Just like old times, taking self-portraits in the car.

I got a chance to hang out with Katana yesterday and it never ceases to amaze me how each time we see each other, I don’t feel like she’s been gone for that long.  The last time I saw her was sometime during Christmas break a good nine months ago, but it’s easy for us to fall right back into an old pattern, an old routine.  I guess this is kind of how I live my life, since the same thing happens when my parents and I are reunited, and last month when I finally came back to LA and saw Panda again.  In each case, the time we spent apart doesn’t seem so long because of the ease in which we slip back into familiar territory.  Sure, a lot has changed, but fundamentally, we’re still the same.

It’s weird to think about Katana and Elle, who were the two best friends I had from my high school years at Valencia.  Ever since Katana and I graduated, with her going off to VMI, then NMMI, and I going off to UCLA, the three of us have only gotten to hang out sporadically, whenever it happened to work out.  Usually that meant about once or twice a year, particularly the over the holidays and/or during another one of our seasonal breaks.  And though interactions were few and far between, we were still the Asian girls who stood out and didn’t quite fit into the mould of what people expected girls, especially Asian girls, to be.  I guess that’s what ties us together in the end – this common way of life that leads us from “normal” girl activities to things like JROTC, where we met, or to be particularly outspoken about some feminist beliefs.

Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve known these two ladies for nearly 7 years now!  I haven’t ever known and stayed in contact with someone for that long.  Being that I moved every 3-4 years, that’s not too surprising.  For the first time in my life though, I’m going back to old friends again and again.  They are no longer memories to be stored away in a compartment labeled based on what city I knew them from.  Now they are a consistent prescense in my life, however fleeting that may be.  So I guess this is shocking to me because I don’t know what it’s like to have lifelong friends.  Do they all fare so well seeing each other so infrequently?  No matter where we are, whether it’s spread across three states in the US (like we are now), or spread across countries (as we’ve often been), I don’t need to see or even talk to these girls to know they will be there.  It’s kind of like family.

A picture is also like a moment frozen in time... photo credit: _Mike_Howard_ on flickr

Speaking of family, mine is also a very scattered one, with me seeing my relatives something like seven times over my lifetime and seeing my parents twice a year on average.  And though we’ve all grown a lot these two decades, I still think of my parents as 35-year-olds and honestly, only when I look closely do I realize they’re not anymore.  But in my head, there’s a semi-frozen image of my family members – my cousins are still budding young adults, my parents quite young, and my grandparents still sprightly.  Sure, we’ve added a few new members since then, but they kind of just get tacked on without the others gaining much in age.  I don’t know how it works in my mind, but that’s how I recall my closest kin.  Every time I see them again, even after four years away and so much that happened in between, I remember a lot of my childhood and the main processes remain unchanged.  I still get spoiled and stay with the same people and generally do and eat the same things.

Even for my parents, the few weeks I see them out of the year doesn’t seem so odd because those memories last me a long time.  I’ve got so much other stuff going on while I’m on my own that just touching base with them semi-annually is plenty to work from.  It does get lonely in the house sometimes when I’m the only one, but I’m used to solitude.  That was much like how our household functions anyway.  Besides, at my age, it’s time to be moving out and doing things on my own.  Much as I adore my house, Valencia is not really the place to jump start a career.  I’d rather be in Westwood or Santa Monica, or somewhere more central to the hubbub of LA.

Finally, the day that I came back after months away in Singapore, I was nervous to see Panda again.  It was our first time being apart since things really got started and it was certainly not a short period of time to cope with.  Even now I wonder how we managed, because not seeing him for a day can make me antsy.  I was glad that we fell pretty quickly back into a comfortable rhythm, working out our schedules around challenges, as we’ve always done.  I had been afraid that it would take some time to warm up again and that we may almost be like strangers for a bit, but that didn’t last very long.  Once again, time altered its flow for me (well, at least to my perception it did) and it was like a fraction of the time had actually passed.  I guess that’s what happens with people you care about.  Katana said it best: we have changed enough to have things to talk about, but haven’t changed so much that we don’t connect anymore.