Author: Kai Raine

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 3)

Posted on by Kai Raine

On my third night, I once again returned to the hostel past 1AM—and once again, I found my bunk occupied. Without so much as setting down my bags, I returned downstairs to reception to inform them, expecting to find that my bed assignment had been unexpectedly changed once more.

However, to our mutual bewilderment, my bed assignment was still 13.

“We can’t go into the women’s room,” the men at the reception desk explained to me. “But if you could ask the girl her name, or which bed she’s supposed to be in, we can figure things out.”

I returned to the room and touched the girl’s shoulder.

“Excuse me. What’s your name?”

She gave me a sleepy smile and a confused hum. I repeated my question.

“Anne,” she mumbled.

“Do you know which bed you’re supposed to be in?” I asked.

Her response was not in a language I understood, but it sounded Slavic. I had the sense that she was telling me that she didn’t speak English. I left her to go back to sleep and returned downstairs to inform them that her name was Anne. Unfortunately, they did not seem to have an Anne listed. They decided that I would sleep in bed 12.

I returned upstairs with one of the men from the reception desk, who came with a new set of sheets. He stood in the doorway as I checked bed 12, but there was a person here, as well.

“Is there any empty bed?” he asked me.

I walked through the room, and though there were a few beds without occupants, only one of those was also without sheets. That bed was bed 7. I asked if I could take bed 7.

“But bed 7 is supposed to be occupied,” he said. “See, there’s a pile of sheets there.”

Indeed there was, and with a few personal clothing items beside.

We returned downstairs and after some deliberation, it was decided that I would take bed 7 for the night after all.

I placed the clothing onto the made-but-unoccupied lower bunk, made the bed in the dark and lay down. I couldn’t sleep. I was convinced that the moment I drifted off, the bed’s rightful occupant would come along and wake me.

The sun was beginning to dawn by the time I finally managed to sleep.

When All Else Fails…Hedgehogs!

Posted on by Kai Raine

From a PR perspective, having upload schedules is a great thing. Even from a self-management point of view, working toward a deadline ensures a constant flow of production, no matter how arbitrary the deadlines may be.

That said, this series is the hardest for me to keep to a schedule. Some days, I find myself in the middle of a depressive episode having to write about how I cope with it, at a moment when I feel like I’m failing entirely to cope. On some occasions, forcing myself to write about the subject anyway would be the answer. Today, that is not the answer.

Instead, I want to share my construct of the Happy Place.

Sometimes, in the middle of a depressive episode, I take refuge in something. The identity of this something is arbitrary. In the past, it’s been anything from my family to a TV show to random cat pictures.

One thing I have found is that it’s safest to keep my refuge something that is not alive, thereby giving it less power over me. It’s all well and good to take refuge in someone you can love and trust enough to know that they will not kick you deeper into the hole even as you’re trying desperately to hang on—and this has happened to me all too often, though the person always meant well. So cynical though it may seem, I prefer to take refuge in the inanimate. It doesn’t help me recover, but it does give me something to hang on to while I gather the strength to pull myself back out.

These days, that something for me is hedgehogs. When I feel overwhelmed by the world, I think of hedgehogs, or I find a cute picture or video or gif. And that image of a hedgehog makes me sublimely happy. It doesn’t last after I leave the hedgehog image behind, but it keeps me going.

Besides, hedgehogs are adorable. No Happy Place ever lasts for me, which I consider to be a positive, since it means I’m still in motion, even if I feel like I’m stuck. But I enjoyed watching hedgehogs long before they became my Happy Place, and I sense that I will continue to find them worth watching after I’ve moved on to a new one.

Such is the power of cute animals, sometimes.

You’re Going to Be a Sister!

Posted on by Kai Raine

I wrote a lot as a child. Once, on a trip to America over summer, a childhood friend of mine showed me an autobiography she was writing in the third person for an assignment. I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to write my own. So I tried, and tried again. It never felt quite right, so I never finished one. I had dozens of notebooks of stories, diaries and autobiographies. (Most of them I threw away in disgust as a teenager.)

There was one constant: my autobiographies always began with the birth of my sisters. Their birth was engrained in me as The Beginning. The beginning of change. The beginning of my family. The beginning of hardship. The beginning of complication. The beginning of my life.

The discovery of my mother’s pregnancy being twins was a subject that my mother and I began to contest in my late teens. I distinctly remember telling her that she was pregnant with twins. I remember her smiling and explaining to me that that was not the case. Later, I remember her praising me for being the first to know.

My mother, ten or fifteen years after my sisters’ birth, remembered it as her own realization due to the locations of kicks. She remembered going to the doctor and asking for an ultrasound (not standard procedure at the time) because she was sure it was twins. When the doctor told her that it was unlikely, she said to him flatly, “It’s either twins or a monster.”

(One of my sisters once told me that upon hearing this story, she asked, “Which would you have preferred?”

Our mother responded only, “Which do you think?”

I asked, “Which was that?”

“Twins, obviously,” said my sister. “Who’d prefer a monster?”

“Hm,” I responded, remembering our mother’s endless exhaustion during their infancy.)

After a few such discussions, I dismissed my own memories as false, painted by the dreams and wishes of my childhood. Years later, after my mother’s death, I reconnected with some of my friends from my early childhood—and, by extension, their parents. One of them started telling me, one day, how my mother had been so proud of me for being the first to realize that she was having twins.

I remember someone saying cynically, “It was probably just your wishful thinking.” But this is one childhood illusion that I have no desire to let go.

My mother’s pregnancy was a time that, for years afterwards, I remembered as the best time of my life. She was often at home, and frequently asked me to do small things to help her: go fetch this thing or that, make sandwiches for a picnic… I felt important, and had her attention. As a family, we were incredibly happy. We were all elated with anticipation of the birth. My parents bought a new van so that we could comfortably fit all five of us and more, factoring in car seats for the babies. My mother spent what felt to me like hours at the kitchen table deliberating over names. (The only thing set in stone was that a boy would be Julian. I would also have been Julian, had I been a boy. All the girl names picked were so non-traditional and so unusual that all of us routinely use fake names at places like Starbucks to avoid confusion. Yet any boy would have been plain old Julian. I always thought it funny that the only name that either of my parents had decided in advance was my mother’s desire to name a son Julian; and then she only had daughters. Go figure.)

The birth changed my life drastically. I went from having all of my parents’ attention to having none. I couldn’t even leave the apartment to play in the hall with my friends: my new baby sisters were bathed in the kitchen sink, which was near the door. I had a confusing interaction with my father in which he told me I could go out only if I could do so without opening the door. I said, “Ok,” and immediately went for the door. When I was scolded, I cried, “But I’m only going to open it once!” It was explained to me that opening the door would create a draft that would make the babies cold. I could go out after their baths. But bathing the babies took a small eternity. I could hear my friends in the hallway now. By the time the baths were over they’d be done playing. I sulked.

I initially felt mostly forgotten in the face of my new sisters. Then one day, my father had to leave my sisters strapped into little bouncy chairs to my care for a scant five or ten minutes while he took a shower. Of course, as is inevitable, the moment my father left the room they woke up and began to sob their tiny hearts out. I remember feeling utterly exhausted, nearly desensitized to all the screaming and sobbing. I was sitting on the couch. I positioned the bouncy chairs so I could rest one foot on the top of each chair, above their heads. I just bounced them with my feet.

The screaming quieted and then stopped.

My father came rushing out of the shower. (At the time, I was confused as to why he was so frantic after they’d stopped crying. In retrospect, I realize how frightening silence must be to a parent who just left newborns in the care of a five-year-old.) He was surprised, then delighted and showered me with praise. I remember it distinctly, because I’d been wilting, and his praise let me regain my footing. I knew that I still mattered.

After that, my parents let me babysit my sisters from time to time.

I was still reeling from the changes when we moved. The new van was sold barely used. The apartment I’d always known was stripped and sold. My sisters were only two or three months old when we moved to my mother’s parents’ place to await our visas. We finally moved when they were nearly nine months old.

Because my father’s visa had been issued months before ours, he had had to go ahead to start his work and set up our apartment. This meant that my mother moved with a lot of luggage, two infants and a five-year-old. (She carried my sisters by strapping one to her chest in a front pack, and the other to her back in a baby carrier backpack. Then she carried over her shoulder the giant baby bag full of necessities. If ever there was a person that needed priority boarding to get seated, it was my mother.)

In a way, because the changes were more or less constant over this year-long period, I probably adjusted not to any new state of affairs, but to the state of constant change. And by that, I mean that I became accustomed to being confused. The state of confusion was so normal to me that sometimes I’d entirely fail to realize that I was confused at all. I believe that this has largely become a strength in my life. But it would take a long journey to get there.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 2)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I barely slept on my first night in the hostel. I fell asleep past 4 and was woken by the clamor around the room just past 6:30. I went downstairs for breakfast only to find, to my disappointment, that they served only coffee without mugs, orange juice that tasted more like fanta than orange, cereal with milk (which I couldn’t have as I’m lactose intolerant), and plain, white pieces of square supermarket bread with packets of butter and marmalade. I had some toast, some orange juice and some coffee in a glass before I left for the day.

I returned early that evening exhausted and desperate for sleep. For once, my bed was unoccupied. I curled up in it and drifted off. Less than an hour later I was woken by a pair of girls chatting as they entered the room and found their beds. Soon enough they recognized my presence and their voices quietened to a whisper, but I still heard them giggling at the notion of someone already in bed. Nevertheless, half an hour later one of the girls was curled up in the bunk next to mine.

I slept in bursts, attaining a cumulative 8 or so hours of sleep over the 16 hours that I lay in bed (with occasional trips out of it for hydration or the bathroom). By morning, I was sufficiently well-rested and in a cheerful mood. When an alarm of piano music and birdsong woke me around 7 and continued to ring for half a minute before its owner put it on snooze, I was unbothered. I simply rolled over and opened my book. I remained unbothered when the same alarm continued to go off every five minutes for the next hour.

I breakfasted on toast, coffee (for which there were now mugs), juice, and cereal with soy milk that I had bought for myself. My mood was high as I left the hostel.

Unbeknownst to me, it was the last good night’s sleep I would have for nearly a week.

No One Else Can Save You: Saving Yourself

Posted on by Kai Raine

So, having recognized that I do, in small ways in daily life, need to be saved, and having acknowledged that I am, in fact, worth saving, how does one go about it?

I started small. It started with acknowledging that I am, in fact, human and as such, do have limitations.

I learned that most of my guilt is pointless.

I have excessive amounts of guilt. I don’t know if it’s a born or a learned trait, but if left to my own devices, I could easily feel guilty for virtually everything that’s gone wrong anywhere near me. I had to learn to counteract this. Largely it helped to acknowledge I am not special, and that every adult in my life is also in possession of a brain and agency. Therefore, most of what I feel guilty for cannot be my fault unless I also blame everyone else around me. Which I generally find ridiculous to consider. Therefore, I can argue to myself, it’s not worth blaming myself either.

I learned to say no.

The guilt over saying no was, of course, inevitable. I learned to coax myself out of it by repeatedly reminding myself that I am of far more use to everyone if I am happy, functional, and capable of generating enthusiasm.

I learned to set more realistic expectations of myself.

There was guilt over this too, but I learned to manage that. It did, in fact, help that I had pushed myself to the limit so often in the past that I had a sense of where my limits truly lay and what would happen if I pushed myself beyond them.

I learned to push back.

One of the cornerstones of my former way of life involved caving to any and all needs of those I cared about. I thought this was what caring and loving was all about. But the fact was, the more I caved the higher expectations became until I could no longer fulfill them despite my best efforts, and ultimately it almost always headed into a nasty terrain filled with anger and tears.

Since it was a change, there was a lot of resistance when I first started pushing back. But once I overcame that bit, it turned out that a lot of things were a lot better when I defended myself. I respected myself in a way that I hadn’t been able to envision before, and it seemed that other people grew to respect me more as well.

I learned not to take other people’s emotions or words personally.

Once I respected myself more, it became patently obvious to me that I’d been largely concerned with the opinions of people who most likely didn’t think much about what they said to me, or how I felt. And it became easier to overcome any criticism tossed my way. Even when it is something intended personally, even when I can empathize that I did in some way unintentionally hurt a person emotionally, it helps to be able to take a step back and recognize that I am not entirely at fault, because emotions tend to be a function of a variety of circumstances, rather than one solitary event. Obviously this isn’t always so clear, but it helps me to keep it in mind.

I learned to find courage.

Saving myself still takes courage. It sometimes requires conflict, and it always requires me to face something unpleasant head-on and keep going. When I feel intimidated, I remind myself that ultimately, I am one tiny person in a gigantic, unimaginably huge universe. I am one of six billion people on the planet. My mistakes and failures are not the end of the world, and I am not alone.

It’s all about finding the right angle to manipulate myself, to put it cynically. But so far, it’s worked to keep me moving from day to day.

Falling Face-First into Gender Norms: The Books

Posted on by Kai Raine

My mother often railed at the “happily ever after” mentality and the mindset that it teaches children. She told me how there is no happily ever after, because the wedding is only the beginning and it’s hard.

By the time that she thought to tell me this, I didn’t believe her one bit. She’d already read me fairy tales, and I’d seen all sorts of Disney movies that ended with a wedding. Sure, the wedding is the beginning: the beginning of happily ever after.

As a young child, I subconsciously saw marriage as my ultimate goal in life. This mentality goes as far back as I can remember, when I already had decided on the boy that I was going to marry. I don’t know what led to such a warped idea of reality, so I can only surmise.

But all of my books were either about children, or if they were about older people, it was a fairy tale or a similar sort of story that ended in marriage. I dreamed of doing things with my life, yes: of being a farmer on a ranch or a horse trainer or an archaeologist. Yet in all those visions of the future, there was always a vague figure of a man who would be my husband, because of course I had to have one.

Looking back, I lament that despite my mother railing at Disney and fairy tales for creating this mentality, she bought us Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, 101 Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, Aladdin and the Lion King. Absent were movies such as the Fox and the Hound, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book or Peter Pan. Furthermore, I picked up on my mother’s not-subtle-enough distaste for Aladdin and the Lion King, and she was not at all subtle in her dislike of 101 Dalmatians. I would feel a vague sort of guilt (and in fact, I still do) at enjoying those movies and stopped watching them. When Lilo and Stitch came out and my friends were talking about it at school, my mother would not take me to see it because the trailer gave her the impression that it was too violent. She bought Ever After, and that became her comfort movie, and by extension, mine.

When I was about eleven or twelve, I discovered that I rather enjoyed romances more than the rest of books. Sometimes, I would entirely ignore a plot, reading a book only for the romantic subplot. I was a talker, and no doubt tired of hearing me read a mystery only to come out gushing about the love story, my mother gave me two romance novels for teenagers.

While I enjoyed them, something felt inherently off about these books: the plots too contrived, the antagonists too mean, and nothing really happening. I went back to reading non-romance books for the romances. So my mother tried a different approach. When I would read a book and come out of it talking about the romance, she would not-so-subtly tell me that she didn’t think that part was that important, because “picking your boyfriend is something people do everyday.”

Which further engrained in me this idea that I would have to eventually pick a boyfriend (and therefore husband).

It wasn’t only the happily ever after mentality. It was also the contrast between what my mother said and what others told me. For instance, my mother bought me both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. I was immediately drawn to the Hardy Boys, and picked up the book and started reading. One of my aunts saw me and asked me why I didn’t read Nancy Drew.

“Hardy Boys is for boys,” she said to me. “Nancy Drew is for girls.”

I felt stupid and ashamed and even after I ran out of Nancy Drew books to read, I didn’t dare touch the Hardy Boys book, because I was a girl. It was four years later that I realized what nonsensical logic that was, and in a bed and breakfast in Australia, picked up a Hardy Boys book for the second time. But it was too late. The tone was too childish and simple to be enjoyable to me. I closed the book and turned off my reading light and stared at the bunk above me where my sisters were sleeping, wondering why I’d ever listened.

Such instances happened a lot. I would do something that subverted someone else’s gender norm, that someone else would tell me I was wrong, and I would feel ashamed and try to comply with these rules that I didn’t understand. So I grew up in a confused array of mixed messages, understanding that my life was about my femininity, which put me on a track headed toward marriage to a man, with certain roles I had to fulfill as a woman, but that I wasn’t supposed to talk about any of it. I was supposed to pretend.

By the time I was in my late teens, I reached the point where I could hold my own against people who felt that I wasn’t fulfilling the gender role that they expected me to fill: but by that point, it was a rarity. I neatly slotted into what most societies relevant to me expected of females. It took years for me to dig deeper into my own assumptions.

My mother continued to rail at fairy tales and Disney and the happily ever mentality, but it took decades for me to at last open my ears to the alarm bells as she ranted about this subject. At last I came to realize that even as she complained, she had  accidentally indoctrinated me. And then I gradually realized that everything was optional: not just for other people, but for me, too. I didn’t necessarily have to get married. I didn’t have to learn to clean and cook to take care of people. I didn’t even have to date.

So maybe my mother failed in my childhood to raise a child free of the gender-based shackles that society places on one. But by accidentally indoctrinating me and trying so hard to break me out of it, she taught me an even more valuable lesson about the forces of society and the ridiculousness of neat little gender-based boxes.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 1)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I stayed in a hostel in Paris for a few nights. On the day that I arrived, I checked in and paid for my stay, and was assigned to bed 3 in a 14-bed dorm. I was given sheets, so I made my bed and headed off to meet some friends.

When I returned past 1 in the morning, exhausted and ready to crash, I entered the dark, silent room and found a girl in my bed. She was on her phone, so I told her that that was my bed. She assured me that it was hers and suggested that perhaps I had the wrong room.

“Room 4, bed 3?” I said.

“Huh. But they gave us these beds,” her friend in the upper bunk chimed in. “Beds 3 and 4.”

I showed her my key card with my bed and room number.

“I believe you,” she said. “But these were the beds they gave us.”

“Was the bed made, when you arrived?” I asked the girl.

“No,” she said with a small smile.

Resigned, I went back down to the reception desk and explained my situation.

“Bed 3,” said the man at the desk. “Are you Elizabeth?”

“No,” I said. I gave him my name.

“But you haven’t checked in?” he asked.

“No, I have.”

“But you didn’t pay?”

“I did.”

He went through the book of receipts and eventually found mine. He assigned me bed 13, gave me new sheets and exchanged my key card, and I returned upstairs.

Making my new bed in the dark, I discovered that I was missing my blanket. The person in the bunk beneath mine seemed to have appropriated it, presumably having assumed that no one would be taking that bunk that night.

I went back to the reception desk and was informed that there were no extra blankets.

Returning to the room, I turned on the reading light on the bunk and started making the bed, postponing the inevitable waking of the person in the lower bunk. In my irritation, however, I wasn’t as quiet as I could have been while making my bed. Just as I was finishing fitting the sheet on the mattress, an arm emerged from below, offering me a handful of the blanket.

With a “Merci,” I took the blanket and curled up. Just as I was getting ready to sleep, another small commotion began on the opposite corner of the room. It was past 4 by the time I got to sleep.

No One Else Can Save You: The Realization

Posted on by Kai Raine

We live in a society that teaches us that we will be saved.

This isn’t usually a teaching we explicitly propagate, or even teach on purpose at all. In fact, I hear it frequently being explicitly contradicted.

Yet we worship deities that save us. Most of our folklore is characterized by someone who saves the protagonist, or even all of a society or humanity. (Such as fairy tales, for example.) We tend to place an astonishing amount of weight on the notion of “finding someone” without putting very much effort into discussing what that “someone” is supposed to contribute to our lives, or what we are supposed to contribute to theirs. Families are sometimes held together by the notion that they’re the ones who stick by you when things get tough.

The undercurrent that we need someone else to save us, to stick by us, to put up with our craziness and love us anyway, runs through our lives everyday.

It’s not entirely wrong. Humans are social animals. We do tend to need some form of social life, some support and love.

That doesn’t mean we need to be saved. In fact, in my experience, even the subconscious expectation that I will be saved by some external force makes it that much harder for me to overcome obstacles.

I had to learn that no one can save me but myself.

I don’t mean that I have to fight my battles all alone. But if I need someone’s help, it’s much more effective if I can articulate to them what I need. Even if that person can’t necessarily offer me what I need, the understanding of what I need makes them more effective at supporting me where they can.

As long as I seek to be as self-aware as possible without being clouded by what I think should be, no one can know me anywhere near as well as I know myself. Certainly, some things are clearer from the outside looking in. Sometimes I don’t become aware of some behavior of mine until it’s pointed out to me by a friend. External observations are helpful. But those behavioral observations alone are not me. If I am the sum of my past, my behavior and my thoughts, emotions and beliefs, then only a portion of that is observable from the outside. If I ever claim that someone knows me better than I know myself, I am either woefully unaware of my own behavior, or willfully ignoring a very large part of myself (or, most likely, joking).

So, being the person who knows myself best, it stands to reason that I am the best person to work out what I need to remain adrift; the best person to gauge my own limits; the best person to identify what I want and what I need.

This may sound like common sense. But it took me a good twenty-five years to work it out.

Subverting Gender Norms: The Toys

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my parents got married, my father said to my mother, “I want four girls.” Eight years later, when they had my sisters, my mother joked, “You said you wanted four girls. Well, you have four of us now.”

It took me a long time to realize how unusual this was, given that it was the environment I was accustomed to, but my parents were dedicated to raising me, a daughter, as a person first and foremost. They took care to make sure that I had an abundance of traditionally “girl” toys like stuffed animals and dolls, but also traditionally “boy” toys like toy cars and trains.

I displayed a preference for the stuffed animals and dolls as a child, but very quickly lost interest in the toy cars. In my adulthood, some people in my family have reflected on this and pointed to it as proof of my inherent femininity shining through. I disagree.

I liked to play pretend, making up stories. It’s easy to see why stuffed animals and dolls would appeal here. I liked the toy cars that could do things: there was a truck with doors that opened and closed that I used a lot. The toy cars with motors that allowed me to propel them across the room were fun too, though it was hard to make them work on the carpet of my room. The plastic cars that did nothing―no motors, no doors that opened, no figure inside them to be driving―confused me. What was I supposed to do with these things? Yes, I could roll them along the floor, but what sense did this make if there was no one driving them?

Clearly these cars had to be sentient to make sense. The notion of sentient cars was a nightmarish one to me, and I had a recurring nightmare about my mother’s car kidnapping me from my mother after she had gotten out of the car, before she had come to the back of the car to unstrap me from the carseat. (I continued to have this nightmare for years, even after I was no longer in the carseat; and even then for awhile after we no longer owned a car.)

That was why I largely ignored my mostly-useless, driverless, nightmarish toy cars. When I got a radio-controlled car from my godfather, however, I had no such compunctions and I very much enjoyed that. I also had a wooden puzzle train set that, though it could only be set up into a figure eight, delighted me.

When my parents first took me to India at age two, a Hindu priest “blessed” my parents, that their next child would be a son. My father took offense at this, and berated the priest that he wanted more daughters.

It became a common theme throughout my childhood that whenever she heard me saying things that subscribed to gender stereotypes, my mother berated and corrected me. It often seemed strange to me, that my parents were so dedicated to keeping me from thinking in a way that most of society seemed to think. But I would not, perhaps, have become as confused as I eventually became if not for the books.

The Girls Visiting Indian Boyfriends

Posted on by Kai Raine

As a teen, I would often converse with the person in the seat beside me. On two separate occasions, I met girls with very similar stories: they were in their twenties and visiting boyfriends in India that they had gotten to know over email. One was a German girl dating a Muslim boy; the other was an American girl dating a Hindu boy. I met them approximately three years apart, but it never ceases to astonish me how similar their stories seemed.

They had gotten to know their boyfriends through some interaction on a website, and ended up swapping emails. After that, they had corresponded for a time, getting to know each other (and falling in love). The boyfriends, in both cases, had visited the girls in their home countries once. In both cases, I was meeting the girls on their first trip to India—though I met the German girl on her flight to India and the American girl on her flight back to the US.

Both of them had a lot to say on the subject of the obstacles that lay in their paths in the form of religion. I listened, but it wasn’t a subject that was very interesting to me at the time, beyond analyzing the cultures and why people insist on laying those obstacles before inter-religious and inter-racial relationships.

Both girls were fascinated when I said that I was the product of such a marriage, and were fascinated to hear my parents’ story. They expressed surprise when I explained that my parents simply got married, neither of them being particularly attached to religion or cultural tradition. They would then go on to wonder aloud whether their boyfriend would be willing to entertain this as a possibility (both of them found it doubtful).

I met the German girl first, when I was fifteen. She was cynical, fairly certain it wouldn’t work out in the end. Perhaps because I met her first, she had much wisdom and many observations to share that I had never before thought to consider. I was still in my youthful fairy tale mind, convinced that love could conquer all. She was very laid back, and willing to foster the relationship for as long as it lasted, even if it was not going to be for life, or even for that much longer.

The American girl was more specifically critical in her assessment of her situation. “Why can’t he just say no to his parents?” she would complain to me. “I don’t know if I can live with a man who can’t stand up to his parents.” She then went on to exposit about the differences between American and Indian culture,* naming things that were very familiar to me and leaving me to shrug and smile. I offered some advice based on observations I had made, but I got the impression that she wasn’t interested in my opinion as much as she just wanted to vent.

I kept in touch with the German girl for a few years afterwards; the American girl and I went our separate ways after our flights and never corresponded. I do know that the first girl’s relationship lasted through that trip and for some months afterwards before her boyfriend caved to his parents and broke things off.

*I am aware that both of these are very culturally diverse nations. This is meant to indicate the experiences of India and American culture as lived by myself and this one girl. It is not meant to be a generalization.