Samantha Duan
If you know me, you know how I usually tell these stories.
The time I got lost and found the best dumplings of my life. The bus I missed that led me somewhere better. Mishaps with soft landings. I like it that way… the world winking at me, letting me off easy.
This one doesn’t go like that.
It was supposed to be our anniversary. One year. Taiwan in the humid stretch of a summer that never quite cooled, the air thick enough to hold in your hands.
I planned it, of course. The itinerary, the trains, the wake-up times. Which stall for breakfast, which night market after dark. I always plan. I’m the eldest daughter. Carrying things is what my hands were taught to do before they knew anything else.
But somewhere on that trip, the carrying started to feel like something else.
I woke him. I read the maps. I found the exits, the platforms, the right coins. When he was tired, I softened. When he was bored, I filled the silence. I kept telling myself this was love: the anticipating, the smoothing. Maybe it was. But it didn’t feel like being held. It felt like babysitting someone I was also supposed to lean on.
You don’t really know someone until you travel with them. I’d heard that before. I understood it now.
The train to Ruifang was full. We stood pressed into strangers, shoulders against shoulders, the metal rail warm and slick under too many hands. The announcements came in Mandarin, then Taiwanese, then English, calm and looping. We held hands. He sighed.
“So many people,” he said. “Why is it always like this.”
Not a question. Just a small complaint, tossed into the air for me to catch and fix, the way I always did.
And I stood there, holding his hand, and felt more alone than if I’d been holding nothing.
I don’t want this, I thought. Not the crowd. The guarding. A whole life spent leading, the body, the mood, the map, all of it, and calling it partnership. I know what safe is supposed to feel like. I’ve longed for it quietly for years. This wasn’t it.
When we stepped off the train, something in me went quiet. Numb, floating, a little outside my own skin. The platform moved around me and I watched it move, distant, like a scene through fogged glass. I could have stayed there, unhooked from everything.
But there were lanterns still to see. And I was the one who knew the way. So I woke myself up, the way you do. I led us on.
At Shifen, the lanterns went up one by one into the night, small warm bodies of light rising over the tracks. We were handed a brush and ink. The paper was rough under my fingers, thirsty. He wrote about us; the years he hoped for, the two of us in them.
I wrote my own hopes. My work. A place of my own. A softer version of me I was still becoming.
Nothing about us.
He noticed. He always noticed the wrong things at the right time.
“Why isn’t there anything about us on your lantern?” he asked.
I smiled. Soft, sad, already somewhere else.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to settle for this.“
We let it go anyway. Watched it climb, wobbling, joining the others.
The station kept us a while longer. Some places you only pass through. This one held on… my ink drying in the night air, his hand no longer in mine, both of us watching the same light rise and mean two different things.