I suppose others remember his larger legacies. The ones set in stone. His accomplishments, what he built, his reputation, his photos with so and so and lunches with who and who. 

I don’t remember that much. 

I know of them, but it’s as if they were done by someone else. Listings on a resume or chapters in a biography. I don’t remember them because I didn’t see them. 

I knew less of him than I would have liked. Things we could have talked about when I could understand more float now like all the other unsaid stories in his life. 

But I know his other legacies. The smaller ones. The ones that I can remember.

I know his legacy in the two little pots of glass flowers that stand on my shelf, that once stood on his desk in his office and were transplanted after he saw me spend the whole time eyeing them. 

I know his legacy in the stuffed giraffe that sits in the corner of my room, a first birthday present to my sister that was passed down to me. 

In the way that my father’s cheeks pull back to nearly touch his ears when his laugh becomes a beam.

In the way that I, the only non-AC kid among my siblings, know how to sing the school song just as well as the others after singing it to him and seeing his heartbeat monitor rise when listening to it. 

In Gershwin’s Summertime and Teresa Tang’s 月亮代表我的心. 

In any texture that feels like tweed. 

In soft hands. 

In yellow.

And in hugs goodbye in which my head could only reach his chest.

I wish there were more.

Roses, Dan Flavin, MoMA. 

Three-and-a-bit months into college and this new environment is starting to become a little more like reality and a little less like living in a temporary fictional state. Which is good: I feel like a piece of laundry that was churning inside a washing machine finally being taken out to relax a little on a drying line (the strong gusts of finals season not withstanding). But temporary states let you explain things away, you can self-rationalise and just close your eyes hoping that when you open them, things will be different. When it becomes reality is when no matter how much you blink, what you’re looking at just won’t disappear. Which means that I have to live with it, and acknowledge certain things.

Acknowledge that yes, I still get homesick at times and I’ll probably continue to do so for a long while to come. That I miss my parents and my siblings, the way my dogs run to the gate to welcome me home, the curved red couch I’d lie on to watch tv or play games, the smell of dinner wafting up the stairs to my bedroom, the sound of a tropical thunderstorm outside while I curl up happily dry and comfortable in bed with a book at two in the morning. I miss my friends and even school food, and running around the field like maniacs flinging grass clippings at each others’ hair. But then again, it just means that I have good memories and it’ll be all the more sweet when I can go back and appreciate what I left behind. 

That sometimes you just feel sad. There can be no explanation, it might be a little bit of homesickness, a bit of homework stress; it can be that the weather is just plain shit that day and makes you feel like you should be crying as much as the sky is. Or sometimes that life just isn’t what you thought it would be, or that you’re hangry and just really need some good food in your system. And that’s okay, because what kind of hyperactive morphine bunny feels happy around the clock for the whole year? Also, if you were to smile every moment of the day your cheek muscles would be in perpetual agony. 

When you just feel trapped. Like collage pieces between sheets of glass. Psychogeography, Dustin Yellin, Pioneer Works. 

That I have friends, and that they can’t be defined by quantity. Especially coming from years of only slightly shifting comfortable social groups, it seems so easy to compare yourself to people in huge groups of friends (or well, “squads”) here in this new place and wonder why you’re not one of them. But not having a kazillion friends in no way reflects any kind of inadequacy; I know that the ones I do have are ones that I can count on, they’re the ones who’ve made my transition so much easier and smoother and I appreciate them all the more for it. It’s also a lot easier to fit them into one Instagram post. 

That people are different. It seems like the most obvious thing, but it’s so obvious that sometimes we let it fade into the background when it deserves centre stage, and we attribute the difference between other people’s fates and ours instead to our own failure. And granted, realistically speaking sometimes our shortcomings are responsible. But so much of the time, we inflict torture on ourselves through comparison, with pictures on social media (let’s get real it’s all curated anyway, who’s going to post photos of themselves studying late and eating dining hall food everyday), with people who look like they’re perpetually having the time of their lives. And you wonder why your life isn’t like theirs, if it should be like theirs, if you’re doing something wrong. But as long as you’re enjoying yourself, does it actually matter? College life might not exactly be 22 Jump Street or Spring Breakers or any other crazy college movie - and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s so much more to it to experience, especially here in New York surrounded by art and performance and food and this general atmosphere of possibility. If the whole idea “college life” with red solo cups and beer pong and fomo permeates even here in this huge, diverse and not exactly united body, I can’t even imagine what it must be like in a smaller campus college. So some people prefer the party scene, some might prefer chocolate biscuits in bed or a day just wandering around a museum, others might like a mixture of both, and all are completely acceptable. In no way should any of these lifestyles be answerable to the judgment of others because a difference in preference is just that - a difference, not a deficiency. 

There’s so much more that I could cover but I’ll just stop here to avoid sounding too much like a self-help book. Telling yourself that you have a good life doesn’t mean that your problems don’t count, but being able to take things one by one and put them into perspective seems like a pretty healthy mechanism. As it is, being thankful for what I have doesn’t completely negate those questions I sometimes ask myself about where I am, but I guess with new realities you kind of have to try to look things in the eye and accept them bit by bit. 

Untitled, Felix Gonzales-Torres, MoMA.