Chapter 27 — I Never Made It to Nam Thanh With You

This time, he did not reach out to catch my hand again. Just before entering the boarding gate, I turned back to look one last time. Co Nghien Le remained rooted to the spot, his fingers clamped tightly around a ring that would never find its intended recipient. That eighteen-year-old boy, for the very first time in his life, seemed to be tasting the bitter, disorienting flavor of absolute uncertainty. I had once believed that as long as he turned back, I would be waiting there for him, tethered to the same place, forever. But now, as he finally turned his gaze toward me, I was already gone.

As the train shuddered and began to slide along the tracks, I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window. On my phone, I kept the message he had sent the day he finalized his university preferences. "See you in South City." I read those words one final time, feeling the ghost of a promise that had long since withered. With a steady thumb, I pressed delete, wiping the conversation history into nothingness.

The cityscape outside the window blurred into a streak of gray and gold, rushing backward as if trying to flee from me. The steel sleepers stretched out ahead, branching off toward destinations that would never converge. South City lay to the south, bathed in the warmth of the life he had mapped out for us. The place I was headed, however, sat in the vast, rugged expanse of the distant Northwest.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out my grandfather’s worn, leather-bound surveying notebook. Flipping to the very first page, I saw the traces of the past; I had once written his name there, only for my younger self to scratch it out into the shape of a crooked, misshapen house. Below that tangled mess of ink, I wrote a new line in a clear, deliberate hand: "Northwest Travel Journal. Day One."

Sunlight danced across the crisp paper, bright and untethered, like a window flung wide open after years of being shuttered. This time, I was not following him to South City. I was finally setting out to find the life that belonged, and had always belonged, only to me.