The Countdown

three

Jetlagged, she awakens at noon from a 13-hour slumber. Drowning in the flood of sunlight, she struggles to fight her way out of the sprawled tangle of strewn clothing and sheets. She has already missed breakfast, but her stomach is apathetic to the serpentine scent of food trailing up from the kitchen downstairs. Acting entirely on instinct, the first thing she does upon getting up, like typical 21st century spawn, is to log onto facebook and check her wall posts. Her friends -- now all so far away -- have written messages recounting newly imprinted memories and thanking her for "being there" for them this summer. Being there, being here -- she's here but her heart is still there. She feels the familiar trickle of hot, saline pearls and the blurriness of vision. Her eyes are in need of their own set of windshield wipers, but she is never going to let anyone know that she is shedding tears over the technicalities of geography, of the distance between the "here" and the "there."

two

This time, she awakens at 1 pm in the afternoon to the shudder of her vibrating cell phone. An hour and a half later, she is peeling the wrapping paper off of a blue scrapbook that has just been dropped off at her door. When she sees the graduation picture sealed onto the cover of the book, she cannot help but smile. As she turns the pages, grinning at one photograph or laughing at the scribbled middle school note tucked into one of the pages, she is there again. She is there, sprinting all the way from Pier 39 to Pier 1 in San Francisco with three of her most beloved friends laughing by her side. She is there, stacking the chess pieces across the chess board in a reenactment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, complete with Hobbit pawns and Elvish bishops. She is there, glued in front of the computer screen watching the devilishly handsome Marble-Eyed Prince offer his unsullied handkerchief to the distressed heroine and vicariously experiencing the frisson of Eros' arrow. And she is here, holding the months-long project of her dearest and closest friend and feeling all the more ashamed of not having created something to keep the here and there locked hand-in-hand. Today's here, Rogue is by her side; but at tomorrow's here, Rogue won't be there. The grains of sand are slipping down the hourglass like beads of tears slipping down porcelain skin, but she is never going to let anyone know that she is shedding tears over the technicalities of time, of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years between the "here" and the "there."

one

Today, she is unceremoniously dragged out of bed by her mother, who tells her she will forever be trapped in the wrong time zone if she continues to sleep until noon every day. As she forces herself to pack for college, she suddenly remembers to place her gift to her brother, who is out of town, onto his bed. She enters her brother's room and spies the present from their paternal grandfather she had left on his bed just days ago. Stricken with curiosity, with her mother's approval, she carefully opens the box addressed to her brother and pulls out a small bubble-wrapped package. Nestled within, she discovers, is a compact gold-colored clock, a set of batteries, and a small handwritten note. She inspects the clock for a moment (and concluding it to be untouched and most likely brand-new) before pulling out the folded piece of paper and reading its scrawled message. Her mother is reading over her shoulder, but for once, she does not complain about having eyes watching from behind her back. The letter asks her brother about his well-being and informs him that the clock was a highly treasured gift that Grandfather received from an old Japanese friend more than twenty years ago. Without thinking, she voices her awe at the preciousness of the gift and is oblivious to her mother's silence.

But later, as she is packing her clothes and talking about her trip, she casually asks her mother about whether or not her father will return to his hometown this winter when she suddenly notices with a mixture of shock and uneasiness that her mother is crying. Her mother responds with a voice that carries all the weight of grief, anxiety, exasperation, and age. Her mother has asked her father countless times to fly home and see his parents, but for whatever reason, he has never been particularly warm to her advice. And now, with Grandfather handing down his most beloved gifts and maternal Grandmother giving hundreds of dollars away to her grandchildren, it is all too clear to her mother that her grandparents are already beginning to confront their own mortality.

For the first time, she can distinctly recall the weathered lines on her grandfather's face and the powdered white tips of his graying eyebrows. She recalls how he would forget questions that she had just asked moments ago, how he had gotten lost in the Main Station when he took her to the High-Speed Rail terminal, how her uncle (a physician specializing in oncology) had told her privately that Grandfather was beginning to show signs of dementia. And when her mother tells her that Grandfather may not be able to recognize her anymore within less than a decade, she is neither here nor there. She is torn between two countries, between two times, and this time she lets her mother see her tears.

zero