Dear Shell,
I am writing to remember that time in your car, or perhaps mine.
By chance, we drove the same beige Mazda6 Sedan before we became friends after high school. It was not a unique vehicle, but rather kind that screamed my parents’ car during what felt like the beginning of our adult life.
My early 20s are filled with the scent of cigarettes masked in pine air freshener inside your Mazda, often parked outside the grocery store complex between my house and yours. It was exactly the kind of gray plaza you’d find on every corner in the greater Toronto suburbs we grew up in. We studied at different universities, but both still lived at home with our parents who were church friends. And when we parked beside each other in those sprawling suburban parking lots, it was a homecoming of sorts, a reunion of twin-flames.
In the winters, we’d have our usual Tim Horton’s parking lots to drink coffee inside your car while smoking and listening to Saves the Day and Biggie Smalls. It was too cold to smoke outside, so we’d open a tiny sliver in the window to blow smoke and ash outside. Small gusts of wind always managed to carry little white flecks of tobacco back inside. And this, this existence is how I saw our entire friendship: the two of us in a smoke-filled bubble talking about how fucked up we felt or how fucked up the world was while gazing out through salt-stained windows, and just the slightest crack to the outside world.
We were always the sad girls, the only ones who noticed the small injustices of life. Like how we, the purehearted, never got what we wanted, the boy, a job, the grades, the recognition. Instead, we found shelter in each other. Me with a nose ring, you with a chin piercing. Both 5’2” and on the tanned side for Chinese girls. Both with the same ordinary beige car. Both with an unbearable frustration for a life beyond suburban parking lots.
Looking back in my 40s I now see how we, or at least I, thought it was beautiful to be sad.
You were truly a beautiful sad girl, one who cut herself when she felt too much or nothing at all. Those thick scars on your inner forearms, the ones that people gawked at, provoked me out of the mundanity. Living was to feel deeply. So deeply that it hurt. You were perhaps the most beautiful sad girl I’ve ever met with distinctly chiseled cheek bones, and downward-turned, deep eyes to counter my round, oval face with upward-turned, shallow-set eyes. And back then in my 20s, I also wanted to be a beautiful sad girl.
1768 – Countries around the world were eager to study the 1769 transit of Venus. This happens when Venus (the second planet from the sun) passes between the sun and earth (the third planet from the sun). From earth, Venus appears as a small dot crossing the sun. The transit of Venus is a rare astronomical event that doesn’t happen for more than a century later. In 1769, the next transit would not occur until 1874.
On his first voyage around the world, Captain James Cook was tasked to maneuverer the HMS Endeavour from Plymouth, Great Britain to Tahiti by June 1769 to observe this phenomenon. An affluent young biologist named Joseph Banks insisted to join Cook to help collect plant specimens along the way. It was an expedition of a lifetime, and an opportunity to calculate the distance of the earth to the sun in hopes to better understand the magnitude of the entire solar system.
After university we both work in communications, but we eventually study, discover, and become what we truly want to be. I’m a writer, and you’re a photographer. With different tools, we both try and render our worlds. Me with a keyboard, and you with a camera. We both observe and capture moments. I move to Asia for the man I will marry. You move downtown and when we can, we travel all over Southeast Asia together.
In Pai, Thailand, we rent scooters. We try riding separately at first, but we have to shout while trying to navigate the roads, so we return your scooter and keep mine. This way you can just sit behind me and speak directly into my ear while we zip across the Northern Thai highlands.
Together, we glid up a tall hill towards a huge pink moon hanging in the horizon. The moon had never felt so close before. You think of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, your first dance song choice with S, your first love, if you ever got back together that is.
“In this moment,” you say, “I feel like everything will be okay.”
We continue down the long road of the hill in silence, leaving the glowing moon behind us. But then you ask me or maybe no one, “Why can’t this just last?”
April 1769 – Finding Tahiti was no simple task. Despite Polynesians inhabiting the island since 500BC, it had only been documented by another English explorer a year before and thus, the exact coordinates were known.
Cook crossed miles of open waters and storms to find an island only 20 miles wide. It took eight months to navigate the Endeavour to Tahiti with the only tools available: hourglasses, knotted ropes, a sextant, and almanac to calculate the Endeavour’s position according to the stars.
They reached Tahiti in April, two months before the transit of Venus, and eventually set up a small fort on the black sand beach at the end of Matavai Bay on the North Shore. From this makeshift observatory, they would study the skies, and record Venus traversing across the sun.
Dear Shell, I am writing to remember, that time in your beige car, or perhaps mine.
The word “mollusk” comes from the Latin molluscus, meaning soft of body. We were both tender. Too tender. We noticed things that others didn’t like the smell of the rain, or ladybugs in spring. We were always aching over something, and that’s why the world was hard for us.
The word “mantle” refers to a robe or cloak; something that covers or conceals. We hid away in our cars, confided in each other.
The skin of the mantle of a mollusk secretes calcium carbonate and conchiolin, creating a hard, layered structure known as a shell. We were just two beautiful sad girls, smoking in our matching beige cars.
The Endeavour biologist, Joseph Banks hired 23-year-old Sydney Parkinson, a botanical illustrator to paint the discovered flora and fauna during the voyage across Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Brazil — if they made it that far, that is
The young Parkinson drew as many specimens as he could, often in life-size to record the details with accuracy. Those from other continents, across oceans had never beheld such wonders before. Despite the cramped, unsteady space of a ship, and the urgency of capturing hundreds of types before they withered away, Parkinson drew and painted over 900 plants and animals from direct observation.
The year before riding scooters in Pai, Thailand I fell pregnant. You wanted to video-call me when I told you on the phone, so you could see if I was lying or not on my face. I wasn’t, but 6 months later I lost my pregnancy, my future daughter. I didn’t think you cared or understood as a single woman. But my mom told me that you brought her flowers after she lost her future granddaughter. And then I received the fuzzy blue blanket you sent to me in Hong Kong with a poster that read, But the sun always comes out tomorrow.
Months later when I was still mourning. You told me how other people had it worse, like the mother you heard about in the news who had just lost her 12-year-old child. Those words burned. Especially since you were friends with me, and not that woman on the news. You didn’t understand. I stopped calling you after that and blocked you from calling me, my signature move to put a blockade between us. And then I ignored the email invitation to your first photography exhibition in New York in the autumn, despite being in New York during the exhibition.
Dear Shell, this was my first true sadness. A sadness you will likely never know, heartache over baby I almost got to have. In my 20s, I didn’t know what sadness was, but I did now. And this time when I was sad, I was not beautiful, nor did I care for my sadness to be beautiful.
I too went in search of something.
For what? I do not know.
But I am here now
collecting shells.
In our teens, before we became friends, you asked for my old driver’s license. I was two years older with bleached-brown hair, thin arched eyebrows, and dark lips outlined in a colour called Burnt Sienna. You used my ID to get into clubs when you were fourteen, but you also to set up a video rental account under my name and maybe even a gym membership at the Y.
Four years later, on my 20th birthday, a church friend brought you to my party at Love and Scandal, a bubble tea café downtown. During my teens, I punched that church friend in the eye, the same church friend you got caught smoking weed with at church camp. She was the one who brought you to my party.
You wrote your phone number in the birthday card and said to call you sometime. Early the next morning I called and woke you up. I always had a brazen curiosity about people. I would later name these impulses Interesting Social Interactions I sought out. This is how our kinship began, from a birthday card and phone call. For years you’d say that it was just something you wrote, not something you meant — to call you sometime.
In our 30s, you used to call me in the middle of your Toronto nights when you felt lost or couldn’t sleep. You started questioning your patterns of high energy and engagement followed by lulls of isolation and apathy. I talked to you in my Hong Kong afternoons until your early Toronto mornings, and quietly realized how I had always ridden your waves with you.
We were still the sad girls talking about our feelings in the car, but we fought often. Usually about how you hurt me somehow, or how I was too demanding of a friend, requiring total availability and absolute empathy. “You guys fight more like sisters,” your childhood friend said. “I don’t see how you are so similar.”
I have never been so close to anyone since, someone who knew my innermost thoughts and feelings. Like how I wished I could be happy like everyone else. How I’ve always just wanted to belong to someone, and how, for over a decade, I thought my home was you.
In Bangkok, we came across another group of photojournalists, like you. I noticed one of them right away and said that “You guys are going to be lovers.” It was that kind of sensitivity and attunement we had for each other. We felt each other deeply.
Dear Shell, I now know why this couldn’t last. It’s because nothing does. We can only attempt to capture a moment in hopes to remember and make sense of later.
Tahiti, 1769 — Sydney Parkinson, the illustrator, was swarmed by hundreds of flies that ate the paint as he worked. He was unable to paint all the plants in time, so he sketched many and made notes on how to fill in the watercolours later.
Once, you told me about Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment in photography. How Bresson waited until the precise time to capture an otherwise ordinary moment, to make it interesting and beautiful. By my late 30s we are no longer friends, but I’d read about the Decisive Moment in one of my writing craft books:
“Human understanding is often burst-like. Lives flash, mesmerizing in the moment of ignition, the same movement that later takes much longer to remember and interpret than it took to live. The Decisive Moment in literature is not just the rendering of some small space of time, but also some slant verbalization of all that the moment conveys.”
You indeed became lovers with the photojournalist we met in Bangkok. “He’s an enigma,” you said, someone who was difficult to understand and access. “I’m usually the enigma,” you said, flustered. I already knew that. Even though we reunited often to have those car talks over long distance or in person, there were always times you retreated somewhere into the unknown, where no one could find or reach you.
I liked being the key. The one who persistently knocked or coaxed someone back into my presence, including a slew of missed calls and text messages when you woke up. You always held this against me to show me how obsessive I was, but we were both equally obsessive in different ways about different things. I’d give chase with unavailable people, consumed by the mystery and drama. You loved and loathed the idea of perfection, always striving for it, but punishing yourself when you didn’t achieve it.
Romances, real or imagined were also our downfall. We savoured in the preoccupation of things that broke our hearts. Such things consumed us and let us plummet the seas of our sadness. And we loved swimming together in the agony, exploring Asia and the existence of our lives. Who were we? And what would become of our lives?
I later saw that I had always been drawn to locks. You were also drawn to locks, but eventually ended up with those tireless keys.
According to Captain Cook’s journals, on June 11th, 1770 at 11pm, the HMS Endeavour hit a large piece of coral reef and the ship soon began sinking.
The last time we saw each other, you found me sitting alone at a large white table at the end of a wedding. You said that you wished me the best. With both hands clutching your heart and tears in your eyes, you said that “From the very depths of [your] soul, [you] hope [I] get everything you want in life,” which I knew you knew, was to become a mother and a writer.
You had burned me again. This time someone in Hong Kong wanted to ruin my reputation, and despite being in Hong Kong with me at the time, you decided not to stand up for me. I no longer contemplated if I was too sensitive or demanding, or if you were just being callous or absent again. I was so tired of coming together, only to break apart later. I was tired of talking about all our fucked up emotions together. I had too many real complexities in my 30s: marriage, fertility, health. Not just romanticised problems like we had in our 20s. So I blocked you, again. And we didn’t speak or see each other until eight months later, at a friend’s wedding in Toronto. You too must have known it was our last goodbye.
“Thank you,” I said, after your pile of well wishes at the end of the night. Each time we broke apart, I never thought it was the actual end. But this time was different. I had been seeing a new therapist then, for the pain of losing my pregnancy and my tendency to distract myself with Interesting Social Interactions, usually with people who were locks. I wondered if you were also a distraction.
“I’m getting better, I said. And I hope you get better, too.”
You started telling me about a man you met in Toronto, how he wanted you to move to England to be with him. I sensed your vulnerability. Normally, I would have reassured you, just like we used to whenever one of us was set adrift in our feelings. But I couldn’t get back into the car with you again. It was time to let go.
I later learned that neurotic brains are usually drawn to each other. They see and recognize each other.
Dear Shell, I am writing to understand.
There was another time in Pai, we rode into the dusty dirt path of an empty burnt field in the countryside at dusk. And I remember how the lonesome horizon opened up to the hues that steeped the evening sky.
We rode like that forever, through different countries and continents, different temperatures and terrain. We were determined to hold on. To ride together no matter where we were going, and no matter how dark or cold it got at night.
In Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), Parkinson contracted dysentery as the Endeavour prepared for the journey home. He died at the age of 26, shortly after they set sail. Many of Parkinson’s sketches were left unfinished.
In our 20s we got all dressed up for New Year’s Eve, wore makeup and high heels and went to a party where we thought everyone else went. We stood on the second-floor balcony in silence, and looked out at all the happy, drunk people.
“It feels like we’re in the car,” I said.
I once had a friend who was closer than a sister.
We were outsiders, who felt like insiders whenever we were together.
Her name sounded like, and I called her, My Shell.
That time we made up in Tokyo after I stormed off on you earlier for feeling left out. We were at Karaoke, and I was purposely belting out Roy Orbison’s Crying off tune. Crrrrrrryyyyyaayyyyayyyyaayyyayying over you. Crrrrrrryyyyyaayyyyayyyyaayyyayying…. We were happy and drunk.
“I love you,” you shouted in my ear over the song. “But sometimes I hate you! You’re so annoying!”
“I love you, too,” I shouted back.
“I will love you until you are old and grey,” you yelled. “But God, you are so fucking annoying!”
The porous and skeleton quality of shells, and their proximity to marine sedimentary rock make shells an ideal object to undergo the fossilization process.
In 1988, Alecto Historical Editions published Sydney Parkinson’s illustrations which contained drawings of birds, insects, plants, the local Māori people, marine life, and more. Today, these 35 volumes can be found in the Natural History Museum in London, England.
You are now a mother and live in England. Like me, you had always dreamed of living abroad. I am also a mother, but now live back in Toronto. I know you got married because you invited my parents to your backyard wedding. And somewhere inside my parents’ house is a photo of you in a red Chinese dress, smiling with your husband and child. Inside the same house with a photo of you at my wedding, as my maid of honour.
Once in a while, I’ll wake up and remember the dream I had. Sometimes we are friends again and we are belly laughing and crying like we used to. I wake up and wonder if it’s true. Are we still friends? Other times I dream that I am trying to reach you, but you are running away or are closed off to me. But then I wake up and remember that there’s nothing that actually separates us. In fact, our mother’s just saw each other last month.
And if I feel rejected, as I now know is my disposition, I remind myself that I was the first one to realize that we had to let go.
Sometimes, I miss you. I wonder what it would be like to be friends in motherhood. Would we be two beautiful sad mothers, restless again in the mundanity of life?
It’s likely that it would still be a maddening journey of sorts, filled with storms, sorrow, and much damage along the way. Yet, it’s impossible for me to overlook the sheer luck or chance of encountering a kindred creature like you, like me, in all our faults and follies. And all the wonders we saw along the way. It’s as though time and place, gravity and even our cars, perfectly aligned for a finite time.
The transit of Venus occurs in pairs with the second transit taking place eight years after the first.
From earth, the planet Venus appears like a small black dot and can first be seen outside and approaching the orange sun. The black dot is then observed to be contacting and then directly inside the disk of the sun. And at last, Venus is seen in front the sun moving outward before the black dot appears completely outside the disk of the sun. The duration of the crossing lasts six hours.
The last pair of transits occurred in June 2004 and June 2012, during the summers of my 20s when I was friends with you.
The next time Venus passes between the sun and earth won’t be until December 2117 and December 2125.
And when you hold a conch shell to your ear, sometimes you can still hear the singing wind and roaring ocean of a former life of beauty and discovery. A testament to a love lived, a friendship discovered, all found within the cavity of a shell where an animal once dwelled.
The satisfaction of learning a puzzle that only you could understand. To somehow carry this treasure with you, for always.