Time to Sail

The trigger was tiny. So tiny I'm embarrassed to tell it.

Friday night, on video with my mom, I mentioned — offhand — "I'm thinking of taking some vacation." That's it. That one sentence. My mother's radar locked on instantly: "Vacation? Where? With whom? How long? With your status, if anything goes wrong with the visa stamp, do you even get back in? Do you know what happened to Auntie Li's son—"

"Mom," I said, "Auntie Li's son has died for the cause three times now. Let the man rest."

"What is that attitude?"

The next fifteen minutes escalated from vacation to my attitude toward life, and from my attitude toward life to what we sacrificed to send you out there. I didn't fight back. I never fight. I just turned my own volume down one notch at a time until I was on mute, said my last "mm," and hung up.

No tears. No throwing the phone. I just sat there feeling something in my chest get wrenched one notch tighter — the same something that had been winding for seven months.

And then it snapped.

It made the lightest sound. Light as a mooring rope slipping off a bollard.

I opened my laptop. No incognito this time. Direct flight to Amsterdam, Tuesday after next, economy, window. Card number, name, passport — I typed fast, fast like I was afraid one second of slowness would give me the chance to intercept myself. Half a second before CONFIRM PAYMENT, I paused—

OPT. Re-entry. The H-1B lottery. Stability above all. My mother's voice filed a full page of risk assessment in my head.

I thought: approved. This risk, I'm taking.

The moment I pressed it, I felt nothing at all. No fireworks, no racing heart. It was like merging a PR that had been open way too long: quiet, and obviously correct.

Vivi heard the click from her room and came out, looked at me, then at the screen. Her whole face was shock: "You BOOKED it?!"

"Booked it."

"How long?"

"Return date," I said, "is a month out. The changeable kind."

She stared at me for three seconds, then broke into an enormous grin. "正啊! Beautiful!" — and sprinted back to her room. "Wait! I have a packing-list template for you—"

Two weeks later: SFO, security line. My mother was still not speaking to me; the family group chat was as silent as our team's Slack during layoff week. My dad, though, texted me privately: "Be safe. Pack enough medicine." Followed by his generation's signature, half-a-beat-slow 🙏

After boarding, I did something premeditated: I shoved the work phone and the work laptop into the very bottom of my backpack and powered them off. The click of the lid closing sounded like a lid closing on something else, too.

Pushback. Taxi. Throttle. The second the wheels left the ground I leaned against the window and watched the Bay Area tilt away below, shrinking, blurring into a circuit board.

For the first time in seven months, I was not thinking about next Monday.

Later, Lucas taught me a phrase in Dutch. He said it's what they say before setting out:

Nu moet de boot maar varen — it's come to this, so let the boat sail.

My boat sailed that Friday night.