividness of it; life felt closer.
The amusement parks were his idea at first, and then they became mine. I loved the colors and the fact that everyone came there to feel something; you could see it on their faces openly, and without embarrassment. I found joy interesting to draw because it moves, and at here, it moved without any self-consciousness. We would go on every ride twice because he liked watching me the second time. He said my face during the drop was the most hilarious thing he had ever seen. I laughed at that and told him it was betrayal. He said it was affection. I said those were not the same thing.
I did not know, then, how right I was.
I think what hurt the most was that he was part of my circle. My inner circle, my closest friend. My family knew him and welcomed him. This still sits strangely, even now, even three years and considerable hard-won perspective later. They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I still feel blind. Where did it go wrong? He came to dinners. He sat in our living room. Grandma fed him. Jingwei tolerated him, which, from my brother, is practically an endorsement. He formed part of the furniture of my life, and my family trusted him too. I have never been able to separate my own failure of judgment from theirs. We were all fooled. I know this. I tell myself, if I keep repeating this to myself often enough, it will become true. Some days it does, and some days it doesn't.
The morning of the incident was ordinary. And that's the thing I keep returning to: the absolute ordinariness of it. I remember getting in the car. It was cold, and I was thinking about nothing more significant than whether he would already be at our café when I arrived.
Then the car swerved.
We were on the road, then, suddenly, we weren't. Time froze. Everything seemed to move in slow motion until it suddenly sped up to the speed of light. I remember the sound of metal folding in on itself, the window breaking into fragments, my hands trying to grab – something.
Then nothing.
The next thing I remember, I was waking up on a dusty concrete floor. The light was dim, and the smell was definitely not the smell of roasted coffee beans and old wood. I knew this wasn't right, this wasn't where I was supposed to be, but it was difficult to comprehend. My thoughts felt shuffled, and I still heard a buzzing in my ears. But it soon became clear that this was a thoroughly orchestrated plot, and we were in danger.
I didn't want to believe it at first, but there was only one person who knew exactly where I would be and when, because I had told him myself, at our table, third from the window.
Someone died because of what he did, a man with people who loved and cared for him. I lost a lot, too, but not as much as he did. And I carry that too, every single day; it never leaves. The knowledge might retreat into that place I never show anyone, not even myself, but it never disappears.
Then the memories leave just as fast as they arrived. Outside the window, there is only white.