Tonight I played Wii Tennis with a 7-year-old (more or less my sister's ex-boyfriend/arranged marriage prospect), and it was one of the best Wii matches I've ever had. He was SO good.
Asian parties are the reason why my parents go to Ann Arbor so often; I think maybe 90% of their Michigan friends live there. Which is fine with me, because I get to practice driving on these 50-minute trips. Sliding into the driver's seat for the drive home with every window and mirror initially fogged up, yet with the highway lights so bright and beautiful, I think it's absolutely tragic, beyond lives lost, when I hear about people falling asleep at the wheel late at night. But maybe that's just the amateur driver in me, eying the speedometer and every car around me like a hawk, still unused to the perils of merging and changing lanes.
I love doing a lot of thinking when I'm on the road (although sometimes it makes me miss signs and react late to traffic lights heh heh), and tonight I was thinking about what one of my friends recently asked me. It was a weird question; she asked, "Why did you wear that moon necklace for so long if your name has a sun in it?" (Just so you know, Cecilia means "blind" but my Chinese name means "sunrise.") I don't think she meant that necklaces were supposed to represent names; it just seemed ironic to her.
For the longest time, I had an unexplainable obsession with the moon. If I ever do get a tattoo, the first I'd get would be of the outline of a crescent moon. It's hard to find pretty crescent necklaces, and when I finally did find one in Shanghai, I wore it all the time as a constant reminder of how much I love where I'm from, as well as the powerful presence of the moon in my past. Little kids wished on the first star they see every night; I accidentally wished on Venus (it looks like a star ok), and then I wished on the moon when I couldn't find a star. Sometimes when it was too cloudy at night, I got anxious. Sometimes when it's only four or five in the evening, you can already spot the moon, and I got so giddy I couldn't keep it to myself.
"Where's the moon now? Is it hiding?" I looked up above the highway lights and, sure enough, there it was. You can't stare into a pitch black night and not search desperately for that well-known spot of white, especially if you know that it should be there. Over the years, it's become my guidance and my reassurance, the North Star to my own goals and dreams. For a brief period of time, my moon was replaced by a cross, and then by nothing when I realized I no longer needed physical representation of things already so deeply etched into my heart. When I was in the Bahamas, I saw the perfect sun necklace but I was terrible at bargaining. Then again the sun isn't the same though; it shines in a sea of its own light. I thought getting a sun could maybe represent the beginning of a new era, but if you hold onto it forever, there's going to be a heck long of a beginning with no middle or end.
Just like how my name means sunrise, I'm constantly getting excited about starting things and choosing the initial steps, but that enthusiasm often drains out and I'll need pushes and shoves to get through to the process, and then to the result. I need guidance and supervision probably much more than the average person, or I'll wander off into the pitch black unknown. And ironically for what it means to me, I need the moon to keep me grounded.
