Guest Post: 'What It Means to Love Someone'
In which former Essays in Journalism student Linnet Chang considers the early contours of a lifetime companionship
It’s been a rough week at UCLA. We did Zoom school yesterday. What I said, to open class, was that we were probably all hurting but the most useful thing I could do is require my students to write, to offer this promise someone will read what you do and care. In real life, I said darkly, no one cares. (Unless you make them care, somehow.) I also talked about the fact that, even in the hardest times, when I personally had been most afraid, mad, sad, confused, or upset, it had always been true that writing helped. I believed this to be true. It’s sill been a rough week.
How about something different?
Here’s faithful correspondent and Winter 2021 Essays in Journalism student Linnet Chang, writing with a piece she’s been working on for a long time. (I just checked, the first draft she sent me was September 2023.) Credit to Linnet for sticking with it! She’s a gorgeous writer and a really great person in general. Be like Linnet.
Wherever you are, as you read this, take care. If you owe me an essay, keep working on it and don’t give up. I heard just this week from a student from fall of 2019 who told me he’d been ignoring my emails for years and years and for some reason decided to read one and got sucked in and then methodically went back and read a bunch of the Substack. I love that. I hope I get an essay from him. (He thought I wouldn’t remember him! Not only did I remember him but I almost was able to quote from an old mini-essay of his that I loved and burned into my brain.)
Anyhow, take care, and thanks for reading.
The Strange Thing About Change Is...
By Linnet Chang
I turned 25 this year. An age that sits so squarely between the exhilaration of the early twenties and the queasiness of waiting for your thirties. It’s a time where other 25-year-olds are in such different stages of life; on Instagram, I see friends from UCLA getting engaged, friends from high school getting married, friends with babies still aged by months, friends taking STEP, friends switching jobs for the first time.
And me. Starting to feel my body sluggish without a morning cup of caffeine; too young to understand the intricacies of the industry I work in, yet already too aware of the politics and callousness of corporate; learning what it means to be an adult with responsibilities; just starting to understand what it means to really love someone.
It’s almost a year and a half into my first serious relationship. “First” because this was the first time I said I love you and I understood I what it meant to say that.
But now, when the initial bubbles and shimmers fade into a routine pattern like the ocean tide, how tenacious is our love? Will it weather the storms or erode with time?
I wonder how others knew they were ready to get married.
How were they sure?
Hold hands and kiss. Trying wheel-thrown pottery together. Sleep in the same bed. Fart in front of each other for the first time. Travel to a new city. Ask to be picked up from the airport. Meet each other’s parents. Taking each other to see where we grew up. We do the things that progress the relationship, each step a hopeful glimpse into what an answer could be.
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Seeing my boyfriend’s hometown this past weekend was strangely intimate.
Windy roads dip into the bottom of canyons covered in arid-weather shrubs, capturing urban legends of ghosts that come out at night along the lightless streets. At his old high school, a tan Toyota Highlander stood alone under solar panels, a window smashed-in on the driver’s side. His parents’ home, lived in for decades, had books hidden under desks, magazines tucked in the bathroom, 1000+ piece puzzles scattered on the dining table. Lots and lots of pictures of loved ones on multiple vertical surfaces.
In a place so unfamiliar to me, there are memories being recounted to my ears for the first time.
This is where I played baseball as a kid. Though most of the time I was more excited about the nachos and hot dogs after the game than the game itself. Three baseball fields, golden with the hue of dried grass, sat adjacent to each other like Russian dolls, each growing in size as we pulled to the end of the parking lot. I imagined a hot dog stand in front of the bathrooms, complete with a pinwheel umbrella and the oozing stench of plastic cheese.
Seeing old haunts left me with more questions than when I started the day.
(How does he feel to see his childhood room turned into a storage space for books? Does he like to stick eclectic combinations of magnets on the fridge (UCI Health “How to identify signs of a heart attack” next to a MatchaBot from Moongoat) because his mom sticks pictures, advertisements, and funny magnets on the fridge too? When did he decide that baseball outgrew him? That the demands of second base one day became the final out of the inning? During cross-country training, was he running from the ghosts of lore? Did he seek out the new band building because that was his favorite part of high school?)
This is the heart of Mira Mesa. A left turn at the intersection reveals a public library with aquamarine trims next to the soon-to-be-closed 99 Cents Only. Just behind the two buildings, another park sprawled across two sides of the streets, dull plastic slides on the right, shiny metal playground climbers on the left. An uneasy, melancholy feeling settles in my stomach.
Strange, how places can change, yet remain the same. How establishments once sturdy are forgotten. How seeing the changes of his neighborhood reflected the changes in him over the 18 years he grew up here. How, despite how superimposed we are now, part of me is scared that we will grow apart, and what happens then? Will we become only echoes of loving memories, a trickle of a time gone by?
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Blockbuster of the summer, Sleepless in Seattle, convinced my parents to uproot their new immigrant roots from California to Washington, where I spent seven years of my life growing up.
Showing my boyfriend my hometown last month was strangely intimate.
A new shopping complex complete with apartments appeared in my hometown, hiding the trees that used to hug the curve of the road. The Mexican restaurant next to the QFC across the street from Safeway still operates. The elementary school has a new parking lot, a new metallic playground climber, but the same salt on the sidewalks to melt ice. The townhouse we moved into during 6th grade was repainted, closer to the gaudy hue of magenta, rather than the pink-orange salmon it was a decade ago.
In a place now pseudo-familiar to me, memories I forgot I had spilled out of my mouth.
This is the apartment building we first moved into when we moved here. There was a decent snowstorm our first year, and we lost power for a few days. But I remember it being so fun to snuggle up next to the fireplace to stay warm and seeing my mom put groceries out on the balcony because it was colder than the powerless fridge. Its exterior was still painted white with green-gray accents: the same color scheme consistent on the carports and garages. A large number “9” hung on the front. The biggest difference to me—some cars nestled under the carports now sported the new seven-character license plate instead of the six.
This is the lake our family used to take walks to. It’s man-made, but some people fish here, and others let their dogs swim in the summer in the water, even though they’re not supposed to. Green plastic fencing stood alert against the metal diamonds that blocked the dock down to the lake; closed for renovation. The wooden stage in the heart of the park lay empty, not yet warm enough for summer concerts. A new community poetry board welcomed visitors to the park, adorned with different handwritings, scribbles, thoughts, drawings.
Strange, how places can change, yet remain the same. How the memory of a place holds a version of ourselves we no longer carry.
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I wonder if he felt the same when I took him around my hometown. Did he notice elements of myself that stemmed from this place? Did it feel distant to him, the person that I was? Did he also fear a potential future where we would not be together anymore?
But, despite the changes that places, people, and feelings may have, some things remain constant.
I migrate towards him when we share a bed, ending up in the middle of the bed just to be closer to his warmth. Wherever we go, his fingers wiggle between mine, like a compass that points North. We make each other laugh. We do our best to be patient and attentive listeners. A hug from the other is permission to let go a sigh of relief.
And while the future holds a landscape that continues to shift, one thing seems improbably standard, mundane, and cliché: change is expected.
We will change. My feelings about him will change. His feelings about me will change. After all, we’re only 25 with decades ahead that remain a mystery.
And yet, equally paradoxical and plain, when I know I’ve met the One, I’ll supposedly have known. Because despite all the change, the strange thing is—
somehow, we remain the same.