Summer is coming to an end, and it’s already feeling like pretty much any other good time in my life: it slipped right through my fingers. This summer has been special for me. I had ups and downs, learned a lot, and had a lot of fun. As a crazy Broadway musical fan, one of the most exciting parts of the summer was meeting Usnavi, Washington Heights, and every sueñito the characters had. (If you’re a musical fan, you already have In the Heights playing in your head and know exactly what I am talking about. If you haven’t seen it, GO WATCH IT…after you finish reading this post, of course!)
Either way, let me explain a little about the movie. In the Heights is about the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City. Every character in the musical has a dream of their own. My favorite is the main character, Usnavi, who dreams of going back to the Dominican Republic where he had the best time of his life with his dad. Every detail he remembers is sweet, and he does all he can to go back, to revisit the island and the perfect time he remembers.
As I’ve been enjoying the great music from In the Heights and thinking about Usnavi's dreams, I can’t help thinking about the best memories I’ve had since coming to the US from China five years ago. So many good memories in each place I have stayed…from Mississippi to Pennsylvania to Virginia. With so many memories of close friends, fun times, and kind host families, I decided to go back to Mississippi for a visit as the summer ends. And soon, there I was, two weeks before school starts, sitting on a flight, nervous about seeing the people from my past—from my own sweet memories of a place and time years ago. I was excited to relive the laughs we had together, to enjoy the great conversations we shared when we were at school… Yet, when I got there, I discovered that sometimes the places are the same but we are different, and so are those we remember. While relationships flowed easily back then, now things can feel a bit awkward after being apart for so long. And it can be hard to reconnect when we’ve all changed and grown so much. It made me wonder if sometimes we aren’t better off just living with the memories, preserving the people and places of our past that taught us so much. I also wondered if maybe revisiting a place is less about recreating great moments from the past than about seeing how much we’ve grown and what we've learned.
In some ways, that makes our life like a bus trip. We make stops and pick up people who join us for a while on the journey, but some (most...) don’t stay on our bus forever. They move on when they reach their stop—and so do we, moving on and leaving them behind, yet carrying with us all we learned from them, all they gave us. The time they were on the bus with us was wonderful, but we can’t go back and recreate those memories because every rider and every stop changes with time. Yet we can live our lives appreciating the connections we had with them, and we can love knowing how much they helped us become who we are.