thalassophilia

1.

Lately I’ve been restless as ever. I miss home and all its people and real seasons where all the leaves color the sky orange-red and dance swirling in the sweeping wind. I miss the vastness of the cornfields, so thick you could drown in it — a midwestern thalassophiliac. It’s the kind of empty space that you can only fill with the thoughts of leaving (in all senses of the word). It’s home, the same as it was 19 years ago and the same it will be in 19 more, just as I left it.

How ironic is it that Indiana is a landlocked state?

Recently, I came across the term oceanic feeling, coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Freud. He used it to describe a sensation of ‘eternity’, an unbounded union with the universe. He attributed this incredible, metaphysical state to the source of all religious energy, the universal god.

Freud, in his response, dismissed this as a deformity: a vestigial sensation left over from infancy, when the borders of the world haven’t yet formed, and the edges of the ego are still blurry. When the world is no larger than the infant and its mother — when they are still one.

That’s the thing about Indiana: the horizon here is infinity, not in the hopeful sense, but just vast. You could stare out forever and never see the end, and it’s so flat that there’d be nothing obstructing your gaze but the occasional rotting farmhouse or cookie-cutter suburb. The sky, a heavy womb over this place, sealed in a dome along the seam of its horizons. The infinity wraps around me like a mother, and I can’t tell if this is dissolution or eternity.

It’s precisely this boundlessness that I miss — the kind that only comes from staring over the vast corn sea. The kind that drags you to the bathroom mirror and forces you to look at the bones poking through. The kind that drives you crazy enough to dream.

Have you ever loved something so much you had to leave?

2.

How much do I miss the rocky shores of Weihai?

I can picture myself, 3 years old, and unburdened by the weight of consciousness. I am playing with a more youthful laolao and laoye on the sand. They point at the jet on the horizon and tell me it’s flying to mama in America, and to send our love along with it. They are still strong enough to lift me toward a still-hopeful sky and laugh.

Never more have I wished to freeze time, to capture this frame in a pickle jar and store it long past the expiration date (which I’ve learned that all things must have). I try to ignore that my mother is nearly the same age now as my grandparents were then.

It’s Christmas break of sophomore year, I’m at SFO boarding the first flight back, and it’s been 16 years since I’ve seen Weihai in the winter. I pray that, in 16 more years, I’ll still have reasons to visit home.

Now, I can only wish to pack this jar neatly in a lunchbox for the hospital, in delusional hope that expired memories can ease chemo pains — maybe I can cure cancer. In the big, ugly face of it all, I am 3 years old again, chasing bubbler crabs on the beach. I know that’s who grandpa sees too.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t tell her that this, too, must expire.

3.

How grateful am I to see the San Francisco bay?

Freshman year of college and a nation-length from home, I stand atop Slackers hill, above the dense morning fog (which I have learned is called Karl). I see the city and the ocean and the horizon all at once, and it is so, indescribably beautiful. I am 18, raw at the edges, with only my breath to offer.

How many lives have these mountains watched pass? I feel utterly, and happily, insignificant and it feels utterly, and happily, silly. How many beginnings and endings have these mountains seen? How many deaths have they held without a flinch, absorbed into the soil – become one, with room left over. I feel the urge to lay down too, to sink into the sediment.

I saw on Tumblr when I was 14 that though the Rocky mountains are much taller, much grander, than the Appalachians, they are relatively young – lanky teenagers in the grand scale of time. Did you know that the Appalachian mountains outdate not just intelligent life, not just plants, but the entire Atlantic Ocean? You can find its fragments scattered across continents, extending across Europe as the Caledonians.

I learned on a camping trip last fall that, counterintuitively, the oldest rocks are often found at the surface. The principle of superposition does not hold here. The geologic activity from faulting and folding pushes the oldest sediments to the surface, wrenching them from the belly of the earth and holding them up to the sky, as if reaching for the heavens. This is how mountains are born. I like to think they are a testament to the earth’s persistence — each a captured attempt at transcendence, each a goliath. I’m sitting on top of its dreams. I get to touch dinosaur dirt. (and one day, become it too!)

I have the urge to jump, not necessarily to die but to be held by whatever this is. You could throw all of yourself – your whole, loud, messy life – into the water, and it would swallow it without a sound.

I can only imagine that this is what Rolland was talking about – this is the god I was promised. I can only remember to inhale, and feel so incredibly grateful to feel so indelibly small. I wasn’t raised religious, but maybe this oceanic feeling is the closest I’ll ever be.

4.

I found, later, on Google Maps that San Francisco is almost exactly across the Pacific from Weihai in latitude. I can picture the mountains fused together like puzzle pieces in Pangaea.

I can picture my mother, younger, staring back from the other side.

5.

The beautiful thing about Indiana is that you can disappear into it: the perpetually half-flooded fields, the droves of soccer moms with their sticky soccer kids, the Target filled with teenagers looking at everything and buying nothing because it’s the only ‘spot’ within a 50-mile radius (you were one of them, too, not long ago).

You could spend eternity here, watching last names trickle down through underfunded classrooms and settle in the local cemetery like silt. This is where you are born, and this is where you will die. The vastness is dulling, in that nobody thinks further than this weekend’s grocery run or the game that’s on tonight. It swallows the future too.

Not like San Francisco, where you’re all but drowned by the doom, hope, and potential of an impending future. The horizon isn’t an end here, but a beginning. It will not hold you. You don’t look at it and think “when does it end,” but rather “where does it go.” There’s no limit to the dreaming.

I am grateful that I am so grateful. My Bay Area friends don’t understand why I get so excited to hike the dish even after the nth time – you haven’t really experienced elevation until you’ve experienced flat land. You haven’t seen that this is the future until you go back home to the Midwest and suddenly realize you’re talking in tongues and no one else seems to know what Claude nor Cursor are.

6.

I am a master of self-destruction.

Sometimes the only way to escape local maxima is to blow things up enough to scatter. To sail through spacetime hoping that the force of the explosion will propel you to a new peak, or at least the ascent of a larger one. Maybe you could convince yourself that the last one wasn’t a peak at all, despite it being everything you’ve ever known for the past 19 years of your life. Though, upon writing that, 19 sounds like much sillier of a number than it feels.

Sometimes you need to forget a self to find one.

They say that half of your perceived life is over by 25, and I pray to god every day that this isn’t true (and know deep down that it is). I think I am too aware of this fact.

My parents like to joke about when I’d come running to them at age 7, crying from nightmares about aging and death and being “born too late to invent the lightbulb.” It wasn’t at all funny to me at the time but I think I, too, would laugh now if a first-grader said the same things to me. I wish I could go back and tell her to shut up and study for math olympiads instead (just kidding, only half). I still can’t answer her questions. I would probably swallow and lie and tell her that she grew out of aging.

7.

Maybe it’s the vastness of 19 that gets to me – of both what lays ahead and what’s left behind. It’s the vastness that I’m dangerously, foolishly in love with. I hold my breath as I teeter on the edge of teenage-hood and decades and god-forbid my twenties but hey! I’ve got a good 5 years left until the halfway mark.

There is no greater urgency than the inevitability of time.

(favorite quote: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver)

I am in love with the ocean in all its forms. I am in love with the corn, the Bay, the Pacific. I am in love with tall mountains, torn sketchbooks, and a future that is still soft at the edges, waiting to be bent.

I am certain the ocean will keep finding me, and I will find myself: barefoot, lungs full, peering over the cliff’s edge. I will choose again and again to dive.