Shiho was the hardest part of getting back in touch with Oberlin friends. Shiho is high school, Oberlin is my current reality, and they never were mixed. I’ve been coming to grips with having Shiho back in my life. There’s so much she doesn’t know about these people who I love so dearly and who are so much a part of my life. How do I bridge the elements of Shiho and my friends? Do I tell Shiho about these people? How do I tell Shiho about these people? Even if I wrote to her about them, I couldn’t capture what they are to me. Reflective narratives treat the past as monolithic memory, rather than accumulated dynamic bits and pieces of memories acquired over time.
I need to break off emotional dependence on Amina. Amina stopped writing to me when I was in Japan, and I didn’t know why and it hurt. I asked her why and it was because she was having the most difficult academic semester to date. She doesn’t like the feeling of dumping problems on other people. And maybe she doesn’t like other people dumping their problems on her. Which is what I did all Summer.
I guess her not wanting to dump her problems on other people was about her, and not about being considerate or sensitive to other people. How else could she be so uncharacteristically wrong about how I feel about something.
