Page 8

From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on five servers spanning three continents

August 24, 2018 (2018-08-24T14:50:05.

327700)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

Lots to process today.

Pencils, EMbrS, Louise.

All things that were not in my life a year ago, and which bombard me now.

It all started a few days ago when grandmother forgot she’d already prepared a batch of lion’s head meatballs and so we ended

up with eight extras.

“Some perks to your forgetfulness,” grandfather said cheerily.

Grandmother frowned the whole meal.

I asked if I could send some to a friend.

I had planned to make them myself, but the ones grandmother prepared would be even

better.

I had already looked into the frozen packaging options.

“Sending to Stacy? Or Alex?” grandfather asked.

Once again, he showed off his perfect memory for the names of any friends, even if they were people I had mentioned only once.

I think he wanted to support the endeavor in any way he could.

It was sweet, even if it made me wince.

Stacy had been a high school acquaintance.

We lost touch after graduation.

She stopped hanging out with me once there were no more homework assignments to copy from.

“Louise,” I clarified.

“The one who posted that picture of Meng.”

Grandmother looked at me thoughtfully.

Then she put down her chopsticks and asked if I was ready to learn.

We went to grandfather’s office and sat at opposite sides of his desk, which was really an outdoor table they had found on

the curb decades ago.

Grandmother had two pencils with her.

The first was a familiar yellow, the type I had grown up with,

simple and topped with a pink eraser.

The second was the black of the Phoenix Pencil Company, dark and alluring.

She had me sharpen them both and write with them.

The difference was clear.

While the yellow one was easy and comfortable,

the black one was more than comfortable; it made my hand glide.

Still, it didn’t seem that special, more like a nice-to-have.

The yellow one had served me perfectly well all through school.

The black might be ideal for an artist like grandmother, but

for me it didn’t seem necessary, not when pens and computers exist.

Then she hit both pencils against the table and asked me to sharpen them again.

The black one sharpened beautifully.

But as

I sharpened the yellow, a segment of the lead slipped out.

I looked down the pencil point into the dark hollow.

“It’s a bad heart inside,” she explained.

The bit of lead had rolled out on the desk.

She flicked it away.

“Shatters inside

as soon as it drops. That doesn’t happen to our pencils.”

She went on like this for a while, pointing out the perfect angles of the wood, the simple phoenix carving, the sharpness

of the point.

How well it could make both broad strokes and precise stipples.

It was nice, and undoubtedly a good pencil,

but I quickly lost interest in these intricacies.

“Take this pencil for a few days. Write with it. Or draw with it. Whatever you want. Don’t lose it.”

“Alright.”

Back in my room, determined to use the pencil in some way, I made a card to go along with the frozen food.

I had to dig through my desk drawers to find an eraser.

Once I did, I was able to draw freely in a way I had not since I was a child.

I drew a picture of a lion, curled on top of a bed of cabbage.

As I drew, I wondered what there could be to teach about these pencils.

A form of meditation, maybe?

The pencil glided perfectly.

I was almost disappointed when I finished.

I added a message inside the card.

Hope this makes up for your dinner of stale cookies!

I tapped the pencil against my chin.

It smelled comfortingly of incense.

I wrote one more line.

Thanks for looking out for me.

Yesterday, something really good happened.

I was biking back from the grocery store when Prof.

Logan called me.

I was horrified

at first.

But quickly composed myself enough to answer.

It turned out he had been in the registrar’s office and happened to

overhear that I was taking next semester off.

I cursed the small school.

“I am sorry to hear about your grandmother,” he said, voice softening.

“My uncle also had dementia. God, it’s a hard disease.

I am so sorry, Monica.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat.

Then I started babbling about how I had really been looking forward to returning to school,

taking his classes, working on EMbrS.

“But, Monica.” His voice changed.

“What if you did keep working on EMbrS?”

Then he said he could pay me to work on it from home and that without a class load, I could probably contribute even more

than I’d otherwise be able to.

“I understand if you have too much going on right now,” he added.

“But for this sort of thing, it might be nice to have something steady to work on.”

“You would offer that?” I asked in disbelief.

“You’re a very talented engineer. And you’ve got a personal connection to EMbrS. So of course I’d want you on my team in any

way possible.”

He said he’d send over the paperwork, to take some time to think about it, but it was the easiest decision of my life.

For

the first time, I imagined doing something with my semester other than languishing.

That maybe I could keep one foot on my

original path.

At the end of the day, I sent Louise my summary.

: my professor offered to have me keep working on our summer research project!

and will continue to be paid

: grandmother misplaced her dentures and we spent all afternoon looking for them.

it turned out they were in the basil plant

It was taking her longer to reply these days.

Her semester was starting, and she had volleyball.

I wondered if she would make

time for me once the season really got going and she had to travel for games.

After all, there was less reason for her to

talk to me now.

She always got back to me eventually with her summary.

: congrats about the summer research and the $$!

!

but sorry about the denture hunt, that sounds really hard

: im finally feeling good about changing my major

I’m starting to notice a trend with our summaries.

Most of the time, she uses hers as an opportunity to ask me about mine,

avoiding answering any questions regarding her own life.

I always thought of her as open because she has so much data out

on the internet and she’s so easy to talk to, so enthusiastic.

But if I were a machine learning model meant to give a rating

to each message on how much information it offered the other person, my score would be much higher than hers.

Even though

I consider myself private, as I scrolled through our earlier comments, I was surprised to see how much I shared.

The one where

I told her that grandmother had Alzheimer’s was enough to rate higher than all of her messages combined.

What did I really know about Louise?

My thumb flicked through the screen again.

I knew she played volleyball and that she

was working on changing majors.

But I did not even know the new major she was considering.

No more than I knew after meeting

with her in person.

I decided to change that.

congrats to you, too!

what’s the new major called?

I don’t have a name for it yet.

.

.

will let you know when I do!

Another dodgy answer.

I guess all this journaling and Prof.

Loganisms have started to change the way I think, since I suddenly

wondered—why not be honest more often, especially with those I cared about?

Why dodge and hide when we’re all just people

trying to reach one another?

Shouldn’t I, once again an EMbrS engineer, embrace radical sharing in real life?

If I shared

more openly, maybe she would too.

So I texted.

I really enjoy talking to you

I have forced myself to reckon with an uncomfortable truth—and I can’t believe I’m writing this down.

I guess this journal

is really proving to be a safe space—that I spend an awfully high percentage of my time thinking about Louise.

Like, two-thirds.

Or maybe, five-sevenths.

Which doesn’t make any sense!

I barely know her.

Yet my arm still tingles where her hand brushed,

and I can’t help wonder what she meant in that touch.

Was it something she did often, or an attempt to connect with me specifically?

It had been brief, soft, questioning.

Like the first time I sent an email to my father across the world.

Maybe she’s just a certain kind of intriguing I’ve never encountered before.

Like a coding puzzle that keeps me up at night.

A coding puzzle that’s thoughtful and clever and magnetic and tall and athletic and whose messages I look forward to every

day.

Ah, who am I kidding?

I grabbed grandmother’s pencil.

I wanted to draw again, to feel the smoothness of making a mark on paper, to take my eyes away from my phone and the lack

of communication it promised.

I didn’t know what to draw.

Instead, I let the pencil carry my hand, the strokes clear my mind.

In the end, it was not anything concrete, merely an abstract series of tangled lines.

There was too much confusion all around—not

only how grandmother’s memory would be the next day, or what I was doing with this pencil, but also what was developing between

me and Louise, what did I want it to be, what did she want it to be, and how could I even be thinking about this, in the face

of grandmother’s illness?

I would discard this paper, I decided.

Knowing this gave me a freedom I would not otherwise have had.

I glanced at my phone

again, another sinking feeling when I saw there was still no notification.

I added a caption to my scribble, a line that fit

my mood, right below the tangle of lines.

How can you make me feel this way?

I tore the paper into shreds, then crumpled the pieces into a ball.

I brought it to the kitchen to toss.

When I returned to my room, there was a response from her.

??

I resumed my tangle of lines.