a quick write in the denver international airport with held back tears and held back thoughts:

♪ Yesterday Once More – Carpenters

there’s a very distinct quality to an airport that creates a pocket of timelessness. even then, this static feeling i get from sitting at the airport gate, one seat between me and the person next to me, across from someone who appears vaguely my age, is all but a three-hour layover exchanged for a two-hour, eighteen-hour, one-hour time difference.

there’s an honest quality about coming home. returning to old and steady friends after we’ve all earnestly barreled towards the diverged paths that adulthood requires us to pave. even then, somehow all these paths we take converge back, just in time for the brief moments we spend together. like making up for lost time, i’m suddenly facing the truth of the past months that blurred into some nondescript block of events. new friendships, boyfriends, girlfriends, and the push and pull that college brings— how grateful i am to have survived this bundle of nostalgia and friendship. it’s a quiet and most rewarding luxury, and a rather expensive one at that. any truly good thing comes as quietly as it might leave.

every homecoming embraces a routine i’ve adopted over the past years: with a box of brown hair dye and some rubber gloves, i knead the darkening cream into the shimmering grey roots of my mother’s hair. each silver strand is a testament to her worry and stress from my first steps to my undefined future; just another penny paid to motherhood. how strange it is to celebrate her courage and unconditionality by erasing every worn-down and love-filled indication.

♪ 起风了 – Zhou Shen

there’s a brutal quality that makes honesty feel so real. all of this is temporary, and time is passing without a breath or a pause for reality to catch up. i learn that the right temple returns more silver than the left. i remember that the strands at her crown are softer than the coarser sweep by her ears. i know to dye the back only at the end, because she “won’t ever see it anyway.” i run my hands through my mother’s hair, to brush, to dye, to mend, and find myself running the pads of my fingers over more and more scalp each time.

there’s an insatiable quality that encapsulates everything we will ever be: i chased adulthood as a teenager and now i mourn my childhood, selfishly unaware that i’m still living it and that we’ll have more years if i allow myself this simple right. together, with this drugstore box dye, my mother and i chase her youth. to each greedy question there’s an inevitable answer. a destination to all the tireless running, so heavy in the distance. and i know i should be chided for such premature thoughts.