Traveling with ZL (Part 4) - Reunion After a Long Separation
When the oppressive days had crawled through over seven hundred cycles on the calendar, and some slight light finally seeped into my work life, I decided to end this long period of self-exile. I planned to cross the ocean at the end of September to visit ZL, whom I hadn’t seen in three full years.
I don’t know when it started, but the starting point of my trips always seems to fall after the journey has already begun. That is, there’s no one or two weeks of anticipation before departure, no nightly daydreams with closed eyes about the wonderful things that might happen on this trip. There’s only packing up and going, and even before leaving I’m still dealing with work issues. This makes the whole process too rational and lacking in emotion. This continued until I asked for a small bottle of wine on the plane, and the warmth rising from my chest after it went down dispelled that excess rationality. Only then did my expectations for the unknown and my anxiety about reuniting with an old friend start dancing in my mind.
Getting off the plane and out of the terminal, I saw him. He had cut his hair short and was no longer thin. Now he was a sturdy man with just the right length of hair. Seeing each other, as we gradually approached, neither of us could suppress our smiling lips; the old flame was rekindled. The outdoor air was a bit crisp, and we got into his little car.
Soon, after the joy of reunion settled down—whether because it had been so long or because life in North America demanded it—I noticed he seemed to have armored himself with a transparent shell, keeping me and everything unknown in the world at bay. What he presented to the world was an emotionally stable, burly man, but in certain moments, you could glimpse the immature youth beneath that shell.
Fortunately, that shell was unstable. In ZL’s little car, the scenery along the way, with the passage of time, quickly crushed it. After 36 hours, we were once again chatting about everything under the sun, just like during those years in Suzhou, and shamelessly commenting on every girl who walked by us—except for Asian faces.
Among the many dreams I had dissolved into—flowing like water and forgotten in the vast world—one was to drive along the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) while listening to Jaden’s song “PCH”. Before arriving in Monterey, I mentioned this to ZL. Without a word, he found the song and put it on repeat. Under the sunny sky, by the foggy yet blue sea, when the intro of “PCH” wafted out, the sea breeze took shape. We chased the ever-shrinking horizon, and the rolling tires kept churning out new memories to patch and cover my lost dreams.
Sometimes the sunset was ahead of us; I stared at the afterglow in silence, weighed down by jet lag, while ZL, who was driving at the time, was also silent. The twilight mixed with the car lights played across our faces. Under the gaze of the gods of dusk, we drove toward the immortal sun, and in that silence lay an unceasing conversation. Then he broke the silence: “Hmm, we need a song for this moment,” ZL said while fiddling with the central screen.
P1: ZL has a lot of quirky little things. When I entered his house, I found a pair of small round sunglasses.
P3: I brought that bottle of ice wine that ZL gave me—which had accompanied me for five years—to the US, and we opened and drank it together.
P7: ZL said he really likes this photo, but it makes me look fat, so I’m not fond of it.
P9: Two weeks later, I transferred through San Francisco on my way home and stayed at ZL’s place for another night.
🧩Fragmented Stories
