Hello and good morning and good evening and happy (very late) 2022! I’m over here wishing that your year is off to a wonderful start, or at least an okay one. Or at the very least you have been able to find some humor in it. I am absolutely KICKING myself that I failed to conclude my last newsletter with a good old fashioned “See you next year”. I’m mortified, and if you want to unsubscribe now I completely understand.
But to be fair, I wrote the last Kitchen Sink under the pre-holiday delusion that I might cram in another installment sometime between Christmas and New Years Eve. I obviously didn’t. And then, after January 1st, I continued to tell myself every day that tomorrow would be the day I return to the Substack drafting page. I wouldn’t. I fed myself these vicious lies and washed them down with warm vodka orange juices consumed out of empty plastic Evian bottles.
If you’ve been keeping tabs, I spent the days after Christmas on a spring-break-style tropical vacation off the Southern coast of Vietnam. The trip was supposed to last six days, hitting its crescendo at an all night New Years Eve festival. But instead, high on UV 10 sunshine (and on other illicit substances too), all eight of us skipped our flights to keep the ~party rolling~. Plane tickets were cheap, jobs were online, and none of us had a single reason not to remain on island time. If reality wanted my rose-colored vacation glasses, it was going to have to pry them right off of my sunburnt face. Anddddd… it did just that. By the time I booked a new ticket back to Hanoi and plopped my sunburnt bum into my tight budget airplane seat, my eyes were welling with tears of relief.
So now it has been more than a month and I am crawling back to you. And while I have been looking for every excuse not to write lately, my silly little head has been doing plenty of thinking. Specifically, about why it took no more than the weight of a few grains of sand in my hair to bring me crumbling down?
What better way to re-kick things off than to bear my soul, I suppose?
Christmas plans first began brewing among my friends in November. At that point, only a week or so after moving into my new apartment, I was spreading my emotional capital between being jet-lagged, being overjoyed, being nervous, and still attempting to be Ryley. The easiest way to cope with it all seemed to be to take everything in stride. To be a Yes Woman, do it big and do it grand! This meant doing beach Christmas. I had never made my own Christmas plans before. I always returned to Minnesota where the holiday was just wrapped around me like a warm blanket, everything from the festive pajamas I woke up in to my parents’ old Mr. Coffee pot I poured from first thing, was a given. But there was no time to mourn that loss, there was only time for fun in the sun.
As the weeks passed, holiday plans still up in the air, time moved briskly in the exciting affairs of settling in — re-learning to ride a motorbike, trying to woo new friends. And amidst it all, the theoreticals of moving so far from home unfolded to reveal the realities.
I had assured all my loved ones that the twelve hour time difference between the U.S. and Vietnam was actually quite convenient, as morning and night (hours that tend to be free) line up well. The time difference isn’t horrifying, but when you add the normal business of life, you’re really left with only handfuls of moments to catch up over text, let alone on the phone. Days and days at a time have passed without chatting with friends, and I’ve failed to make more than a handful of calls to my parents. And while we can catch up on the highlights, more often than not I wake up to have missed many a little thing. It makes for a slow and very mild, but nonetheless present, brand of loneliness, exacerbated by the fear that my poor communication could be misconstrued as apathy.
My new friends here are wonderful, and I feel lucky that after just a couple of months I know people who I can have an honest-to-god hangover Sunday with. And of course there’s the Ellie of it all, a lifelong pal and someone who is virtually impossible to be sad around. But I suppose that when I was busy doing all my little 22-year-old scheming and dreaming for future escapades, I failed to take to heart that “going”also means “leaving”. And losing that most special thing - closeness and community- that isn’t built over night. And there certainly are moments, even on my most wonderful day, when I wonder why anyone in their right mind would trade that in.
And, the all too personal cherry on top, just a few weeks after making the move, Colin (see: love, best friend) and I realized it might be in the best interest of our relationship to temporarily end said relationship. This was the right decision, and one that has allowed us to stay close while quite far. But it’s a change. Perhaps more on that one day? If I can get through a paragraph talking about my romantic feelings without throwing up?
In short- quite a lot of change. And so much of this change wasn’t a brisk stab in the heart, but rather a slowly festering wound. Like how you can boil a frog alive if you start it in cool water and slowly turn up the temperature. For so much of that time in the pot, you’re just cozy and warm and happy, with just an inkling that something might be amiss. And then you’re plated!
So the holidays got closer, as they do. Thanksgiving came and went in a spectacular fury of homemade pies and cocktails and Pictionary. I kept the call with my family short, as it was hard to hear over the chaos of my parents, brother, sister, and nieces. One night, while eating leftover turkey soup, we bought tickets to Phu Quoc for Boxing Day, so thrilled about the upcoming trip that Ellie spent minutes jumping up and down on her bed. We booked AirBnbs and drew Secret Santa names and Hanoi itself transformed into its Christmas glory, with Santa hats and Christmas trees being sold on street corners.
As for the day to day of those following weeks, life was… sparkly? I was recently chatting with someone who is considering moving to Vietnam and, after describing my day to day, she said it sounded like a serotonin overload. And she’s not wrong. Some days Ellie and I spend all evening doing crafts, like papier-mache, on the roof. When I have a free hour I’ll opt to take a leisurely bike ride around the lake. I drink coffee with coconut ice cream in it instead of milk. The sun is setting in front of me right this very moment. It’s hitting my face and everything, all warm and cozy and golden.
We spent Christmas Eve at the bar down the street, listening to covers of Irish songs I’ve never heard and drinking mulled wine. It was sweet and spirited and made me feel proud about carving out a teeny little home for myself, complete with brand spanking new traditions. On Christmas morning, Santa brought me a basketball and a Corona and brought Ellie tennis rackets and a hard cider. There was a little spare time between our morning and heading to our friends’ house for more festivities, So I gave my parents a ring to wish them and my brother a merry Christmas. Half a day earlier there, my dad had just finished reading The Night Before Christmas aloud and the thousands of colorful lights on the tree lit up the three of them on the family room couch. In my own tiny rectangle of the FaceTime screen, I could see my big festive bow and last night’s glitter, the nature of our holidays in sharp, iPhone screen contrast.
Christmas dinner was delicious and the post-dinner Christmas quiz left me drunk and giggly. Activities lasted well into the night, filling every moment with the mandatory cheer of a first Christmas far away. There was even Bailey’s and cake and a talent show. After not enough sleep, we woke up early on the 26th (still drunk) and rushed out the door to fly off for vacation.
Phu Quoc island is comically beautiful. From a certain vantage point on the beach, especially at dusk, the ocean looks like an iPhoto green screen background in all its glowing, white sand glory. When we were flying in on the 26th, the odd shape of the clouds outside the VietJet plane window combined with the too-blue sky gave the impression that we were in a video game. A nice, Animal Crossing style video game where you don’t battle but just complete charming little challenges. These challenges included:
Try not to get scurvy from a daily diet of pizza for breakfast, pho for dinner, and Pringles in between.
Accomplish the following crucial tasks simultaneously: spend over 4 hours floating in the pool and avoid getting sunburnt.
Pick every stupid piece of sand off the bed from when you were too lazy to rinse off before falling asleep.
Phu Quoc has a beach littered with starfish. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t take your eyes off but it’s almost impossible to comprehend that it exists. There’s a waterpark and a cable car and snorkeling and fresh oysters on the half shell. You can get two dollar gin & tonics at the bar and on more than one occasion I stayed up late enough to see the sun come up right there over the ocean, which was never more than a block away.
I missed countless photos of my perfect little nieces, the messages always buried in the family group chat before I bothered to look at my phone. I forgot to wish a happy new year to a single person back home, and my heart tensed when I woke up on January first (at two in the afternoon) to a number of well wishes from friends I’d already been failing to keep in touch with. This, combined with a chaotic sleep schedule and the fact that my brain was almost always in some state of impairment, made the moments between the highs feel especially low. Phu Quoc was an absolute paradise. And there’s a sadness in acknowledging that something is missing in paradise, something that it feels like you’re letting slip through your greedy little fingers.
I was extremely jazzed on New Years Eve and subsequently stayed at the party longer than any of my friends. It was a rave-type affair right on the beach, complete with wristbands that bought your drinks and two stages that both featured music without a single word. Some time around 8 a.m., with the sun up and exposing the ~good times~ wearing off, I looked around to the realization that while I was surrounded by pure fun, I wasn’t surrounded by a single person I cared about. I dragged myself into a taxi and, alas stripped clean of all energy and audience (save the poor driver), succumbed to a long awaited, absolutely PITIFUL cry. Yes indeed. I welled up in the back of a taxi on New Year’s Day in my stupid tiny green dress and my sparkles. Say it ain’t so!! Then I tucked myself right into bed.
A few days later I returned home. I needed to come back earlier than everyone because I had some visa paperwork to accomplish, but I was grateful for the excuse. I was a fragile shell of myself at the airport, the kind where you actually pray that the security lines and and passport checks will look kindly on you so you don’t disintegrate right there on the linoleum. I watched the man at the check-in counter discretely fix something that I had done incorrectly on a form, and it is the closest I have ever felt to having a guardian angel.
There was nothing shiny or exciting about Hanoi when I arrived. It was cloudy with pollution and empty as everyone remained at the beach. And yet my cold dark apartment smelled like the freshest breath of air. I spent the next few days on my lonesome catching up with my parents, doing non-exciting errands, and having completely insignificant days around the house.
After a good nights sleep, I revisited photos reminisced fondly on the exciting first holiday on my own. And, for the first time, I let my mind wander into the holiday at home that I regrettably missed.
I know this can all sound very ~woah is me~, and that there is far more to lament than a holiday enjoyed with friends. But I guess it is a note to self about how sneakily you can become untethered to yourself, and what a good anecdote normalcy can be after too much time living for luster. It turned out that a 2 p.m. alarm, that woke me from a drunk and teary eyed slumber on January 1st, was exactly the wake up call I needed.
2022 already looks to me to be a mixed bag of a year, and I anticipate I will cast myself out and reel myself in many a time (fall down 7 times, get up 8 amiright??). I’m not at all saying I’ve been on my last beach trip or to my last embarrassing festival party, and regardless of my whining I still expect my next Christmas will be spent in Hanoi too. I guess I just… want to call home more? And I want to acknowledge aloud that my favorite parties have still been the ones that I’ve dragged myself home from with my best friends. And I want to indulge, just momentarily, in the thought that I missed Colin on New Years Eve, even if I was capable of having fun without him. That perfectly taught sweet spot, between being a person who is growing and changing and being a person at all, certainly continues to evade me. But at least I’m a wee bit closer, knowing now that it isn’t found on holiday.
New year, same bullet points!
Today was the first purely sunny day Hanoi has seen in a few weeks and I was in the mood to be a little glamorous. So I listened to Courtney Barnett on the roof and painted my nails (fingers AND toes) sparkly pink.
My latest hobby is that I joined a Burlesque dance class. If you’ve ever seen me dance or move my body at all you can imagine how it’s going. But it is an excuse to wear fishnets.
I finished Dune! And started the Hunger Games prequel.
What’s your favorite word in the English language? I asked my students this week, and some of my favorite answers included: honey, purple, and lovely.
Sending all my love and more through the little internet channels. If you’re still here reading after my month long hiatus, thanks for waiting for me to get a grip. I owe you one <3
Cheers-
Ryley
bubbly