【by Orly Perez】

I wish I could say the sweltering heat of the Midwestern summer afternoons had taken me by surprise, that each drop of sweat on my forehead had caught me off guard, and that the sticky discomfort clinging to my skin was something unexpected. But the truth is, I had done my research and still went there willingly, fully aware of what awaited me. I complained. A lot, actually. For the months leading up to my internship, I took every opportunity to remind my friends that I was going to spend the summer all by myself in a small town in the middle of nowhere––Rochester, Minnesota. But every time, they would remind me I was going to be working at the Mayo Clinic, and therefore to “shut the fuck up.” Fair enough––when I received the acceptance letter to their prestigious summer research program a couple of months ago, I thought I was going to pass out. I had done it. The sleepless nights working on my application, on the essay I read, and reread, and rewrote a thousand times, the afternoons preparing for the interview––it hadn’t all been for nothing. I had earned my spot, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this achievement, like many other moments in my life, would be fleeting.

One block East, three blocks North. That’s all it took me to get from my apartment to Café Steam. I could smell their freshly brewed coffee from around the corner––the traffic light holding me back as the unconscious anticipation of the caffeine rush invited me in, promising an escape from the real world, from the claustrophobic town I was spending my summer in. I had been there for about a month now, exploring every inch of the city I could get to by walking, somehow always finding my way back through the creepy tunnels full of geese poop that led right to my apartment. The city’s simplicity masked the hospital’s reality; walking through those big old wooden doors every morning felt like a portal that transported me into a different dimension. White cement walls, white lights, a marble white floor, just enough white to make you feel like you’re going crazy. “Code blues” and machine beeps that always find you. Endless hallways that look the same all around the buildings. Windowless labs that make it seem as if time stops passing, where day and night blur together as life and death battle each other in every corner. How can a place full of life feel so lifeless? I spent a lot of time by myself in a lab full of computers and machines that stared back at me, avoiding their judgment by drifting into my own. I should make pasta salad for lunch tomorrow. Do I have all the ingredients? I should probably go to the grocery store. I haven’t called my grandma this week. Mental note to call her. How are Sol and Dominique doing? Am I good enough to be here? I want to give up. *Crying break.* I only have two months left here…one month left here…a couple weeks. Who are actually the people I call my “Rochester friends”? I don’t really know much about them, do I? Nothing I say to them matters, I will never see them again anyway. I was falling into a familiar pattern, creating temporary connections with no lasting roots––a fleeting existence among people I would soon leave behind. 

The hospital was full of commotion, yet somehow eerily quiet––a chaos that strangely made sense. Café Steam was everything the hospital wasn’t––my refuge, where noise was just that, noise. Its old-fashioned brick walls contained the murmurs of what felt like a thousand people, a buzz in the air that gave me a false sense of security. Nothing I said while being there was real; only empty words came out of my mouth in between sips as I eavesdropped on the conversations around me. 

I met Cihan in the community kitchen of our apartment complex, and we quickly became friends. He had gotten there from Turkey just a week after I did, so we both knew how lonely Rochester and the hospital could get, and we both just needed someone to talk to. The way he talked about the future made it seem as if he had everything figured out, but his brown eyes revealed how scared he actually was. He portrayed himself with confidence to overcompensate the constant battle he endured, always against himself, only against himself. Breakfast before work had become a daily tradition, and the superficiality of our conversations meant I never needed brain power to talk to him. His presence was a break from the turmoil of my days. 

“Isn’t it hard?” His question still rumbled in my head a couple of hours after we had parted ways at Café Steam. I wanted to scream back, but I held back, afraid to break down in front of someone I barely knew. I just looked at him, silently, his eyes eagerly looking into mine, looking for an answer I was too afraid to give. What do you think? I wanted to say. That it isn’t hard to leave people behind all the time? To move to a place where you don’t know anyone? To build a new life for yourself without anyone’s help? As he told me about his future plans of moving abroad I didn’t have the heart to tell him all that, to tell him the truth; that sometimes I question myself and wonder if it’s actually worth it; that too many nights, I lay awake, tears staining my pillow, feeling the weight of loneliness crushing my chest; that FaceTimes feel distant, like reaching for a hand that is always just out of reach; that it is lonely; that you start missing the everyday interactions you had given for granted; that leaving a piece of yourself everywhere you go doesn’t get easier as time goes by, as you keep doing it. I looked down at my coffee, swirling the leftovers of my drink, words caught in my throat like a broken record, afraid to break the fragile silence.

“Yes, yes it is,” is all I answered.

I dragged that question with me for a while. It would pop up randomly throughout the day, leading me to an overthinking spiral. Looking back, I realized it wasn’t just the question that haunted me—it was the painful truth: home no longer felt like home, permanency had stopped being a familiar concept, and temporality had taken its place. I had left not knowing if I was ever going back. And I don’t mean physically never returning. Hearing Spanish at an airport gate twice a year on my way back home feels like a breath of fresh air, like I had been underwater for too long; the bitterness of hugging my parents for the first time, a bandaid on a bullet wound; catching up and gossiping with High School friends, overwhelmed with everything that I missed, realizing that I became a background character in their lives. It’s not that I had expected the world to stop moving, for their lives to be on an endless pause awaiting my return, but every time, there is a sensation that something is wrong, that I no longer belong. It’s as if the butterflies in my stomach had died and instead, a heavy, unsettling stillness had taken their place. I became a tourist of the place that saw me grow. I had bought a one-way ticket with no specific destination. 

I had taken a gap year before college. We were a bunch of 18-year-olds eager to escape the Covid pandemic who ended up finding a platonic love beyond being just friends. In my pre-adulthood mind, the fact that our friendship had a deadline was not real. “We will all stay in contact after the year is over,” we used to say. “We will call, text, and visit each other. Remember you always have a house in [insert country where they’re from].” We repeated those promises often, our voices mingling with laughter as we held down the tears. But part of me knew I was lying as I said those words over and over again. I knew the calls and texts would eventually stop, resurfacing once a year to wish each other a happy birthday and becoming dormant until the next big event happened. How foolish were we to think we would have the money and the time to travel around the world to see each other? We made an effort; we really did. My freshman year of college was full of long-distance calls to Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Venezuela, and Uruguay. As November came, the last leaves on the trees in the Boston Commons bore witness to our reunion—filled with memories, updates, and tears. But just like those leaves eventually fell, so did our regular contact. The year we spent together is engraved in my memory, and it will always be, but so will the hole I felt in my chest as I boarded the plane back home. The occasional calls and texts are something too precious to discard, but they are also a constant reminder of the ephemerality of people. Isn’t it hard? I accumulate goodbyes like loose change in a jar—small, insignificant on their own, but over time, they weigh me down. Each one is a reminder of the connections I’ve made, the people I’ve left behind, and the parts of myself I’ve scattered across the world. The jar is always there, heavier with every departure, yet somehow never full.

During my senior year of high school, I had my first anxiety attack. My parents bickering about what was I going to do in the future, my friends whining about prom dresses, my teachers expecting more and more of me, my boyfriend making stupid decisions that made me question if I wanted to still be together—it felt as my life was falling apart, and my body’s reaction was simply to shut down. But by the time I got to college, I was used to them. The irregularity between every inhale and exhale; the over-consciousness of everything that touches me: my pants getting tighter around my waist, the loose threads of my socks crawling under my skin, my hair caressing the back of my neck; feeling my heartbeat in the tips of my fingers, in the vein that stands out of my left wrist, in the back of my head, everywhere but my chest; the air coming in and out of my nose as I try to catch a breath, as I feel my lungs overcompensating for my lack of stability; the weight of my whole body; a thousand different thoughts flashing in my head, but never long enough to get a grasp of what they’re actually about; black spots covering whatever tears allow me to see, changing with every blink, blurring the world around me; a psychogenic pain in my chest; the walls closing down on me as I scramble on the floor––5 things I can see, 4 things I can feel, 3 things I can hear, 2 things I can smell, 1 thing I can taste. 

I had a panic attack the day my parents moved me into my first dorm, approximately 30 seconds after I had waved them goodbye on their way to the airport. As I walked back to my room from the parking lot, the pebbles of the irregular road twisting under my shoe, the car honks around me quieting down, every step felt like I was dragging a suitcase full of memories, each one heavier than the last, baggage that was slowly turning into what-ifs. For the second time in the past year, I had to reinvent my life again. My anxiety wasn’t special, I could sense it emanating from everyone around me, the need to make friends just to not feel alone. I remember my first college friend group; we had met during orientation week and stuck together. For the first couple of weeks, we met every night at some fire pits on the other side of campus. Dark skies full of stars interrupted by an orange glow emanating from the fire, cold wooden benches where we would cram up because there was no space for everyone, conversations so dry they were sometimes hard to witness. We had nothing in common other than the need to not be alone, to be able to tell our parents, “I’m doing good, I have friends!” We clung to the feeling of reassurance until the fire burned whatever fake relationship we had created. Nowadays, when I run into them in the hallways we exchange an awkward smile, acknowledging what we had, happy it’s now over. But I went about, following a pattern I was getting used to, creating relationships with deadlines. There is a comfort in knowing people don’t stay forever, in knowing that there is always a way out. But when you are in it too deep, you begin to question if this is something you are ready to keep doing. Isn’t it hard? What happens after graduation? Will the efforts of staying in contact remain? Are we really friends, or just a placeholder for what the memory of being cared for feels like? 

If you had to make a list of all the people you have ever cared for, and I don’t mean on a superficial level, I mean people who you would give your life for, or you would have at a certain point, how many of them are you still in contact with? And don’t count people you fought with or broke up with, just the people that time or distance was stronger than what you had cultivated together. How long since you last spoke to them? Do you know what’s happening in their life? Or were they just there long enough to create a bond, mark your life, give you a lesson, and disappear? How many temporary people have you lost? 

Me and Cihan never went back to Café Steam after that conversation. The brick walls now felt as claustrophobic as the rest of the town did, the constant buzz became overstimulating and anxiety-inducing. More people joined our breakfast club, which eventually turned into daily dinners and weekly going-outs. For the rest of the summer, it felt as if I actually had found friends. Conversations were a mix of botched English with Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Slovakian. Although I would love to say that, even for a second, I forgot about our due date, I never did. The ticking time bomb in my brain was counting down the days I had left with them, creating fake scenarios of reunions, knowing they were just that, fleeting images in a mind trying to grasp something that was inevitably coming to an end.

But that is the thing with life, or at least with the life I’ve chosen. Constantly moving, constantly leaving, constantly changing. Every new stamp on my passport represents a new place where I’m leaving a piece of me, a version of me. It comes with the guilt of knowing that the people I love are scattered in different places, so no matter where I am there is always someone I’m missing; with missing out on the big moments, but also the small everyday ones that make life worth living, worth sharing; it comes with a new clock, a new countdown, a new deadline for when the permanent will become temporal. Cihan asked if it was hard to keep leaving, and the truth is yes. It’s harder than I let on. I’ve never gotten quite used to it; I don’t think I ever will. It’s just a matter of doing it, of ignoring all the what-ifs, of buying another one-way ticket, and leaving another piece of myself behind. Of appreciating the temporality of people. 

When we were children we were taught to strive for eternity.
Someone sprayed the graffiti on the walls of our innocent hearts:
“And they lived happily ever after.”

When you grow up, you slowly realize that this eternity is tricky.
Because sand castles don’t last forever.
And the food in the fridge doesn’t stay forever.
And people, too, people don’t always stay forever.

Noam Horev, “Temporary People”