Conchology

Conchology by Rebekah Chan 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 the 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 on joining  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 500 BC, 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 an 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

Conchology-old

Conchology by Rebekah Chan 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 the 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 on joining  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 500 BC, 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 an 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”