Untethered

words by Zoha Suteria, art by Jason Chen

Moving 738 miles away from home, I packed my entire existence into three suitcases and one backpack. It is strange how little space a life takes up when it is reduced to luggage.

Leaving is a heavy art, made heavier by the sudden, sharp awareness of time. It is especially hard when leaving means waking up to the mechanism of my parents' mortality, realizing that their lives are winding down in quiet, irreversible beats.. Knowing that my parents are only growing older, and that my time with them is inevitably finite, attaches a suffocating weight to this new chapter. Moving to another state means rationing our relationship into a few days during holiday breaks and squeezing a lifetime into the seconds our eyes lock before I leave for my flight back. The true distance is not only between Virginia and my home; it is between the daughter who lived within the steady rhythm of her parents’ daily presence for her entire life and the daughter who must learn to keep time alone without them beside her. 

It is heartbreaking to realize that this independence is the formal start of a life where my time with the people who raised me and loved me is permanently limited. In packing my bags, it felt as though I was leaving behind every version of myself, abandoning the only life I have ever known. 

But the clock ticks closer to my own skin, too, its steady rhythm counting down a terrifying transition. It reminds me of my twin sister, whom I've only had four minutes on this earth without—arguably the worst four minutes of my life. I don't know how to exist without her by my side, and to encounter a completely foreign environment without her here is terrifying. She is a part of me, and the baseline of my heartbeat. For our entire lives, our identity was collective; we've always been known as "the twins.” But now, that defining truth has been minimized into merely a fun fact: "oh, you have a twin?” I have spent eighteen years living inside the word we, and suddenly I am expected to introduce myself as I. 

The steady tick of my life was always synchronized with others—forever keeping time as someone’s daughter, someone’s twin, someone’s childhood best friend. But the clock strikes a new hour here, and the constant, ambient ticking has gone quiet. Here, I am simply me. 

My parents and sister are the relationships that have defined who I have been for eighteen years. Leaving them is the first time I am forced to figure out who I am without the anchors that have always held me in place.

I am the only thing that has stayed consistent in my life, yet I feel like a stranger to myself.

There is a fierce, grieving loyalty to the girl I have been for so long. If I change, becoming someone else, does the girl who lived those first eighteen years just cease to exist? Underneath it all, is a clock grinding beneath my ribs. The seconds are dropping away heavy and suffocating, leaving me caught in the loud, terrifying countdown of becoming. 

I came to college expecting to discover who I would become. I did not expect becoming to feel so much like grieving.