But what I need you to know is this. I never expected again to love someone in my adult life the way I have loved you, as a biological mother, but our relationship can’t continue in the same way it has before.
There’s this concept that’s been brewing in my mind lately. It’s around closeness vs contact.
In my head, I see these as two decoupled things: closeness is the distance you’d like to set with a person, and contact is how frequently you actually talk to a person.
Closeness – when you disclose something close to your heart; when you intertwine spiritually.
Contact – the number of messages exchanged on social platforms; the count of times you see each other.
When I was younger I never saw the two as separate, but the older I get the more I realize that there is the conventional and the ultimate reality. And the difference is this:
I’ll always love you. That won’t ever change.
In conventional reality, you talk to someone, you become close, you fall in love or you love, perhaps. Then things happen. You leave school. You change jobs. The circumstances change and you drift apart. Lose contact. You have things to do, and so does the other party. The neverending work of life. The texts and phone calls decrease until there’s nothing for months, perhaps years. Maybe never. In conventional reality, you’re “no longer friends.”
But I can’t make space for you in my daily life anymore. I hope you’ll understand.
But there is a reality beyond our reality, and in that liminal space, between dreams and wakefulness, we have never lost our closeness. There we remain, happy and free. Nothing can touch us there. There is a part of us, timeless and ageless, dormant, slumbering under the constant flow of seasons. It is the truest part of us. Step out of conventional time into eternity, and there, there is the other part of me that is always with you. What is it they say? “A moment that lasts forever; forever in a moment?” What my physical shell on earth is doing or has done is irrelevant. Deep inside of me, inaccessible even to myself wrapped in my ordinary mundane busy-ness, this moment we shared reverberates, like a clap without beginning or end.
We’ve lost contact, but not closeness. Never forget that.
And that is the part that matters above all.
True friendship transcends intimacy or alienation:
I had a dream that I was back in Flushing, and I was home, home, home! So why did I feel so alone? I was in a hotel room all by myself and I had my Game Boy Advance but I was so, so lonely, and I called my mom because I didn’t know where my family was and she said frantically, “just hold on, Shao Ying (relative from overseas) is coming!” And I snapped at her, ready to cry, “I don’t want Shao Ying! I want grandma and grandpa!” And I realized what I wanted was just a dinner with her, grandma, grandpa, and my brother. An ordinary family dinner like countless, thousands even that passed by me growing up, that I had while thinking and dreaming of something else and aging all the while and unknowingly stepping further away and away from my home. And that’s the point in my dream when I realized all over again that grandma is dead.
I’m ashamed now of how childishly I reacted on the phone.