by Carmen Leong
The call had taken a text correspondence of two weeks to arrange. When Verlene turned on her camera, we both broke into a cheer. Her make-up pouch was unzipped on the table, and behind her, the morning sunlight illuminated the white walls of her Boston dorm. “I missed you!” she burst out. “I missed you too,” I replied, three thousand miles away in the late Le Havre afternoon. It was true – it had been more than a month since I bid goodbye to her and the other girls at Changi Airport – but missing her was not something I felt particularly strongly in that moment.
As she got ready for her day, I listened to her talk about her new life in Berklee, and shared in return about mine at Sciences Po. About an hour in, she finished her routine and took me along as she walked downstairs to the cafeteria; I heard the voices of her friends calling for her off-screen and gathered that it was probably time for us to end the FaceTime. After that, it was three weeks before she texted me again, with an update on the cute guitar-playing boy from upstairs she had mentioned briefly during our call.
One night before I left for France, the six of us squeezed into a booth in an American-themed bar, trying to prolong the night as best as we could. On the wall beside us was a huge American flag that hung from the ceiling; as the four girls who would be going to U.S. universities posed for a picture with it, I ducked lazily behind one of them, arms around her waist and drunk on the easy joy of being with my favourite people. It was a good night; we cycled around the same few questions of the recent hangouts and repeated our answers in different words, but meant them all the same. I love you. I am who I am now because of you. I’ll miss you, but I’m so excited for you. Promise we’ll all meet again in New York after two years. The beginning strums of ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence lifted us from our seats, and in the empty bar, we danced. I was a little awkward, not completely comfortable in my body that night for some reason, but my best friend noticed and pulled me into a spin that had me smiling. A few days later, we had a big family gathering: the girls and their parents, and some of their siblings, in my living room – some of our dads hitting it off with guy talk about planes and work, my brother fiddling with the speaker, us girls sprawled on the carpeted floor and discussing a potential karaoke event with our parents in some eventual future. It was then that it occurred to me to describe what we had built for ourselves as sisterhood.
I did think we would call often, despite our universities being in different countries and continents. At one point, I think someone had even put forward the idea of our having bimonthly group meetings to catch up on one another’s lives. It’s strange to me now, therefore, that I don’t miss them, but I miss, rather, the friends here that I see nearly every day.
On the FlixBus back from Paris, I tell this to Audrey, who is sitting beside me. A sleepy quietness has settled in the bus, disturbed only by our low-voiced conversation and the indecipherable one that JJ and Zo-Ren are having some rows of seats ahead of us. I feel like I need to see you guys at least once a week or I’ll die, I say. The sentiment is only half a joke. Just before that, the six of us watched the Eiffel Tower light up for the first five minutes of the hour from the top of Montmartre, and realised just how little time we had before our time together at Sciences Po would end. My cheeks are sticky with the aftermath of tears, and my eyes are especially dry. Audrey takes a while to think. Then, she says, maybe it’s because we’re so far away from home that we’ve had to build our own one here. Even our activities as a group – grocery shopping, cooking – what else but a family does that?
I’m reminded again of her words as we lie on my makeshift couch (two folded futons) after dinner, the tatami mat below our legs thinly protecting them from the chilled floor of late autumn. One of them is on my right, Audrey on my left, and another one has been lulled to sleep in his sleeping bag beside her. Two of them had left earlier, and the remaining unwashed dishes are stacked on the dining table for now, sticky and powdery from the boa loy we made earlier that night, pinching sweet pumpkin flour with the tips of our fingers and rolling them into tiny balls on our palms. Our three-way conversation drifts to the topic of friends back home. As I tell them about the five girls from my life before, I think about the new friends beside me that I’ve begun to open my heart to. I don’t miss them, I say, but it’s not because they’ve been replaced by you guys. Maybe you’re just in another period of life, Audrey suggests, and I agree.
When I was young, my dad used to nag at me for buying and reading multiple books simultaneously. I would fold the upper right-hand corner of a page in a book, close it, and open another one. When the time was right, though, I would come back to it, and continue where I’d left off. There was always space for multiple stories in my heart, and the characters in them shared the imagination of my mind, even if they switched between being at the forefront of it.
There isn’t really a reason to miss these girls, I suppose, since I know with certainty that they will always be a part of my life. Sometime later, we will sit in another American bar – a real one this time, in New York – and reopen the book we’ve written together, with new ideas, new stories, new people from the time we spent apart. And perhaps a few drinks in, we’ll be joined by my friends, these friends, and I’ll be lucky enough to see the past and the present, the old and the new – but all my favourite people – meet at the beginning of a new story.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 