The Blue Orchid Years

Chapter 16: A Promise Made Over Bubble Tea

September 16th 2626

I knew I had to eat. I knew it wasn't good to deprive myself of nutrients. My appetite, however, was nonexistent. For the past few days, the only things I could eat were crackers and some oranges I had lying around randomly on my study table.

Knowing my predicament, Tony had very kindly tried to make smoothie for me but, not to sound ungrateful for his attempt at making sure I didn't starve, it tasted like vomit. I wondered how he could stomach that godawful concoction every morning before his basketball practice.

I talked to Gibran about my grades and my anxiety about not being worthy enough of literally having a piece of someone else inside of me. Wait, what a weird phrasing. I meant being a recipient of somebody's lungs. Somebody died so that I lived and that was unfair, was it now?

Gibran's reaction left me with a lot to ponder. He believed that instead of feeling I had to live my life in such a way to honor Lee, I just needed to be mindful that the best thing I could do would be to keep on being me. At first I recoiled at this suggestion. Being me? Being a pathetic person?

"You're not pathetic, Nardho," Gibran had said. "The very fact that you get anxious over carrying your late advisor's legacy means you're a good person. If you were a bad person you wouldn't care at all."

Hearing him adamantly telling me that I wasn't bad was supposed to calm me down, right? Wrong. My stubborn brain went to the conclusion that if I were bad then it would be easier for me to cope with everything. If I were bad, I wouldn't have to deal with loss of appetite, sleeplessness, and other side effects of grief.

"Gibran, is being a good person a curse?" I had asked. I had expected the professor to laugh at my question or to usher me out of his office, but he just smiled and told me to bring up this topic to a philosophy major instead. He even suggested that I might actually be happier studying philosophy.

"What if it suffocates me even more and I can't break free from this chrysalis of misery?" I was hesitant to share my trepidation but since I was already being vulnerable I might as well be real with him.

"That's not true. Just like talking about atheism will not automatically make you an atheist, asking philosophical stuff will not necessarily make you a nihilist."

"I'm afraid if I keep digging for answers to my questions I'll go insane. Even now, Gibran, I feel as if I'm holding on to the last sliver of my sanity."

"It's your choice," he said quietly. "From what I've observed, however, you seem the type to be deriving a sense of pleasure from decoding meaning in intangible things."

"What do you mean? I'm not a manic pixie kind of guy, if that's what you're implying."

"You're not, but you seem to be hungry for wisdom. Your question about whether being good was a curse is an indication that you're an abstract thinker."

"So, should I give up trying to be a biochemist?" My frustration rose and I had to remind myself to stay polite.

"Again, that's your choice. You're the only one who knows why you wanted to be a biochemist."

Leaving his office, I felt worse than I did before our lengthy conversation. Truth be told, I picked my major on a whim. Save for my mom who studied archeology, everyone in my family was into science and I thought being a scientist would be a path I inevitably thread on. I neither hated nor loved science, it was just another subject I excelled in--until this semester from hell wrecked me.

Philosophers I had read about always waxed eloquent about 'knowing thyself' and I used to scoff at such empty truism, but today I found myself searching for an answer to the millennia-old inquiry.