During my senior year of college, I had some very trying and embarrassing moments. Not so much embarrassing in the way that one slips and falls in front of a crowd, or emits some kind of bodily function in a classy setting, or anything resembling that typical kind of embarrassing (though there was plenty of that as well.) The kind of moments I vividly recall were a sad, shameful kind of embarrassing, that no one laughed at because it was often too much to watch a woman cry over seemingly nothing.

An example: on my twenty-second birthday, I sat in the Pope room at the Santa Monica Buca di Beppo as twenty-some friends watched me unwrap presents. One particular gift was a Sex and the City poster, bearing this quotation: “No matter who broke your heart, or how long it takes to heal, you’ll never get through it without your friends.” As I read it to myself, I felt the moisture collect around my eyes, because, indeed, my heart was still a little broken. Someone asked, “What does it say?” And, forced to read it aloud, this one-sentence quote, I stopped somewhere to take a breath and hide the need to bawl.

One saving grace about coming back to LA, and the only part that makes it bearable, is that I know I always have a home here with a few best friends who will take care of me, house me, and drive my car-less ass around. Two of them, in particular, I can count on for almost anything. They have been there through four years of crying, guilt, neuroticism, and all those other fun things about college. They have watched me fall in and out of love (not too many times, I promise) and seen me grow from a shy, awkward freshman to an outspoken, still awkward member of the working class. In other words, they have been there for every step of the way, and now that I am fifteen hundred miles away, they still manage to take care of me.

It troubles me to consider how many instances in which they have had to rescue me, escaping to a frozen yogurt shop or taking me into their homes. Perhaps it is knowing that they do all of these things, and yet I don’t seem to have gotten any better—there is shame in knowing that. Despite all of the great love that they have given me, I still seek (and often fail to find) a romantic kind of love that is as lasting and steadfast as our friendship. When I come back to Los Angeles, I am immediately grateful for my friends who treat me as if I never left. But that rush of recollection includes the memories of those embarrassing moments, those times when I am asked to read aloud so that the tears willingly come flowing out. All at once, I can remember the times that I have been saved, but am embarrassed for having necessity to be “saved” in the first place.

In this way, Los Angeles has become somewhat stained for me. It will be a long time before I see LA as a place where a lot of good things have happened, without all of the bad to weigh the experience down. But hey, at least this is only temporarily. As new memories are built and strong enough to cover up bits of heartache, I will get better. The wounds will heal, over and over, and as the Sex and the City quote so wisely implies, I will get through it, if only with the help of my incredible friends.

It’s been a few weeks since I donated two ten-inch ponytails worth of my hair to Locks of Love, an organization that takes donated hair to make wigs for young cancer patients. It was my first step to orientate myself back to Los Angeles when I returned for Thanksgiving, and a necessary measure towards becoming the kind of person I’d like to be.

Unfortunately, not everyone has taken it so well. I mean, it’s hard to say, “Your hair looks terrible,” to someone who has just donated it, so I haven’t heard that from anyone (thank goodness.) I have, however, received several questions about why I did it. And as much as I would like to say that it was out of good will and good will alone, I have to be honest about the matter.

Since I moved out to Houston, it became apparent to me what my long hair did for me. I hid behind it, allowed it to be a self-esteem booster, and it seemed that the longer it grew, the more attention it received. I began to rely on my hair to be one of the reasons people noticed me, and I knew my own vanity in trying to manage the tresses was getting vastly unmanageable.

To me, my hair also spoke volumes politically (pun intended.) My long, dark locks seemed to draw men in, as this seems to be part of some kind of male fantasy. When strangers would walk up to me and say, “You’re so damned pretty,” I was fairly certain that they wouldn’t say it if I lacked the long mane so many men seem to enjoy tugging at. I also ran the constant risk of being confused with most other Asian women donning hair that reached past their shoulders. “Ms. Hsu,” some of the more insolent students would call from down the hall, fully knowing that I wasn’t her. All of these things about my long hair bothered me, and made me feel as though I could be easily replaced.

Of course, if you know me at all, it also had something to do with my own romantic past. After all, as my stylist snipped off the weight of a year and a half, I thought of how he would never grab fistfuls of my hair again. In that instant, I felt like a new person.

I suppose I’m just tired of the way that a majority of women are expected to wear their hair long in order to be considered sexy. I want for me, just me, to be enough attractiveness. I want to turn heads because of the witty things I say, or bitchy things I do, with no curtain to hide behind.

Truly, the action has changed me for the better. “It’s just hair,” they say, and I know. But in my mind, I want to pretend that it means more. I want to believe that this part of me will be a gift for someone else, to help her build her self-confidence to the level in which she, too, won’t need it anymore.

It’s true; I have become the kind of hopeless romantic to fall for a complete stranger I met on a plane. As soon as he took the seat next to me, I felt something familiar about him—one of those feelings you get when you think you’ve met this person before. We started a conversation about college rivalries (it seemed that half the plane wore USC shirts) and talked for a full hour; the duration of the plane ride and even into the awkward time when everyone struggles to grab their carry-ons. All he had to do was carry on a conversation and make me laugh, but he won brownie points by showing no mean streak and being perfectly honest about topics that I accidentally pried myself into.

We lost each other in the hubbub of getting out of the plane, but he turned around to wave and give me a wide smile as I walked towards my next flight. I kicked myself for not offering any kind of contact information, but for what? He was just a stranger—a nice, good-looking guy who made a plane ride one of the most pleasant I’ve had in a long time. So what?

Then again, it’s only been a few weeks. We moved too quickly and didn’t know each other well enough, but we agreed that this could go somewhere if we put in the effort to make it work. When we met, it was all about the attraction. Everything was new, and he was just a good-looking guy with a nice apartment, smart and easy to flirt with.

Now that he and I are getting to know each other better, I realize that we are both ridden with biases. It seems that in every new relationship, there is so much forgiving to do. I find myself trying to forgive him for not having the same sense of humor, for surprising me with the things he says, for having a past. I know that I half-expect him to make familiar jokes, to call me just to find out how my day was and share stories about his. I also know that I am being unreasonable.

But on the other hand, I know he is trying to forgive me for not having the same qualities as his ex-girlfriend, the girl he said he might’ve married at some point. I’m not sure what she was like, but I am curious if I meet the same requirements. Neither of us can apologize for these unreasonable things, because these only look like flaws because of the scars left over from the people we loved.

Part of me thinks we should have kept it simple, not asking about each others’ past. Maybe we would be less vulnerable, and slightly less awkward. We could have kept it new, and light-hearted and refreshing, like the conversation with the stranger today. But new beginnings are always charming, and as the luster dies down and the relationship becomes more real, the most you can do is forgive the person who started out as an honest stranger.

In the restaurant, we are holding hands, rubbing noses occasionally, whispering in each others’ ears. From any stranger’s point of view, we are a happy couple. All of my friends, most of whom haven’t talked to me since I graduated from college, are wondering how this all got started again. They look at each other, commenting on how happy we look and remarking on the stark contrast between now and one year ago. I smile, because, at last—he makes me feel like he’s mine.

At home is a different story. As we go to bed, I make the silly mistake of saying “I love you,” and immediately regret the verbal no-no, as he visibly struggles to change the subject. Could so much change over the last few months? In July, we still ended phone calls with those words, anticipating the day we could say it to each other in person again. Sure, we decided to see other people, but could those months erase two years of being in love?

We lay there, silent.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” My voice comes out in a whisper.

“What’s weird?”

“Us,” I manage to get out.

“Well, yeah,” he answers as if I am asking if we’re going to the zoo tomorrow.

“I shouldn’t have come this weekend. I was a little worried about it.”

Then, clumsily, it all spills out: our doubts about this weekend, his fear that we would do things appearing to be “more than it actually meant,” acknowledging that we both have moved on and my staying with him disrupts both of our regular lives.

It’s the one thing I have said in this conversation that I am more than 80% sure of. After all, the night before and even this morning, it occurred to me that we don’t love each other. But it sounds different, being said out loud. It hurts, because it lends to the possibility that we have been convincing ourselves for longer than either of us have realized.

We both fall asleep, eventually, and I wake up in the middle of the night with a startle. Suddenly, this fact sinks in: for the first time in three years, we are in agreement that we do not love each other. It’s messy, though, because for two of those three years, he loved me in secret. And even when we finally tried out a relationship, I always wondered if he could be a better boyfriend in public, so I would not feel foolish for having loved him for so long.

I immediately think about the restaurant: the image we set up, a caricature of a working relationship, the idea we planted in other people’s minds that we truly loved each other. I think about how that scene, for me, describes bliss. Gradually, an aching feeling finds its way into me. Of course, after years of wanting him to show everyone else that he loves me, I get my scene played out. The only problem is he doesn’t love me at all anymore. The scene was exactly that—an act, after all.

Amy Tran

My last face-to-face encounter with him happened on a Monday. I sat, crying in his bed, about not wanting to go back to Houston for fear of having to start over again. He did not offer any words of comfort—maybe because we no longer really know each other.

It occurred to me, once I settled back into my apartment, that I had not yet allowed myself to consider Houston as my home. Part of me clung to college and that idea that maybe I should’ve stayed there to take on a job with less responsibility, less weight than being a teacher. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that Houston, along with teaching, was here to stay.

In spite of myself, I fiddled in my mind about the things that kept me clinging to California, and it did not take me long to trace back the blame to him. I had originally left to get away from him, to leave him behind and start over. And somehow he re-emerged into my life, with me welcoming him with open arms. Ridiculous.

Talking to friends on the phone now is different. They let me cry, and laugh, and curse like a madwoman, because they hope it really is the last time. They have spent the past three years giving lackluster warnings, so I can tell that they are extremely happy that I have finally come to this realization on my own. They are fascinated, however, by the abruptness:

“Just like that? It’s finally over?”

I laugh through hot tears of embarrassment. “Just like that. I can’t believe I let it go on for so long. Why didn’t you tell me how stupid I was being?”

“Love is blind, girl. Love is blind.”

I can sense skepticism in their voices, which I will admit is justified. In some ways, I can’t believe it’s over either. But the moment I saw him at the airport, I felt a sharp hurt that had been built up from residual…something. It was a pang I had always mistaken for love—a heart-wrenching kind of love. In that moment, I realized that it hadn’t been love at all, but fear. A quick alarm of trepidation that triggered all of the jealousy, the anger, the insecurity. As he leaned in to kiss me, I felt his sense of entitlement to me. Leading up to the visit, I envisioned myself as having some power, or at least an equal hold on the relationship. But here, being in the same space as him, I recognized the feeling as being—not loved, but owned.

Other tell-tale signs popped up here and there over the weekend we spent together. Although he showed he cared about me in small ways, it was clear that the weekend was not about what I wanted. He called the shots, and failed to carry out most of the promises he had made to me over the summer. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I don’t think he meant to make me feel so powerless, but nothing can make me go back to being so blindly in love with him.

I’m twenty-two years old. I may be too young to know what love is, but I can be sure of what it is not.

Amy Tran

After not speaking for months, we somehow fell into a feigned friendship because of the community service club we still shared. Two weeks in a row, Mike and I spent Saturday mornings together, and two weeks in a row, his smile overwhelmed me. It’s cheesy, and embarrassing, but in the moments we made eye contact, I saw the emotion two years can instill in a person. There was some flirting between us, and people began to gossip. Friends became weary and angry with me, but, for me, these were the first weeks that sleeping became an easy task again.

This ease, of course, didn’t last long. In the second week, we ended up drunk at a party together. We spoke quietly to one another, making full eye contact, I think. I remember feeling his fingertips squeeze sweetly on my sides, as they had before but now much more cautiously. Like old times, I fell comfortably into his lap and put my own weight on his. He said something to make me laugh, our noses lingering dangerously close to one another—and he then kissed me like an accident.

Though it hurt at first, I understand that I brought this upon myself. I’d written songs, countless of them, about how much he hurt me, and then I’d written one last song, my own version of “I Will Survive.” It’s called “Walk the Other Way” and the chorus goes something like this:

So if you learn to love again, please don’t come my way
Looking to break hearts or make amends
‘cause I’m starting a new day.
I’ve been earning back my stride,
Returning to a better way of life
So if you learn to love, please walk the other way.

It was my indirect plea, and, to my surprise, he listened. I don’t know if he ever heard it, but the one thing I’d ever asked of him finally came true.

I never really received anything from him, not even answers to my questions. I did, eventually, regain my ability to think somewhat rationally. I’m still a woman plagued by interracial images, clever article titles like “Amazon Grace,” and the best and worst of Mike-filled memories. I have been trying to date other people, though I question whether or not I have actual feelings for the poor guys who fall for me or if I am acting in defensive loneliness. I put a great deal of thought into the political and moral implications (if any) of who I date. But I know myself better now, all the good and bad and bitter.

Part of me wants to get back in touch with him, ask how he’s doing, apologize for not being enough. Part of me is curious, wondering if he and I will be friends someday and be able to look back on this as some crazy college love story that never ended right. But then another part of me that lacks in humor or understanding is still angry about all the hurt. I suppose that’s why I still cry during certain songs—particularly when I’m on stage and baring it all for people to hear. He played a huge part of my college life, and though the memories are bittersweet, the rawness of emotion I’ve experienced comes through in each note I play, each word I write. There is only a week of school left, and I know that in leaving college, I will be leaving Mike. I don’t know what exactly will happen from here, but I suppose I won’t know until I get there.

Amy Tran

One of the first dates following the breakup was particularly memorable. I met John in Vegas, and he just happened to be from Long Beach. When I returned to Los Angeles after winter break, we agreed to meet for dinner. John could not be more different from Mike—he was Cambodian American, stocky, clean-shaven and too nice. He took me “out” to a Cambodian restaurant where his friend’s sister was having a graduation banquet. Needless to say, it was somewhat awkward because the guests dressed in gowns and traditional Cambodian clothing. In my tank-top and jeans, I felt like I’d been a stowaway trying to sneak in some food.

But it wasn’t even this that bothered me. I went along with it, laughing and confident, learning traditional Cambodian dances and even doing—yes—the electric slide with expertise. What bothered me is that the whole night, he’d been nice to me, complimenting me and shamelessly flirting. He held my hand as if he’d known me for years, and his friends called me his “girlfriend.” Finally, six hours of dancing concluded with an awkward stop at his place.

The experience further embittered me because it made me see what I imagined to be how men view the world. I say this because, the sad thing is, John very well could have been playing the same dating game. And if there was any imbalance of feeling there, somebody would get hurt, I’m pretty sure. The thing with guys, though, and maybe girls too and I just don’t know it, is that (in most cases) they’ll go ahead and take the sex and come away with it being fine. The sex doesn’t mean anything, the night didn’t mean anything, and they can walk away wondering what they’ll eat when they get home.

I left, because I wanted to try to keep sex close to my heart, or develop enough sense and distance to distinguish between making love and fucking. I couldn’t play along anymore, and in my mind I knew I would regret it or just feel gross. It’s frustrating as hell that the more girls guys sleep with, the more they are seen as “pimps” or whatever, but the more guys girls sleep with, the more she is considered to be a ho. In this way, men are able to collect women like trophies, objects. Women cannot do the same without being called out on it—not only by men, but certainly moreso by other women.

To be honest, I hadn’t felt lusty anything in a while. Newfound independence had sprung from my bitterness, and I remembered what it was like to enjoy time with friends and do work that was important to me. I concluded from this date that I was growing on my own, and certainly didn’t want to be limited by someone at this point. I figured the dating game wasn’t so much that as it was a waiting game. And someone worthwhile would come along.

But no one better came along. By the second semester of senior year, I was even more of a jaded mess than I thought I could be. At some point, my mess caught up to me. The party with all the dancing and Christmas lights on the trees is where she approached me. Jen was a girl that Mike and I had both known for a couple of years. She was petite, always dressed fashionably, and I envied her for having fairly large boobs for an Asian girl.

“I heard you were with Mike for a while,” and I don’t think she meant it in a mean way. “I’m sorry you two broke up, but you’re better off without him.”

“Yeah! That asshole,” I answered, in my drunken and yet so articulate self-righteousness.

“You know, he used to come knocking on my door some nights. He’d ask if we could have sex because I looked like his girlfriend, and he wanted to know if I would just pretend to be her for just one night. He’d be like, ‘Hey, you’re Filipino and my girlfriend’s Filipino…let’s fuck.’” She exploded in laughter—the drunken, loud kind.

I laughed it off because it was the only thing I could do. But my mind would not stop racing. I had heard things before, but here she was, pouring out secrets of what happened with them in the past; how he had approached her, and how she resisted him, in a way I could not. Her words deeply hurt because it cheapened my own experience with him. And what I had believed was love seemed dirtied now. Something that I walked away from with at least some pride and maybe even hope, suddenly became a novelty to be laughed at.

It’s not her fault, I know, and maybe what she said can’t be completely trusted. I’d like to say that I disregarded it, walked away calm and unaffected, but what she said has only reignited my search for answers that can’t be found. Even if I managed to get the truth, I’m not sure if I would believe it. And then the questions about race came back. Was it true? Were we all just one in the same—cute Asian girls set out as bait for the White man? I was not only hurt, I was pissed off.

A week later, I saw Mike on campus holding hands with Grace. I didn’t look directly at them, but in that quick glance out of the corner of my eye, I could’ve sworn she looked like me.

Fool

boy you sure know how to fool them all
yeah, you sure know how to fake it.
all the laughter fades into a mess you've made
and i'm not sure how to take it.

but please tell me that you meant it
please tell me i was the one.
say, "baby i had stopped my searching there,
i'd found you and i was done."

Amy Tran

All of this unhealthy suspicion of an Asian fetish only piled onto the fresh memories of hurt and distrust in my mind. To quietly move through a year and a half wanting to love each other is to curse yourselves with unrealistic expectations when the relationship finally comes to fruition. What I mean to say is, we’d been a secret for so long that I had no idea what it was like to be “his” when we were around other people. And sadly, I quickly learned to have a distaste for it. His confidence and crude jokes drowned out my own personality, so that I felt like a different person when we were with other people. Though he said he wanted to try, we hardly spent any time together. We were both busy, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that outside of the time we slept together, we hardly saw each other. Three months into the relationship, I realized that it was like our two-year friendship—more like a battle than anything steady or concrete. Some days were good, but most days I cried without knowing reasons why.

True, the first week after we broke up felt like renewed freedom. No more waiting to see if and when he would call, no more crying and wondering why he didn’t love me. Things seemed infinitely better, even if they were lonelier than I had envisioned myself to be. Naturally, I missed him after some time. When we ran into each other on campus, we started off somewhat friendly—but over a few weeks our interaction quickly became a series of awkward moments and avoiding eye contact. We were no longer friends, and I blamed myself for this. I just couldn’t look him in the eye anymore, because after getting over the initial sadness, I was angry. I wanted to know why he wasn’t trying to win me back, why I wasn’t worth making an effort for. I wanted answers.

For months later I still wondered about us, agonizing over whether or not our relationship consisted of anything more than the White Man’s desire to dominate and the woman’s expected submission. Of course, in post-breakup regret, one always forgets the reasons why everything fell apart in the first place. I convinced myself that I was wrong to think that he had an Asian fetish, and swore that I still loved him.

Then, a few weeks after we broke up, I heard he made out with some girl at some party.
In trying to cope, I did some very un-Asian things:

• I journaled. Non-stop. Any new revelation about the relationship would be jotted down immediately to be written about at length later on—only to discover that I had thought of that previously sometime in the last two years.
• I considered going to counseling. Strongly considered, even. But I never did follow through. Thinking about it was embarrassing enough.
• I discovered the Self-Improvement (no longer titled “Self-Help”) section in Barnes and Noble. It became my guilty pleasure. I indulged myself in a book called It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken and read it religiously—even spent $19.95 of U.S. currency so I could carry it around whenever I started to feel insecure. It told me things like, “You are a Superfox,” and it made me feel slightly less neurotic.

In the end, nothing actually worked. All of my efforts seemed passive-aggressive and internal. I became a different person; hurt, angry, and more cynical than a 21-year-old should be. The thing is, the more I did to try and get better, the more bitter I became.

Soulmates and Second Chances

when it's you and me, it's like no one else exists.
and for moments at a time, i'm allowed to forget.
but when the rest of the world comes into focus
suddenly there's so much fear, so much that i can't trust.

and why does it ache?
why doesn't it feel right?
why can't i forgive myself for having given up that way?
and i can be strong,
more stoic than expected
but i can't shake this feeling of knowing you're unaffected.
just a shrug,
just a wave of goodbye.
no more talk of romances.
no more soulmates or second chances.

Amy Tran

You can call it fate, or stupidity, but some part of me hung onto Mike—even when any sane woman would walk away from such an impossible and trying situation. But a few months later, I went to Seattle, his hometown. For an Asian American Women’s Conference, for irony’s sake. And that summer, somehow, for a few weeks building up to that visit, we became friends again through e-mail. So when I visited Seattle, I stayed with Mike. And I saw his beautiful home, played with his cat, rode in his car. His mother made me breakfast before he drove me to the airport after three oddly happy days.

It was at the airport that he gave me the letter that changed everything. In the letter, he told me he broke up with his girlfriend and swore off Grace, and said that he would change to be a better man. A weight had been lifted off of my heart: here, all this time, I thought we would never be friends again. With this letter came hope for a real future.

“You sure you want to do this?” I spoke softly, surprised, and in some ways, overjoyed.
“More than anything.”

I fell for it because, let’s face it, I wanted a chance. I’d been the dirty little secret for so long that I wanted to know how it would feel, if it would work out if I had that title that so many girls vied for; “girlfriend.”

People said we made a cute couple, albeit a little disproportionately matched. Even on my tip-toes, I could barely reach his shoulders. We had few good days; some scattered football games, maybe a couple of parties where we kissed legitimately and not in hiding. At times, the joy was so foreign to me that I felt like it wasn’t mine. Weeks into the relationship, I still struggled with the thought of openly displaying any kind of affection towards him.

I should say that it wasn’t just his actions and my emotional baggage that brought our relationship to its inevitable end. It wasn’t him alone that made me angry about how imbalanced our relationship was. Many things attributed to my change in attitude over the first semester of my senior year. I was taking an Asian American Psychology class and learning about the history of oppression. At least once a week, I was angry about the White Man. The White Man exploited, killed, exoticized, and objectified. All in all, the White Man was primarily to blame for the hurt that my family and millions of others had gone through. I couldn’t help but think of Mike, my boyfriend, as the White Man.
This piercing anger came into its own, but soon added to my paranoia. My fear that he would leave me didn’t truly take form until I asked him an innocent question before leaving for work.

“If you could sleep with any Disney character, who would it be?”
“Hm…Pocahontas.”

I laughed out loud, and he couldn’t understand why. “Out of every Disney cartoon, of course you pick the one where the white male dominates the minority female!” He kind of scoffed, not knowing how to respond. I must have teased him for a little while before kissing him and leaving for work, the idea lingering in my mind for too long after he answered.

For my self-reflection piece in the Asian American Psychology class, I focused on why I spent much of my high school and college career dating white guys. Not only did they better fit the Western idea of beauty, but they were a status symbol to me. To date a white man says to the world, “Look! I’m American!” No one would look at us and think we were Japanese tourists. In my mind, people would look at us and think that we were both so cultured. So, I suppose in some way I took advantage of the men I dated. I wanted guys that towered over me, that were rough and athletic, that were more American-looking than me. Physically-speaking, they were everything that I was not. So the game played both ways.

I still held to the assertion, however, that in most heterosexual relationships, women were expected to sacrifice more of their selves than men did. I began to look at interracial couples and find imbalance. I would feel bad for the woman—usually a woman of color. I saw oppression in relationships and became inexplicably angry at the White Man. With Mike, I started to wonder why we were together, why he was attracted to me. Every action became meaningful, giving me new reasons to hold silent grudges against him. It became clear to me that he was most often attracted to women of color—and most often within that group, Asian women. It got to the point where I couldn’t stop myself. I would be reading a magazine and would get real panicky when I saw a picture of a girl he was certain to be attracted to. Once, in a lounge, I saw a Vice magazine and saw a Seven Jeans ad featuring a White, unshaved man kissing a thin, Asian woman with long, dark hair that fell across the small of her back. If we were better looking, the ad very well could’ve been me and Mike—and this unsettled me. I couldn’t figure out the exact reason why, but I wanted to erase this uneasiness.

These images of White men and Asian women suddenly seemed to be everywhere. When I saw older couples, I wondered where the men had met these women, if they had pursued the women with unabashed fervor, if the attraction was mutual. I would look at the men, judge them by their receding hairlines and bulging bellies and compare them to the women, often thin and so young looking—and I honestly could not help but think that there was dissatisfaction somewhere here. I would concede that there must have been some genuine feelings of love and attraction, but I wondered if I was setting myself up for a trap of unhappiness with Mike. Being with him made me feel guilty, like I was betraying my own kind. And on top of everything, I became increasingly insecure because I realized that girls that looked like me were everywhere, and why should he stay with me if he could be with any of these girls that bore some resemblance to me? Every other woman was a threat, and I was just another Pocahontas.

Amy Tran

And don’t tell me how you feel.
‘Cause I’ve put up with your words too long.
And I’m sure I’m losing my appeal,
but after all, a million things can’t be wrong.

It’s always those last few lines of the chorus that catch me off-guard—even though it’s my own song. Even as my new boyfriend is sitting in front of the stage, urging me on, with all my friends in the audience, I can feel tears well up in my eyes. This song always makes me feel like crying. And I do, usually, I end up crying a little—right there on stage without anyone knowing. Two years from the first time we ever kissed, the memories are still intact.

Mike didn’t seem all that important or special the first time I met him. He’d caught my attention at a party, we joked and laughed, and that was it. I knew he had a girlfriend going to school on the other side of the country, and I, myself, was still working on getting over my first college boyfriend. The moment we met, I couldn’t have foreseen the future we’d have together.

He was a stereotypical white male in many ways: tall, overtly masculine, hairy, perverted, and cocky. He made me laugh, and I think that’s what made me like him so much. As we became closer, I saw that there was a familiarity about him—much more than what met the eye. When we talked about our large families, insecure and broken childhoods, past loves and heartaches, our lives seemed to have been connected all along. That easy manner that he carried around with him made him so charming and easy to love. And when he placed his hands on me, I could feel a warmth I’d forgotten how to feel.

By April of my sophomore year, two months after meeting him, I was smitten. Through the fall semester of junior year, our lives were entangled in a cycle: flirting which led to kissing which led to crying—then silence for a couple of weeks until the cycle would repeat itself. He seemed impossible to stay away from, particularly because neither of us could explain why he wouldn’t just break up with his girlfriend and choose me. Each time there was a different reason—some that I’d make up, and some from him. By the time February rolled around, we had slept together twice and he told me he loved me. But I was tired of being a secret, and aching from being “the other girl.” Though he claimed we were soul mates, I wanted nothing to do with this man who had consistently hurt me.

We stopped talking for two months before I found out about Grace—the other “other girl.” Something must be said about her, because she has proven to haunt my life. When I found out that they had been hooking up since November, a rage lit up inside of me. She reminded me of everything wrong with me—she was thinner, taller, younger, probably here on scholarship. I hated myself for being short, chubby, and—well, at least she was flat-chested like me. The worst thing about Grace was her name. It was a noun, it was an adjective, it could and seemed to be used in every way. It was clichéd, in the way that I saw her name in “amazing Grace” and “graceful” and—well, Grace was just about everywhere. And every time I saw or heard it, I could feel it.

She was my reason to confront him before school let out for summer break. But I received little closure or relief—he simply told me that he loved Grace. And his girlfriend? He loved her too. And me, well, he loved me THE MOST.
And you know, when it comes down to it, maybe we were all a bit of the same—and that’s why we were so damn lovable. I tried to ignore the fact that we were all petite, fairly thin, Asian American, with long dark hair and cheery dispositions. At the time, though, I told myself that this didn’t mean anything. All I could be sure of was that I couldn’t be one of the three loves of his life.

A Million Things
it's a million things that scare me about you
a million times, still i can't live without you
and i've sworn you off
time and time again.
and it's the way you give me far more than i need,
but it's the way you hurt me forcing me to leave,
and i don't think that we'll ever be just good friends.

and all the million lies
and the million signs,
i guess i should've seen them all,
but i was wrong.