By Mimi Phan
When my mind drifts, I catch myself thinking about you, Cactus Man. When I find a pretty flower, or learn about the monarch butterflies, when I go to the nursery to buy milkweeds or see a golden barrel, my mind wanders to you.
My mind starts on a night in early 2019, a time of so much change in my life. After returning to Los Angeles from an 8 month stint in New York, an unrequited cross country romance and a failed career change, I found myself alone watching Blue Planet looking for refuge from my unsatisfying world by learning about the mysteries of another. My awe towards this underwater habitat reminded me that there are so many things in our world we don’t know about. It reminded me of how I felt after seeing totality during the 2016 solar eclipse, a moment when the New Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth and casts its shadow on our world. An experience that recalls the image of ‘the pale blue dot’, a photograph taken of the Earth by the Voyager 1 at the behest of Carl Sagan only to reveal that in comparison to the vastness of the Cosmos, the Earth was just one blue pixel. After these reflections, I knew the only thing I needed to figure out was how to experience totality again. I knew that when July 2, 2019 at 4:38 PM came around, I would be in Chile experiencing two minutes and twenty-five seconds of pure otherworldly bliss.
As life goes, our good moments are only seen in contrast to our mistakes, and, fortunately on this one, I made plenty of them. It started with the loss of several plane tickets because of missed connections and schedule changes. I invited a woman I knew from work to join me and she invited her friend. We had a great time dancing to funk for miles through the Elqui Valley, until she pulled me away from my two minutes and thirty-five seconds of bliss to watch her video timelapse of our reactions from a few minutes before. Until, once we arrived from a long drive from Vicuña to Valparaíso, she blew up at us because her friend and I were getting along and she felt left out. Until, once we returned to Santiago the night before my departure flight, they got into a screaming match at the hostel two hours before our fine dining reservation at Boragó.
Travel wasn’t perfect, but I made sure to get the two things I wanted out of the trip: another taste of totality and a 20 course meal from the best restaurant in Chile. After their fight, I took only one of them to the restaurant. When we entered that large open space of grey walls and dried flowers, where through the glass windows we saw a pig roasting above flames against Chile’s night sky, there was only one other person in the restaurant: a man, sitting alone, donning a tie dye shirt. I wondered to myself, “what is this hippie doing in a nice ass restaurant like this?” then spent the rest of the night enjoying my meal.
The next day, I spent the few hours before my flight buying six bottles of wine and trying to figure out how to bring it all back to Los Angeles. As someone who only travels with a carry on, it was rare for me to stand in the check in line before boarding. As I waited, a vaguely familiar man in a blue button up shirt, a backpacker’s pack, and a green duffel walked up to the business class line beside me. At the gate, I found an empty seat and sat down. And there, one seat away from me, was you Cactus Man. It’s you that asked me, “were you at Boragó last night?” as I sat beside you, recalling how I called you a hippie, wearing the same exact outfit I wore the night before.
We talked about the food at the restaurant. The solar eclipse in Chile. The solar eclipse from 2016. Why we were there. Where we had been. Plants. Cactus. Roberto Bolaño. The Three Body Problem. I showed you the leaves I pressed. You showed me pictures of Copiapoa. We learned that we were both on the same exact flight, all the way back to Los Angeles. We talked until we boarded. We met at baggage claim in Mexico City. In Los Angeles, we sent each other pictures of our plants in bloom. We talked about life. We kissed in the parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl until security told us to move our car. We kissed for an hour outside the gate of my house. We cuddled. We talked about our feelings. We talked about staying open with each other despite our vulnerabilities, despite what ever happened to us before. We listened.
My friend tells me that when you meet someone, don’t fall for their big stories. Their stories cloud your judgment. Their stories suck you in. Their stories dissolve the weight of their actions by tying them to a life event that explains why they couldn’t be there for you. When my mind wanders, I realize that I not only fell for your big story, but I also fell for the big story I told myself about us: that our serendipitous meeting meant something beyond the experiences we had together. That our connection all the way across the world translated to our connection at home. When I listened to that big story, it became my crutch. It reminded me that as much as I wanted to lean into the vulnerability and experience joy, there was still fear on either side. I feared that despite our connections, something still wasn't right.
My thoughts always end with an echo of something you said to me during our last phone call: that maybe we could check in at some future date. But like the monarch butterflies that migrated through Highland Park last year in a swarm of beautiful orange sunshine, unless the effort goes both ways, unless we make the effort to plant those native Southern California milkweeds, unless we give space for that transformation, for the metamorphosis of one phase to the next, some things in life are for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
Mimi Phan really does think that everyone should plant Southern California Milkweeds to save the Monarch Butterflies and that seeing a solar eclipse is one of the most humbling experiences in her life.
www.mimitphan.com