Chicken Wings
I watched the movie “Past Lives” this weekend, and it wrecked me. Oh my God, it destroyed me. I cried twice, the second lasting longer than I wanted it to. I don’t know. I cried because it made me sad and because it made me happy. Those are very small words, I want to find better ones to describe what I felt when I watched it, but those will do for now.
When I moved to Palmview Texas, I was 4 months away from turning 16. I started high school right away, and it was hard. Hard is an understatement. It was hell. It was confusing. It was lonely. For the first entire year, I kept talking with my old friends from Mexico more than I was talking to anyone from my new school. I had a friend who I had known for years, since the 6th grade. He will argue we knew each other from the 1st grade, but I don’t remember (sorry stranger). We were good friends, best friends maybe. We used to sit right next to each other during the 6th grade, and we talked all the time. I remember being called out by the teacher a couple of times, which was very rare for me. I was quiet. Around the 8th grade, we grew apart. We stopped talking to each other for a while. We made new friends and we stopped having things in common. It was hard for me. I didn’t have many friends that I could be honest with, and he was one of them.
When I moved to the US, we reconnected. To this day, I’m not really sure why we reconnected, but I needed a friend, so I didn’t question it. We started messaging almost every day. Things were different. We were friends and confided with one another, but he had many love interests, some more intense than others. Eventually, we grew apart again. I met Edgar in my junior year of high school, who is my husband now. My “white husband” (I hope by now you see where I am going with this).
My friend and I grew apart again, this time a bit different than last time. We didn’t disappear from each other’s lives, but updates now came in the form of Instagram stories instead of direct messages. Acquaintances is the right word, even if it hurts to acknowledge it. He came to visit me once. Well, not to visit me specifically, but we saw each other. It was odd. When he arrived, I had all these memories come back to me, but distant. Like I was seeing them with a blurry filter on them. Like it was another life, one that had been a hundred years ago. One that when I revisit, the girl I am watching isn’t me, but a total stranger.
I am married now, and I buy peanut butter at the grocery store. My parents never bought peanut butter. I didn’t try peanut butter until I was in high school. We also buy bagels. And canned soda. And sometimes, we buy Bounty.
There’s this part of the movie where Arthur asks Nora if she ever imagined she would end up in that bed, sleeping next to him. Nora says “Are you saying you are the answer to my family’s immigrant story?”. We both laughed so hard. No one else in the theater laughed, which made my snorting even more embarrassing. Edgar isn’t the reason we moved. He isn’t even the reason I stayed. This is my life now. The only one because the other one seems so far away. So unknown. And yeah, this life is better than the last one, but I will never be satisfied with just this life alone. I will always feel like I should be living the other one, and a part of me will always wonder what would’ve happened if we had never left. But in the end, I will always come home to cry in my husband's arms. I will always say I want chicken wings when he asks what I want for dinner.
