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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.