The Scientist

One

I gave up.

My eyes were tearing up.

I was standing in the middle of my new apartment. The moving guys were long gone. New York City was swallowed by a relentlessly heavy rain. Tons of unpacked boxes made the living room much smaller. They were covered with raindrops. Muddy footprints were all over the floor. I was supposed to clean them up and start unpacking. That's what people do right? You move to a new place, clean up, unpack, settle in. It's the protocol. If I was being myself, I knew I couldn't bare that level of nastiness. I would have started cleaning or asked someone to shoot me right in my head instead. But I didn't move. I was staring at the rain.

Rainy day has always been my favorite. I don't know why. Maybe it's because of the sound of raindrops hitting on things - metals, pavements, rooftops, they sound like music to me. They calm my nerves and bring peace to me. Or it's because the feeling of the rain cleaning up the world make me feel I'm purified. I just love the rain.

The rain on that day was different. It stirred something up inside me. As if it was a man attempting to send me light signals from afar, but there was this thick and depressing mist in between us, I couldn't figure out what was he signaling. I stared at the rain. I stared at it as hard as I could, hoping somehow the mist would magically disappear so I could receive the message. My eyes were tearing up but the mist was still there.

I gave up. Unpacking and cleaning up were the priorities and clearly they were more realistic than figuring out what the rain was trying to tell me.

I dig out my iPod and speakers, plugged in the cord and hit the Shuffle option. I had 18,833 songs in my iPod which were definitely enough to be my company while I was accomplishing my move-in mission. When I returned my attention to the rain again, the piano prelude of the first song was in the air. Sometimes I thought my iPod was an AI. She could read my mind to know exactly which song to play. It was like she knew I couldn't receive the message because of the mist, so she sent me a breeze. Out of 18,833 songs, she played The Scientist. Then I saw the signals. Message received.

The song never failed to send a shudder to me but it hit me harder than any time before. I guessed it was the rain. I was brought back to a particular rainy day. It was seven years ago, 2008, I was turning 19.

I can still bring back every detail of that day. The rain was pouring down. Impatient drivers were in their road-rage mood. Car horns were screaming. The cold wind was like a stabbing knife. There was a damp smell in the air, like something was decaying, rotten even. It made me want to puke. Students whom I didn't know were passing by. I was pretty sure they were staring at me. They might knew me. I could feel the newsstand owner's stare on my back. I didn't bring my umbrella. I was soaked from head to toe. I was shivering.

Memory is a funny thing. I don't believe there's such a thing named "I can't remember", there's only "I don't want to remember". We recall the memories we want to remember and lock those that we don't' want to somewhere deep down in our mind. We dig a hole in our heart, bury them there, then everything would be fine. But these memories always get back to you, hit you at the most unexpected moment. All they need is a trigger. A book, a painting, a photo, a flower, a perfume, a song. People don't just bury dark memories and leave happy memories alone. We bury happy ones too because sometimes they hurt as much as dark ones do. That rainy day is no doubt a dark one. At first, I repeated that day in my head over and over again. I couldn't stop it. It was like a documentary film, I could play the whole movie, stop at some point, slow down to go through each frame, rewind to play it again. The power of this memory was so strong that other memories around that day were wiped out and I felt obligated to relive this particular one every day. As time went by, it started to take me longer to go back to that day, to recall what had happened. What originally take a one second became a minute, five minutes, then ten minutes. I didn't replay the memory every day any more. It was like twice a week, once a month, then one day it just stopped popping up in my mind. The smell in the air, the coldness of my skin, the harsh rain, stranger's voices, their accusing tones all seemed to fade away. What I could bring back were her eyes, and what they were shouting to me.

Karlie's eyes. Of course I remembered her eyes. I had seen those green eyes, no, I had studied those eyes for million times. I had seen them when they were happy, angry, sad, peaceful, full of love...I could always tell what emotions were behind them. But never had I ever seen them like that. Were they sad? Were they indifferent? For the first time I couldn't read those eyes. She simply looked at me like I was a stranger. She was looking at a stranger.

And I can never forget what they shouted to me - "You are sick."

I was brought back to the darkest moment, the turning point in my life by a song and the rain. Now I'm sitting here, memories are rushing back to me. People whom I met, thing I've done and should have done, and all the wrong timings that led me to that point. I'm also thinking about what happened after that day, how it irreversibly changed my life, how I was trapped and stuck with my worst nightmare, and how blessed I was to meet couple people who were willing to accept me for who I was and be there for me along the way.

I have to write it down. I need to make sure that if I have Alzheimer like my grandpa when I'm old, when it starts to cruelly erase my younger-age memories, there will be something solid as a reminder, proving to me that these people, these crazy dreams and nightmares, these bitter or sweet things did happen in my life. I need to make sure there's an anchor that I can hold on to so I won't lose among the growing blankness in my brain.

And I need to make sure that even my brain can't remember, a part of my heart always knows that I love a girl with shiny blonde hair and exquisite green eyes. And she loves me back.