Reincarnation

In a past life, I was bound for the Olympics. From the age of six, I had posters of illustrious gymnasts, taken from the pages of International Gymnast, pushpinned into my bedroom wall. Almost every day after school, and certainly every Saturday, my mom drove me to the gym for a four-hour workout. I climbed 40-foot ropes without using my legs, ripped blisters off my palms and staunched the blood with chalk, and obeyed when I was told, “Again!” I didn’t think anything of it; we were all in it for the final destination. We were working to make it to the top state level, then regional, then national. We wanted to be the girls chosen for the team to travel to Australia, but a full gymnastics scholarship to Stanford would have been a decent consolation prize. When anyone asked if it was what I really wanted to do, I set my jaw and said yes, I wanted to go to the Olympics. And then, I was twelve years old and exhausted, and I didn’t any more. I walked away.

In a past life,  I was itching to get out of my town. Out of the seven colleges I applied to, only one was in state, and the next closest was five hours away. I planned to wait until I was accepted before I traveled to St. Louis or Chicago; I didn’t care that I had never been to some of the cities where I might commit to live for four years of my life. The important thing was that I was going away, away. I was ready to be anonymous, no longer one of two Asian kids in my entire school, where everyone knew me and my sister and my mom and confused our names all the time. I ran as fast as I could to my university home, and for all intents and purposes, I never came back.

In a past life, I went to London for five weeks. I lived in a hotel room with a mostly-absent roommate, and I scrimped on food money so that I could afford more theater tickets. Someone tipped me off to a Chinese restaurant where you could get a whole plate of sweet and sour chicken for only 4 pounds! I ate there often. One weekend, I took a bus tour through the Scottish highlands, and it was unbearably cold and beautifully stark. I bought a red tartan scarf as a souvenir, and it’s the warmest one I have. My classmates were not nearly as touristy as I was, so I struck off on my own to visit every museum I could manage. One night, after drifting through the Tate Modern, I walked over the Millennium Bridge to the nearest tube station. Snow fell all around, already forming a layer on the bridge, and it was one of the most gorgeous things that has ever happened to me. I didn’t stop to notice it in my beeline to the warm station, and when I look up at a frame of pictures from that time, it seems so far away.

In a past life, I lived by myself. I had just landed my first job with a start date two weeks after graduation, and I quickly leased an apartment. My bed was an air mattress on the floor of the largest room, and my only entertainment was the radio. Every week, I went to the grocery store and bought ingredients for a big batch of baked ziti or beef stroganoff. Supplemented by canned soup and bagged salad, I lived off of one meal for a week’s worth of lunches and dinners. In the evenings, listening to the gooey tones of the Delilah show, I sat at a hand-me-down table with whatever would stay propped open on its own, which usually meant a Calvin and Hobbes collection or a wedding magazine. JG was student teaching and I was pinching pennies, so was a rather spare time. Finally, he got a job and graduated, we got married, and I stopped eating the same thing every day.

Presently, I’m inching into the freelance writing world. It’s an uphill climb so far, and I can feel myself losing momentum. I want to sit and rest and ride out the rest of the year, but then I have to snap myself into shape and remember that I can’t lose six weeks and blame it on inertia. There are agencies to investigate, courses to enroll in, events to help plan, and business cards to order. It’s overwhelming to think about how I will have to work harder at this enterprise than at anything I’ve tried before, but some day, I’ll look back at my days at a full-time, company job without recognizing them. It will be just another past life, and I will have emerged again, anew.