08.28.25

August is the peak of all the boredom and sunburn and melted popsicles and rained out play dates and refused sleepovers marinated tossed and rolled into a month. It’s days before school starts again and you begin to appreciate what little chalk covered sidewalk days you have left, even when you’re a whole twenty two years old.

Life is full of so much agony and happiness and they hold one another in an embrace forever. The scent of the past relinquishes the joy of feeling. However small and insignificant, it matters to me. It’s precious to me. I hold it in my memory for a second longer knowing it will leave me tomorrow. Knowing it will find me willing

07.27.25

10:02pm on my break from working a double. Solace in hearing tunes I used to listen to in the darkness of my half lit room between the hours of dusk and garage door rumbling open, eyes half sunken from the effects of teenage depravity and rice krispy edible. The paper leaflet of my tea bag chimes against the metal exterior of my corporate tumbler, my legs are crossed on a concrete block in the middle of the city, and I’m listening to what I can only describe as the croon of angels and drums of cherubs. A concrete block located in the middle of three sister apartment complexes, reminding me of the mythological fates spinning their red thread. A concrete block that encapsulates unfair imaginations of NYC third spaces and that simultaneously is one of the only places outside of Chinatown that reminds me so distinctly of Shanghai.

For some reason nostalgia has been tearing my head apart while also mending all the cracks in the ridges of my brain. For that reason it makes me want to down the sapphire blue bottle of Lao Lao’s favorite liquor as though it were a potion to bring her back. a childhood memory of my grandma disguised in the orbital figure of a vice.

The wind brings me back to the present, fixing my bangs from revealing alleged premature baldness. The somehow metallic ding of my tea tag against tumbler makes me think of the future in the wind chimes that decorate the outside of my dark spruce palace. Imogen Heaps voice melds perfectly with the breeze that both soothes and chills me. The two poles on my right keep scaring me into thinking they are very tall humans - it both reassures me that they are not, while frightening me into the idea that I am actually just very small, skin and bones, against the clang of metal.

A peek at the sign tells me I’m in an oak grove far from the one I used to bike towards at the brink of dawn

01.22.24

Sometimes when the wind blows in the direction of the right person towards me I smell the vitality of spring. Used to be so wrapped up in my head, trapped in the coils and knots of my own hand that convinced me a great artist is a miserable one, that art comes from desolation and tragedy. When the air smells fresh like the outside of a crowded living room I am reminded that it is actually hope. I am reminded to choose life not death, to open my eyes and breathe in, to expose myself to what I have been blessed to see

11.14.23

Been feeling like there’s a lot to say but as soon as the words run past my tongue they dissipate before my lips open. Sometimes the things that make my heart ush and gush are the very things that smush my guts. Restless but tired, insomniac. There’s a word for everything.

Many times tears have blurred my sight, throat constricted and achey. But never do tears flow. It feels trapped inside sometimes and instead of releasing I just swallow, gulp it down and let it build up until it becomes the mucus in the back of my throat.

Sure I love to talk. But I open my mouth and the mucus regurgitates out and suddenly the words of my past are trapped like scorpions in amber. I love a lot of things and somehow that doesn’t stop me from pushing past the yellow caution tape.

I wish I was better at poetry so I could speak with a forked tongue more. Sure I love to talk.

But I don’t want anyone to understand. For fear that they’ll see those past words and actions stuck in my congealed mucus. Open my mouth wide enough and the back of my throat shows. I never cough it out. The slimy sensation pisses me off. I just swallow gulp it down.

Part of me thinks I’ll never change and I know that’s wrong because I’ve already made so much progress. But times like this I feel as though I’m reverting against the grain of time and I wonder if I hadn’t met you if I could think and act the way I do now. I owe it all to you. I’d be nothing without you. And that’s wrong and I know it’s wrong because i was like this before you and I think that sometimes i get so caught up in my fervor that you need to remind me to unwind. You smooth me out like a tablecloth on aged wood. You make me feel like a tapestry. and I wish time would stop so I could infinitely be in this place with you forever while at the same time wishing it would hurry the hell up so I could experience everything else with you.

There’s a buzz all around me constantly and so I hear nothing. I speak nothing. I write nothing.

03.16.23

i can’t help that every time i come back to my hometown, i am reminded that every moment is a “last”. the town that housed my innocent firsts becomes a town of sentimentality. i almost seemed to know that as soon as i left it for the first time, every experience i would encounter would be tainted by the idea of the past. everything that happens becomes something that has happened all too soon.

i constantly think of how soon, i won’t say bye to my dad in the morning when he wakes me up before he goes to work. and how soon, i won’t say bye to my mom when she leaves for work in the afternoon. i’ll stand in the frame of our door, watching her change her shoes, put her work bag in the back seat, her water in the front. in between each movement, she’ll look back and wave to me. i’ll wave back. i’ll wait until the garage door closes shut and her car disappears past the bend of the cul de sac because i want to be there every time she looks back. i wonder if she does look back and wave.

i feel as if the goodbye means more now, because i’m in a town that has become my past. i feel as if each goodbye is closer to the last, the distances between each growing wider, making each feel more than the last. this goodbye feels more like the ones i do on sundays from the train window.

i remember standing in the same door frame when i was a kid. i would wave to you the same, and wait until you left. it would be a moment of sadness, and then a wash of freedom as i had the next few hours to myself. i think now, when i stand in that door frame, i feel a mix of the same me. i feel the memory of myself, smaller, standing in the frame, waiting so i could be free. but now, i have been free. i have been free for months at a time. now, i want to be home.

time to me is painful. it feels so full of goodbyes. i never pay attention to the hellos.