Story of Rye part 3

Part 3

As I write this the question of why I’m writing is continuing to mull through my mind. And I’ve come up with something. I don’t believe that there is a single part of my life, who I am now, that hasn’t been effected, in a big way or a small way, by this story here. So if you are to read anything I’ve written, or anything I will ever read again, you have to know this story. Now as to why I want you to understand, and understand this part of me, you friends and strangers who might come across this, I’m not sure exactly. I have always tried to write honestly to people no matter who they are, it’s the only way I can do it, if I don’t tell the whole truth I feel like I’ve been fucking a stranger. It’s pointless and useless to me. For me to enjoy anything that I’m doing in this atmosphere, I have to have truth and love, it’s not just an assignment, it’s an instinct of the heart. So here is the continuation.


After our period of discontent, things just kept getting better, and for the rest of my time in China, we were just happy. I want to get the description of this just right though, because this was the important part, this is the state of things that you really need to understand. The problem is that I’m not sure if it’s possible to write this purely. Because I want to remember it as it was, I want to remember how I felt at the time, how I was happy, how I loved this person. How I felt my life was complete now, and that I could start a whole new chapter in my life with this new partner. I want to see her how I saw her then, and not let the things that would happen later taint my view of her, don’t want to read into things that I didn’t notice at the time. But in doing this I wonder if I glorify her more than I did at the time. As time passes it scares me how unsure I am about how I really felt. I know I loved her, I know I spent a lot of time with her, and I know I felt that I needed her, but I don’t know what feelings I truly had and to what degree they were there. This happened a long time ago, almost 2 years ago now.
But here is what I believe I felt. I felt passion, I felt agony when we were apart. I loved everything she did. When I spent a month starving because I ran out of money, she would bring me food from her house. As I wrestled with a stomach parasite for 4 months straight, she held my hands because while I was in the most pain, and I clung to her as my stomach rocked my body in fire, she was the only thing that comforted me. I dreamed of the day I could show her my country, and my city, and my home. I marveled as our love matured, because it felt like it was boundless, that the longer I lived, all I would ever feel was the continued growth of our love, the greater understanding of how we worked in each others lives.
While I was in China I became tremendously skilled at letting things go. I didn’t worry about anything, I just let the universe direct me and that’s where I went, it’s that relaxed way of looking at the world that led me from one end of China to the other. It’s what took me to Rye in the first place, it’s what let me love her with no boundaries, because I had given up being worried about what I felt, or what I should feel, I loved her in an instant cause my heart was open to find my soul mate, and that’s who she was to me. The person that clicked in with my soul.
So though me and Rye both knew we had a time limit on our relationship, I didn’t think about it much. And when the day finally came for me to leave. At the airport I had the same kind of departure that I’d had from my parents nearly a year ago. A simple goodbye, a hug, but no kiss because that was unseemly in China. No tears, no great emotion, because in my heart I felt like we were only going to be apart for a short time, I was just saying good bye for a moment. Though I knew it might be a long time intellectually, I couldn’t feel it. Also we both believed she would very soon be an au pair in America and I would see her in a month or two. As for me though I was off on my trip to Beijing to meet my parents, then with them to Tibet, before I we made our way home. I continued to talk with Rye on the phone and through texts while I was in China, and in Tibet. Tibet was amazing, but a different story. But important in that, a few days after I got home in the US, she also went on a trip to Tibet, it was a few weeks where I couldn’t talk to her, but I felt closer to her knowing we had shared such an amazing place even if not at exactly the same time.
At home though as time went by we started getting bad news about the au pair program. It was proving much harder to get a US visa than we had expected, in fact it was pretty near impossible for Rye to get one any time soon. For a month or two we kept trying though, she would get connected with an au pair family, and stuff, but then they would turn her down in favor of someone who already had a visa lined up to come to the US. It was getting frustrating because even if she were to get with one of these families, she would most likely be living somewhere on the east coast, in New York, or at the closest yet, in Minnesota. After a while it became apparent things weren’t going to work out. And we made the very hard, but seemingly necessary choice to break up. To go our separate ways but remain friends. And who knows, maybe someday rekindle something when we were both done with school and ready to undergo something like that. It was hard to let her go, of all the acts of faith I had been asked to make as a result of my China trip. All the times I would be on a plain or a train and have no idea where I was going, or where I would be sleeping that night, how many times I knew so little about anything that I was doing what just kept walking forward out of faith that things would work out, this was the hardest, and quite honestly, it’s a choice I failed, and it’s this failed test of my faith that I believe led to all the hell to come.
A few weeks after we had broken up, I got an e-mail from Rye, attached was a letter from a family in America that wanted her to be an au pair. A family that lived here, in Portland. We were both shocked, and excited. And we both decided that we would try for it. I took it as a sign that the universe really was backing us up, that it was really going to support us, we were soul mates for sure. The next month or so involved Rye franticly getting paper work turned in to every necessary place. And finally having her visa interview. For Chinese people they cannot simply come to the US, they must be interviewed and evaluated before they are granted entry into the US, to determine weather they are a risk of over staying their visa, staying in the US illegally.
We started talking about all the things we would do when she got here. How she would come over to my house for holidays, she would meet my family, I would show her every wonderful thing about my city, there wasn’t a second that I was walking down the street and not imagining her walking beside me, telling her everything about the places we were seeing, all the stories of my life that had taken place there. My heart was on fire, because I was sure she would be with me soon.
But of course as things turned out, it didn’t work. On the day of her interview, she sent me an e-mail telling me that she had failed, she said the woman who had done the interview said that a girl her age, with no college degree, and with no clear bonds to China that would require her to come back, had basically no chance of getting a US visa.
We were both so sad, but as the time to move on came about again, I realized something, realized that I needed her in my life. And this is where I realized wrong. This is where I failed, Because I felt like I had let the universe run so freely for so long, that it owed me this one thing and so I told Rye that I loved her, told her I only wanted her, and I said I would rather be with her in spirit for the 3 years it would take the two of us to finish college than to just let it go. I asked if she felt she could stand being in such a long distance relationship for that long. And she agreed. We were going to be strong, we were going to persevere. I had the ultimate trust in her. There was no one in my life EVER that I had trusted this much to be strong. Because I loved her, and I knew she loved me, and I knew this was a rare type of love that only a few people were ever lucky enough to feel. And this is when I finally made that choice to turn from trusting of the universe to simply trusting in my own strength. But inevitably, the fall would come, and it fell hard.