• 05 Nov, 2025 *

I keep getting hit with glimpses of things we used to do together.

the last time I took the metro north was with my ex, a year ago at night to look at the pumpkin blaze, trying to put ourselves in a better mood after having things implode with her family. trying to seem normal. I remember we downloaded a few episodes of death note and spent the entire train ride watching it, heads on each other’s shoulders, struggling to keep her phone standing upright and laughing at how stupid and gay the show was. I’d never watched it as a kid. we had a lot of fun that evening. we never finished the show because the story drops off a cliff.

on saturday, my mom and I took the train upstate to visit dia beacon museum and look at fall foliage. she would’ve liked this, I thought, looking at how pretty the trees were in the daytime, walking through the sculptures. I wondered if she was still managing to make plans and see things with friends while grieving. I wondered if she was having more fun without me, or if she still missed me in some way.

last year, my ex and I moved into an apartment right next to the 7, and we’d taken a liking to going to flushing as often as we could. one of the last good dates we had was a few months ago, when we went to get dinner in flushing and then dropped $60 on claw machines. she planned that date. I always felt like she was way better at planning dates than I was, or maybe that’s just my insecurity. I guess I did still take us to good places, like our favorite schawarma place in Astoria or that amazing salteña stand in Sunnyside. for some reason I especially associate Flushing with her, even though I’ve gone with friends before. Flushing is just romantic to me. we’d hold hands on the entire 7 ride, gorge ourselves on excellent chinese food, maybe watch a movie, and then go home. that’s my idea of romance.

I do think that I struggle to try new restaurants sometimes when I go to Flushing. I have my usual picks and I stick to them. but when I went with my mom on monday, I wanted to try new things with her. we went to the food court that closed during covid and then remodeled and reopened a couple years ago. we ate some incredibly juicy chive and pork potstickers, and then emerged from the food court to discover it was raining. neither of us had an umbrella. all the umbrellas at home belong to my ex, so my mom and I rushed to a store she bought me a new one that someone on the street was peddling for $10 (lol).

we followed up potstickers by going to a zhengzhou lamb noodle place my ex and I went to before. I thought it would be good to rewrite the memory. I also thought it would be perfect comfort food for the rainy weather, but I got meat disgust from the intense lamb flavor and couldn’t finish. I’ve been eating meat in my depression again and feeling really guilty about it, but I feel even more guilty not finishing food. afterwards, the rain stopped, so we barely even used the $10 umbrella. my mom said, it’s ok, now you have one of your own. we had a course of dessert at yuanyang and got the ginger milk pudding I’d been wanting to try for a while. it was insanely good... god!

one of the many things I’m mourning about the end of this relationship is that my ex really helped me feel more confident in my chinese language ability. I’d always ask her what does this or what mean, how do you say xyz. she never got annoyed at me for my endless questions. she’d nudge me to practice ordering at restaurants, and even took a class with me at my level, even though she was fluent. eventually I stopped whining and being shy and got better. you know more than you think you do, she’d say, it’s all just confidence. one time, we started watching a chinese movie at home and she challenged me to watch it without english captions. I got frustrated because I could barely understand even the first few scenes, but she walked me through them over and over to make sure I understood every word. I still remember one of the words I learned that evening: 坚持 - persist.

is it that she actually pulled more weight in our relationship, or just that it’s harder for me to give myself credit for things? it couldn’t have lasted for so long if it were the former. yes - she was great at finding activities for us to do. she gave good gifts. she was really supportive of my interests. I was supportive of hers too - she didn’t care for surprises, so my birthday gift this year was a soldering class we wanted to do together. last year, it was a necklace she wanted. I was good at talking and getting her to talk. at remembering small things about her and making her feel seen. at making her laugh. at making food and making sure she ate lunch.

this is a very wandering blog post. just a collection of memories. I’ll be doing something, anything, and then my brain will daydream and visualize her by my side. we used to do absolutely everything together. she always said I had a great memory and she didn’t remember anything at all. I wonder if that’s still true now that things are over.

in recent months, not so much. we were so caught up in our own ways of coping with sadness. I’m finishing this post on a plane, for example, and remembering that the last time I took a flight out of new york was with her by my side. we’d had an argument the night before because she canceled our date to see her friends. she just wanted to ‘turn her brain off,’ which she said she couldn’t do around me. her dad was still in the hospital.

I played video games the entire plane ride. did she want to talk instead? I don’t know. planes are loud. she was playing games too. after a couple hours, she stopped and took a nap, but periodically woke and looked over at me to watch. I didn’t know what she was thinking about. she said I was really locked in. I would never put a stupid video game over her. I’d pause and put it away in a heartbeat.

#posts #writing