The Flight Back

The return ticket, thrice rebooked, finally hit the day it could not be rebooked again. Vacation days are finite, OPT hangs by a thread, and adult romance is taxable.

Lucas drove me to Schiphol. The whole way we were normal — suspiciously normal. We covered the weather, the trip he'd be making to the Far East next month for his father, the Amsterdam traffic. Everything except the largest available topic: so what are we?

At security, he handed me my suitcase.

"Daisy," he said. "Once you're back, you'll file all of this as a dream."

"Meaning?"

"Literal meaning." He shrugged, smiled a careless smile. "Two weeks of jet lag, a couple of standups, and Urk becomes a dream you had on PTO. It's normal. Happens to almost everyone."

"You sound very experienced." The vinegar in my voice escaped before I could catch it.

"Which is why I'm not saying goodbye," he said. "I'm saying—" and he leaned down and set his chin, briefly, on the crown of my head, "go. Catch your flight."

That's it?! I dragged my suitcase through security and fumed all the way to the gate. Where does this man get the confidence to decide what I'll forget? Not even a keep in touch. Didn't even ask for my WeChat — fine, I didn't offer, but he didn't ask. Eleven hours in the air, I fought him three times in my head and won all three, uselessly.

Then SFO handed me a correction, and formatted my little feelings right off the disk.

At immigration, I got pulled into secondary inspection. Technical term: secondary. Body's term: someone has pressed pause on your life. A white room, rows of steel chairs, a wall clock that ticks louder than any clock should. The officer flipped through my passport. What do you do. Why Europe. How long. Who paid.

"Tourism," I said. "I paid."

He stared at his screen for a long time. In those minutes, my head ran nothing but Auntie Li's son, sixty days, my mother's stability above all. My palms sweated. My face held the practiced smile — I'm compliant, I'm no trouble — seven months of training finally deployed to production.

"Welcome back," he said at last, pushed the passport over, and stamped it.

Outside the terminal the California sun was white, palm trees swaying. I stood in the rideshare lot suddenly so tired I wanted to squat down on the curb. My phone caught signal and the messages poured in: Vivi's nine consecutive questions, my mom's "landed?", a wall of red Slack badges.

Nothing from him. Of course nothing. We hadn't even exchanged numbers.

Adults, right? Pick it up, put it down 🙂 I selected the entire Urk folder in my head, right-clicked, archived.

He said I'd file it all as a dream.

Fairly accurate — after all, dreaming has always been the one thing I'm best at.