8,446 Miles

Something you should know about me: I believe in fate and I’m superstitious.

I also can’t bear to say goodbye.

I thought if I started a blog, I might be able to handle the messiness of being apart. Let me recap and start from the beginning, as starting in the middle is nowhere to begin in any story.

I grew up. . . .well, no, I won’t start at the very beginning, but just early enough to paint the scene. I moved to a moderate-size Midwestern city in August 2007. I had received a small (eat-Aldi’s-spaghetti-three-times-a-week-and-always-late-on-the-rent-size) scholarship to start a master’s degree program in social work. With less than $100 in my pocket (my checking account was overdrawn) I drove my beat-up, unairconditioned Subaru 400 miles in 100+ degree heat to start a new adventure.

An adventure it was, albeit exciting, but most days it was hard. The kind of hard that made me want to give up, drop out and move back home to the safety and security of my family and friends. My first semester was especially difficult- my mom suffered a heart attack just weeks after my arrival at school, the financial aid package I was promised failed to arrive until the semester was half-over, and the course work was not what I had bargained for, nor was the unfriendliness I encountered in my program.

I did what any girl in my position would do- I sucked it up, got a part-time job and moved in with an apartment full of Asians to cut my living expenses in half. While living with an apartment full of Asians may have seemed economical at the time, in the long-run it cost me much more in things that cannot be valued in dollars or yuan.

It took me two-and-a-half years to complete my master’s degree in social work. And in that time, I managed to:
Lose my scholarship
Move four times
Date men from 3 different continents
Gain my scholarship back
Find infatuation
Complete 800+ hours of practicum

Looking at that list, it’s not even a small overview of what really happened. By that I mean the things that had me calling my best friend in the middle of the night, sobbing that it was over, and time for me to pack up. Or the things that left me content and with that accomplished feeling deep inside of me. More to come on the trials and tribulations of graduate school later.

While being in the middle of the journey, the end seemed so far. However, before I knew it, my two final semesters in graduate school were before me. I wanted to go abroad to finish my practicum hours and few remaining course hours. Of course, 89% of my desire to go abroad was because of a boy, and only the remaining 11% was of my own true desire. As fate would have it, my plans fell through and I was not able to get the money to study abroad. At the time, when my plans were unraveling, I was disappointed, but other plans were taking shape. Trust me, I bucked these new plans as hard as I could and resigned myself to be unhappy and make the least out of the situation.

In my final semester, I was juggling a lot. I had completed my practicum hours and was hired on full-time by the agency. While working, I was in the midst of completing coursework at two different universities; neither one the university I had attended for my previous coursework. I was taking four courses, working full-time and trying to keep a long-distance relationship a float. It was a miserable semester, and my only mission was to keep myself afloat. Gone was my typical overachieving personality, replaced with a “mediocre isn’t just okay, it’s what I want” mentality.

In the middle of the chaos and whirlwind of just trying to get to the end, my mom almost died. I received one of those calls that you never want. A week prior to this phone call, my mom had been in the hospital for what was suspected to be another heart attack. She was fine, doing well, a routine valve replacement would have her in the hospital for less than a week. But due to complications, that plan was ditched, and a more serious and urgent plan was needed.

I remember sitting at my office, late, on a night I had class, trying to finish a paper due in just an hour. My friend had brought her laptop to my mom’s hospital room and I was able to Skype with her. Something wasn’t right. I could tell. My mom looked as though she had been crying and there was a strained silence as three of my friends stood around my mom’s hospital bed. I ended Skype and something felt unsettled and I began to look at plane tickets.

My fears were confirmed when my friend called in just a few minutes after ending Skype.

“Jessica, you have to come home right away. Your mom is having another heart attack and the doctors can’t wait to do surgery after the allergy testing. They have to do a bypass and valve replacement immediately. They don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

My mom did make it. But not without complications. Her lungs failed following the surgery and she was in ICU for a week on a ventilator and bi-pap machine. When she woke up, she couldn’t see. Doctors told her that it was temporary, that her vision would improve eventually. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case, and a diagnoses 5 months after surgery would confirm my mother’s worst fears- she was left permanently blind from the surgery.

While my mom was recovering, I had to go back and try to finish my coursework and catch up on assignments at my job. I had no energy and didn’t care, just as long as I graduated. I missed many classes and the professors seemed uncaring about my situation, one even demanded the actual plane ticket and phone numbers of my mom’s hospital to confirm my absence. And of course, the long-term relationship began to fall apart; constant fighting, arguing, broken promises and the relationship would end and restart a dozen times a month. In the middle of this relationship, my boyfriend’s father attained a position at a NGO in a small South Pacific country. Ironically, I remembered someone from one of my classes having said he was from that very country.

The next time the class met where the man had said he was from that small country in the South Pacific, I did what Ialways seem to do best, I approached a near stranger and abruptly said “Hey! Are you from Papua New Guinea?” He confirmed this and I told him I had questions about his country, for which he nodded and took his seat in the back of the over-crowded classroom. The next class session, I sat next to him. He didn’t smile or talk and at the end of the class he’d rush out of the room. For the remaining of the semester, he did this and we barely greeted each other. One time, he did suggest we trade emails, but then he rushed out of class without the exchange occurring. On the last day of class, the students gave presentations and I caught his name. Yes, I hadn’t even known his name! At the end of class, he again rushed out. I wrote his name down and put it away in my notebook.

My relationship with my then-boyfriend had deteriorated severely. He became occupied about his impending move to Papua New Guinea and while talking I mentioned my classmate that was from there. He urged me to email him and ask questions about the country.

I found his name in my notebook, and of course, I facebooked him. Within a few hours he returned my message.

Now, I’ve brought you to the beginning.