#165. Chiba Cod Abyss, Odd Wage Also, Longer Haze (Saturday, May 17, 2014)

What was your best day…of having the perfect time with the wrong person?

I could give you a million years to try and guess what this story is about based on the title, and I can guarantee you would never get close.

It wasn’t a hidden repository of non-sushi-eligible fish in a suburban Tokyo underwater canyon, with an atypical excavation salary and an aftereffect of prolonged mental haze. It was nothing but a state of mind. A very naïve state of mind regarding my doomed girlfriend Chenling (#91), one that governed my life the summer of 2014.

Chiba cod abyss (chief economist; me in ten years)
Odd wage also (Ottawa jiaoshou—Ottawa professor, in Chinese; her in ten years)
Longer haze (liang ge hai zi—“two kids”; yeah…)

My dad first said some version of it around this time, mixing the languages correctly but without my later nasal exaggerations, in a semi-sarcastic tone I completely missed. I later used the distorted version to mock my own idealistic past self.

But let’s be serious for a second. If you strip out every flashing red light before and after it, this weekend in Niagara Falls really did make that ridiculous phrase feel somewhat plausible.

I’d started my first Ottawa job two months earlier, while she had just finished the Master’s program. Two months apart felt far too long for a relationship I still considered serious, so instead of me flying back to North Carolina, we decided she would come somewhere closer.

Buffalo, New York—which was, first of all, Buffalo, and second, a six-hour bus ride plus border check from Ottawa—was not the most inspired choice. But somehow, that’s where we settled on. So, on Friday, after a half-day at work, I take the long Greyhound journey. And when I see her in the lobby of the Buffalo airport hotel, it does sincerely feel like I’m seeing someone special I’d badly missed.

No joke about that, and no joke about the next two days in Niagara Falls (U.S. side) feeling absolutely idyllic. We got along almost perfectly, with no real argument occurring during that time¹. We moved through those two days like an almost absurdly happy couple: holding hands, making out a few times,² wandering the state park, seeing the falls from the overlooks and Maid of the Mist, and doing a few other things I no longer remember. She even happily joined my extreme gluttony at Duff’s Famous Wings near our hotel, where we ordered forty of the best Buffalo wings I’d ever had.

I left for Ottawa not thinking I’d just had the perfect two days, but believing I’d spent them with someone who would inevitably become the most important person in my life.

In hindsight, the timing explains a lot. I had just started a professional job³, before living back home had fully settled into something I saw as embarrassing. She had just gotten into Duke’s PhD program, before that new life—and the people in it—had changed the relationship. For one brief window, our futures still seemed compatible.

For those two days in Niagara Falls, I got to believe in that tacky, misguided, sickeningly optimistic future with complete honesty. Before I realized it was a future nobody in either of our lives—including me—actually wanted.

Unlike our much more glamorous Las Vegas trip six months earlier, whose final night has a top-three spot on the other list—and, in a world where I had any discretion, would probably have erased this story entirely.
For the record, nothing beyond that ever happened during the eighteen months we were together, by mutual preference—mostly mine.
My lack of a real job—and my immaturity around that—had been one of the triggers for the disastrous Vegas night.