A Shooting Star Some Decembers Ago

1:00 The first shooting star I ever saw was in a Japanese forest. It made a scratch in the sky like a hand of a clock that goes tick, tick, tick. It pierced my past, my present, and my future; my skin, my eyes, and my being. My neck craned then, and now. I feel the sensation graze my scalp and crunch beneath my soles, and it is alive in transience and eternal in memory. It’s gone and will never be again, but there’s a comfort I take in its mercurial permanence. Because when I look up at the tips of the trees in Vermont, I see you at the very top, where the sky meets the cedar’s crown. It’s the same sky that held the first shooting star I saw. But there are many years and timezones and kilometers and miles that stand in between, and your entire presence fits in that window of time and space, and I cannot find it anywhere but in a part of me that I cannot prove exists. But isn’t it great? Because I don’t know where you are now, if you are alive, if you breathe, eat, read, love, do math, sing that one song, swim, or run laps around your house. But I know that you are here, in my existence, and I hear you laughing: and that is enough of you that I needed, then, now, and in the future. 2:00 She likes to tell me that my whole being used to fit within her palms. Those same palms can now fit the five fingers of my right hand but not much more. I’m holding that hand, pulling her behind me in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. I’m pulling her drunken hand through the Shibuya Scramble of Tokyo and her steady one through the Marshalls aisles in West Houston. The same hand she once stuck out at me and told me to slap because “she was a bad mama.” The same one that lifted me in the air in that video I digitized from 2003. The hand that I held at Lake Hope in Colorado at the end of our unexpectedly-tough hike. The same hand that once flipped through the 1998 yearbook pages that I’m flipping through now, on the second floor of her parents’ house in Japan, where everything but time exists. 3:00 There’s a car driving through the forest right now. Maybe it's the same forest where I saw my first shooting star, or maybe it’s the one that my uncle drove six years ago from Oita to Kumamoto. It’s probably the Nissan driving through a rainy Vermont. Soon, the Nissan will stop, the driver will sigh of relief, and he’ll tell me that we’re here. And I’ll grab the leftover McDonald’s and run to the backdoor through the wet grass, and I’ll feel the safest I’ve ever been in this bedroom that I’ve never been before. And he and I will discuss the significance of the joke at the beginning of the movie, and Sean McGuire will tell Will Hunting that we get to choose who we let into our weird little worlds. And even though my world has only existed here tonight, I’m glad that he’s next to me to catch my tears. 4:00 The only record of change in my mama’s childhood home has been carved into its inhabitants. His skin droops lower than it did the last summer that I shook his hand goodbye, and hers are chiseled with new sun spots. Here, dawn is quiet, and dusk is sacred. There are diaries in the language I no longer live my life in, nursery records of a past I can’t touch, stained photographs, expired stamps, Shinto altars, and morning-glories. The grandfather clock in the living room swings, ticking through our stay. With every year, its hands fall behind, but the path that the pendulum carves is the only straight line I’ve ever followed. 5:00 Do you remember me? I hope you do. I hope you remember my name. 6:00 Few things haunt me: the frog I accidentally stepped on when I was four, memories of yelling at my parents, when that girl pulled her eyes at me in the cafeteria, mistakes I can’t undo, the future, and death. The future haunts me before it’s here because I’m afraid my children will lose the only words my parents find freedom in, and death because it is the only thing that bends time. When my grandpa dies, so too will my ties to Japan. I see death in the orange and red leaves of Vermont autumn, in the freebie calendars my great-aunt hangs, and in the pictures of my ancestors above the altar in the formal room of my grandparents’ house. Fifteen years ago, I lay awake in this room on a futon next to my grandma. She asked me why I was crying, and I told her it was because I was scared to die someday. Because in that room, time feels so finite it suffocates you; it feels so solid that if I reached for it, I would feel it woven into the tatami. 7:00 He and I go to the Providence Place Cinema to watch Ghibli’s Spirited Away because he showed me Good Will Hunting, so I want to show him this. In the film, Chihiro wanders into the spirit realm where an evil witch takes her name away. She is now Sen, the witch’s worker whose mission is to save herself and her friend, Haku, by escaping this world. At the end, Haku reminds Chihiro of her real name, and Chihiro, of his. I cry because I resonate with Sen; I miss my life as Chihiro. I cry because even he doesn’t know me whole. I cry because I exist strictly in two identities, and never in both realms. 8:00 I have a habit of talking to myself in English when I need to drown unpleasant thoughts, but my mama once told me that I sleep-talk exclusively in Japanese. I sometimes hear my own voice, crying about a dream in a hazy consciousness, oscillating between reverie and reality. Yet, when I awaken I remember only fragments like a ghost of a light long extinguished, twinkling in a part of me that keeps time differently. As morning comes in Texas, the sun sets on Mount Aso. And just as dawn and dusk can exist in parallel, I’ve learned that I, too, can exist in twilight. 8:00 How many people have touched my hand? How many rivers has it reached for? How many pages has it flipped? My hand holds proof of change. The one that once grasped my mama’s pinky has since held much more in its palms. 9:00 During a video call over Thanksgiving break, my grandma asked me to create a family tree for my grandpa because he’s started to forget things: his breakfast this morning, our conversation last week, and the names and faces of his grandchildren. I choose from the years-old photos I have of my uncles and cousins and the most recent photos of my parents and brother to construct a concise web of our bloodline. My grandma’s pleased with the finished product. She tells me that she’ll print it out for my grandpa to study. 10:00 When I’m awake, I speak to myself not to create thought but to suffocate it. Asleep, I find clever ways of escape: I fly; I become invisible; I hold my breath; I forget. In my dreams, I am both diaphanous and free. 11:00 When I see stars, I get excited because it reminds me of how little I am, and how a rock or a glacier or an elephant could just crush my bones, and I will decompose and become nothing again except a littlest scratch in the sky, but hopefully, when that happens, someone will be craning their neck, too.