It’s 2025 now.
The last time I went back to China was 2014.
That sentence feels fake when I say it out loud. Like it belongs to someone else’s timeline. I don’t even remember how long that trip was — I just know it wasn’t more than two months.
2014: “I’ll be back soon.”
2025: “Define soon.”
Time doesn’t feel like it passes evenly. It passes like: one day you’re packing a suitcase, one day you’re eating airport noodles, one day you’re hugging people you don’t want to let go of, and then suddenly it’s been eleven years. Not slowly. Not gently.
Just… gone.
And if I’m being honest, I don’t even know when the “I miss home” feeling turned into “I don’t know where home is anymore.”
Somewhere along the way, I gained a superpower. It might be useful. It might be dangerous. It might just be a trauma response with better marketing.
I can shut off. Like fully.
People can talk to me in Mandarin or English, and my brain will politely say:
Thanks for the input. I will not be processing this today. 🙂
It’s not that I don’t understand the words. I understand them the way you understand the sound of a refrigerator in another room. They become… noise. It’s a skill. A survival skill. A social “airplane mode.”
It’s darkly funny, because the longer you live away from somewhere… the more it starts to feel like you’re slowly losing access to the version of yourself that existed there.
Not in a dramatic way. Just in a quiet way. Like your old vocabulary gets locked behind a paywall. You try to open it, and it says: “This content is no longer available in your region.”
So now, when people talk, I nod like I’m present. But sometimes I’m just not. Sometimes I’m already mentally gone. I don’t even run away anymore. I just… disappear while sitting in front of you.
Maybe adulthood is just learning how to manage loss in tiny doses. The loss of language. The loss of closeness. The loss of familiarity. The loss of being able to explain yourself without rehearsing the sentence in your head first.
And maybe being away for too long doesn’t just make you homesick. It makes you something worse:
home-numb.
Because at some point, missing turns into a dull ache that doesn’t scream anymore. It just sits there quietly and collects interest.
Anyways, here i am with my superpower: turning people into background noise.
Not because I don’t care. But because caring takes energy. And sometimes I don’t have enough language left to hold the feeling properly.
So I just let the sound pass through me like wind.
And I smile.
TSIAN 