love, read, write

It's October. Two months away from winter. My skin is already peeling in keen anticipation of the bony tree branches that will adorn my window like a vignette. The draft that will seep in through the cracks and blanket over my face when I sleep. The early darkness, the late mornings.

I've already begun to prepare – a slow retraction from my friends, gradual infrequency of meals, slightly longer naps. Fewer showers. No music. No laughter.

When it feels right, even, I practice arching my back. I know it is too early. Sometimes I get ahead of myself. Some form of muffled excitement gets me antsy in the afternoon and I strip myself naked and stand bent in front of the mirror, inspecting the bony arch of my spine. The little bumps along the curve, like the triangular plates on the back of a dinosaur. I can feel them growing, protruding. Transforming me. The beginnings of a rumble start to bubble somewhere between my pelvis and gut. It feels imminent. I am about to tip over into a roar. I close my eyes and focus on that bubbling, the heat that is stewing within me, vibrating into my knees. I bend forward even more until my hair is touching the ground. The floor might crumble beneath me. I imagine my back snapping itself into the proper arch. I can't wait to dissolve into the shadows of winter.

It is hard to know how much of this desire is detectable to the human eye. People might say that I'm strange, but not much beyond that. Maybe someone will look at me funny at the grocery store if I accidentally slip into my posture while reaching for flour on the bottom shelf. Or if I show up particularly disheveled to a friend's dinner, refuse mimosas, and speak twice in total. Or my staunch refusal of greetings and small talk at work. But generally I like to think that nobody can really tell, and that by the time winter arrives, my existence will quietly exit everyone's memory, leaving just a pinhole for me to re-enter in spring. There are no good-byes given; to them, I have just taken a very long nap.

November is typically when I begin to prepare for my hibernation. This is what my mother taught me. When you get really used to it, honey, she said, it'll even be two weeks. But that comes with experience. Aim for a month. She's right, two weeks seems impossible to me right now. But I'm twenty-six. You'd think I'd at least have gotten it down to three and a half weeks by now.

(i wrote this last year and forgot that i wrote it (it is fiction))

>> STUCK IN A DATA CENTER

in high school the internet felt boundless. it was free in a way that my body didn't feel free. i had this running joke where i'd tell my friends i don't exist in a clumsy attempt to express the casual dissociation i was dealing with– but the internet was this place where i felt real, where i was finding ways to feel like me. it was something i looked forward to every day: i'd come home from school and i'd sit at my desk and the moment the screen loaded, my body would dissolve and i would beam my conscious mind into the internet where i could exist untethered. my senses would hone into the screen, plugged in by convenience store earbuds, eyes fixed on the 13 inch window into a malleable world that could respond to my imagination. it satiated something i didn't know i was hungry for. i was free of my limbs, the concern directed at my body, the conversations happening in doctor's rooms, the muffled frustration i felt towards the things my physical self failed to express on behalf of the real me. the real me, the one that could simply exist uninterrupted on the internet. i told myself my soul lived there, not here. i could finally speak.

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My mother was a rather private person. This was not apparent to me as a child; I presumed that all mothers were like mine – reserved, secretive, sparing in her words. She was a ghost of a woman, floating in and out of my life, leaving only traces of her cedarwood perfume and the echoes of her heels clicking down the hallway of our apartment complex. 

Our conversations were always just short of something real. Occasionally, during dinner, she might ask, "how was your day?" and I would reply, "good," and after a pause she'd nod, "good, good." And we would spend the rest of the meal in silence. I would sit at the edge of my seat, a flower leaning in closer to the sun.

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I was fourteen years old when I forgetfully took the bus home from school. I had made a promise to my mother that morning – that she'd pick me up right after my last class for a doctor's appointment, something that would later turn more frequent and more expensive. But I'd forgotten, and class had ended. The bell rang; I packed my bag hastily and ran to the bus, already teeming with kids; I clambered over knees and cross-aisle punches, clutching my backpack close to my chest as I made my way to the seat, excited to see my friends. The heat of late spring and teenage sweat hung over the air and I cut through it towards Adithya, Tara and Annie, who were already there, midway through a fervent discussion about a recent game release. They nodded to me. Annie moved over to make room. A light breeze entered through one of the few opened windows. Adithya blurted an outrageous 'would you rather' question that would occupy the rest of the bus ride home. I was happy. I loved Tuesdays, the one day a week I could take the early bus home– no after school clubs, just two o'clock's delightful circus, the moving theater of chaos and pure, unadulterated joy.

But this is fake. I do not recall any of this. My memory of this event, actually, is strangely omniscient. In fact, very little of the bus ride – the bit that I was actually there for – remains with me; instead, I recall a mythical episode, a story not mine. I have no certainty of what she looked like, what she said, what expression she wore on her face. But when someone says, "hey, remember that day your mom ran into the school?" – my mind plays a video, however impossible, that is crystal clear. I do. Yes, in fact I do remember when she ran into the school. The curtains of my mind unfold: she is La Pieta without child. She is bursting through the door, sobbing, while I was mid-argument on the school bus. Yes, I do remember. I see it: her face is red, her hair disheveled, and she grabs the first student she sees. In her dizzying paranoia, the world is falling, her child is dying, suffering in her absence. She cries out, barely distinguishable, "where is my daughter," grabbing shoulder after shoulder, a desperate wrest for information, shrinking with each croaking cry, until eventually a friend– someone I'm not even that close to, who later tells me what happened with a strange expression on her face – admits yes, watchfully, she took the bus though, didn't she?– but the answer is not convincing coming from another child, my mother has already known the answer the moment she entered the building– her daughter is dead. Me, on the bus, laughing at a provocative question, two stops away from our townhome complex, where our parking spot is empty– it is only a matter of time until she finds me at the back of a bathroom, disintegrating, she must see her daughter before the warmth runs out, must hold her body, draped over her mourning arms. She runs, and she runs. She trips, and her joints have become fragile, and she crumbles onto a school aide, who wrestles with her own prejudiced frustration to help a strange lady in need, extracts the necessary information – name, year – makes a few radio messages and a few static-decorated exchanges later, my mother is consoled, reconstructed with the information that I have been dropped off, was accounted for, and in fact I am unlocking our townhome door as this information is being transferred– the door clicks open, I take a step, I call cheerily into an empty home, "I'm home!" and a cold silence befalls me. The lights are all out. Through an open window I hear the elementary school kids squealing in the playground behind our unit. 

"Mom?" I call. My mother, miles away in the school parking lot, sobs alone in the driver's seat – of today, and more. 

The door remains ajar as I stand confused at the absence that rejects my excitement, until an eclipsing reality stiffens into my shoulders – and in my shock of realization I drop my bag at this precipice, frozen in the doorway only just beginning.

You are sitting in a patch of grass extending into the sea of asphalt. The sound of childhood and after-school tag rings far away in the background. Your fingers are planted into the dirt, tufts of green between your fingers: soft, like the fur of an animal. The entire lawn sways together, a single instrument wavering indecisively with the sweet wind that combs through your hair. Gleeful screeches echo in the distance, as if recalling a past that you remember as faintly as the little voices sound to you now.

A curious ant crawls up your index finger:

Hi, ____ – it's me. I didn't see you in class yesterday. Or last week. 

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"Autobiography is a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause." 
– Paul de Man, Autobiography as Defacement

I am editing a twenty-minute clip of my late lunch at a park in Sydney, one of many videos I took while traveling alone in Australia. It is two weeks after the events in the video. I have not eaten dinner. It is one in the morning. Tomorrow is Monday. None of these facts occur to me. There is a longing that drives me through this physical limbo into a deep investigation of many hours of footage. Clip after clip after clip. Watching, rewatching. Starving.

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the lights of this hotel room are dim. i feel surveilled under the strange fixtures on the ceiling, which likely serve a functional and necessary purpose, but to me, look like eyes. i am being watched. i am watching youtube, it is my last day in australia, i had promised myself not to go on social media during my vacation, yet here i am. in a strange hotel. watching a video, because watching other people's lives through a screen has become a habit that feels like home.

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My working theory is that it was the mirror that made me into a ghost. Emphasis on the "working" – I'm still undecided whether I would describe my state of being as ghosthood, and also on how the mirror did the ghost thing. 

In the spirit of science, I have a couple of test scenarios that I believe would help me figure out what happened.

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if there is a god (not that there certainly is, but if for a moment we believed it), then maybe god is an elderly woman with kind wrinkles and a knowing smile, a familiar scent of home and nostalgia, a cup of tea between her hands. if there is a god, she is listening, observing, embracing. you’re speaking to her. you vomit out your life in front of her — full of shame, embarrassment, the occasional pride.

you are shrouded by self-pity these days. it’s getting dangerous, the amount of self-absorbed isolation you’re drowning in, indulgently, in the full glory of life’s terribleness. you are slowly isolating yourself from your friends, blindly hurting others through careless words that stem from insecurity. they’re small changes — barely noticeable, but with several months’ time, the world has shifted its tone towards you — it’s defensive, cautious. you’re something they are careful about. you feel a sense of loneliness waft up from the gaps in the flooring.

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i. 

Once, I was drinking with a friend. It was in my apartment. It was late at night — maybe around midnight? Maybe later than that. We’d known each other for a while. I believe two years counts as a while.

“You know,” she said, suddenly (I don’t remember if she was interrupting herself, or if there was a poignant silence that added weight to her next words, like they do in the movies), “sometimes, I feel like I don’t know who you are.”

“Oh?” I said. I paused.

Two years was apparently not enough for me to know what to say next. I was at a loss.

Eventually, I provided her with a very helpful, “Who I am, huh?” and then we moved on to talk about other things.

ii.

I am a Russian doll. 

Well— more specifically, I’m the Russian doll two layers in. I promise you I have friends, I just don’t know what they look like. The me that is two layers out — the representative me, perhaps — knows their names. I’m sure they are great people. I leave that to the outer me. I’m sure she knows what she is doing. I’m two layers in: it’s cozy. It’s dark. It’s safe.

There are more dolls deeper within, presumably. Maybe they also have egos, and maybe they also write their own little stories about how they are Russian dolls three layers in, or four layers. Or five, even. Might be a stretch. Regardless, that’s not my problem. I’m only aware of the two beyond me. Sometimes I’m jealous, because the outer dolls know more than me. They know the people in my life better, can recall their names better, can close their eyes and remember what they look like, whether they wear glasses, what kind of hairstyle they usually have, what kind of ice cream they like. They probably have funnier stories to tell.

I’ll admit it: I’m jealous of them. But I’m sure they already know, because I’m just a layer within them.

iii.

Occasionally, I will talk to someone, and it will be like a breath of fresh air. A little direct line to oxygen. We will talk for four hours. Five, maybe. Given that we would have time. I will feel like my words are being understood— translation-less, interpretation-less. It will be enthralling, the speed at which I will just say something and I will hear something back and there is nothing in between, no resistance to slow down the growth of an idea. I will lose myself, but in a different way than usual. My body will disappear under the transit of words, under the idea that we are nursing.

I will take the bus home afterwards. On the bus, there will be someone muttering to himself across from me, a little kid clinging to his mother’s sleeve several rows over, and a person staring at their phone leaning against the rail. I will be two stops away from getting off.

My body will disappear, again, but this time not under the benevolent transit of words, but under the hostile transit of perception.

But it is okay that I have disappeared. I will see all of this through a film — later, with popcorn. I know it sounds funny, but I can’t help it. And maybe it is easier that way. Maybe it is what makes me further away. Either way, I don’t have much of a choice.

iv.

Bathrooms cannot help it but have a mirror. In this day and age, it cannot be helped. On top of that, it cannot be helped that I see myself in that mirror. I stand there, each evening, staring at myself until my eyes blur and I start to unfurl into an unraveling roll of film. Eventually there is no reflection. It is a screen. The day reveals itself, frame by frame, until I am immersed in the spectatorship of my life.

The words I have said, the people I have met. Maybe that is what they look like, I wonder to myself. Maybe that is the life I am living.

 You come to me in waves:

The first is silence. You’re invisible. For a mistaken moment, I believe you are no longer there. I move on with my life and marvel at how smoothly life continues in your absence. The calmness is unexpected; it preoccupies me, seeding a question: perhaps you were not that big of a presence. Perhaps this is a sign. Perhaps this silence was sent to deliver a message, that you were nothing, after all.

The second is the silence, held longer, turned inwards, flipped inside-out, and turned outwards. It is loud. I realize, suddenly, that for the silence to be visible I must have looked at it. The silence was not silence all along. It was an excuse to think about you while feeling above the waves, when I was not. I was under the surface, looking at the sky refracted through the movement of the tides just above me. Suddenly the silence hurts, and I dare myself to look at photos of you. It takes me less than a minute to succumb: it is two in the morning and I have looked at every photo of your beaming smile, your nonchalance blurred in a momentary capture, your silhouette against the adventures we took. The silence is gone.

The third is melancholy. I wallow in the mistake of swimming in our past, because now the ocean is blue, so incredibly blue. Not a day goes by where I wonder what you are doing, suddenly afraid that the silence I first felt is the silence you are feeling now, of me, but more truly. Have you moved on? I want to know, but I cannot, and so I continue to wade in the viscosity of my sorrow. I am addicted to photos of you, though at the surface I tell myself that I am doing it because I have moved on. That is a lie. I have not.

The fourth is an unsettling peace. Eventually, the sorrow wears thin, and the ocean is blue but transparently so; I can look up at the sky, break the surface, breathe the air. Sometimes I am back underneath, but I know how to swim upwards. It feels like silence, but I am not sure it is the same as the one I first encountered. Suddenly, I realize that the ocean is vast, that I have been wading in place, and that maybe it is time to think about swimming towards something new.

“Come on,” said David, like the little devil he was. As if he’d been working toward this moment his whole life. “You can’t do it.”

He was rocking back and forth, the river dancing around his waist. Momentarily, the clouds parted and the sunlight bore harshly into my eyesight. I frowned and heard Jenny giggling at the shore, asking us when we’d start playing Marco Polo.

“You can’t,” he said, ignoring Jenny. “You’re not even interesting enough to come up with a different game.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Then come up with one. Come up with one right now.”

I could feel the kids’ eyes on my back. I was facing the river in which David stood, waist-deep into the water. Even in this moment of hatred I couldn’t deny how picturesque he looked, a lean and lightly tanned teen posing for a Target summer photoshoot. His most definitely evil grin could be interpreted as an overzealous smile of a sporty youth enjoying nature, and the his blond hair caught the sunlight in a natural halo. Above us, the sky was a clear blue. Around us, it smelled wonderfully of water and rocks and grass and soft dirt. I could hear the rush of the river. As I took all of this in, contemptuously, my mind went blank. I stared, defenseless.

“Yeah. You can’t. All you do is play videogames. It’s not like you have much of a life anyway.”

I couldn’t believe his audacity. His blinding arrogance; his controlling attitude. That he’d gotten away with so many things, that he was so beloved -- how could the adults not see him for the devil he was? How could they misconstrue tyranny for charisma, hubris for confidence, and deceit for charm? How could they leave me to the side like a forgotten hand-me-down while he flourished in the attention and sunlight? And it had all gotten to his head, had become the fibre of his being. These summers were always under his reign, under his self-appointed dictatorship misunderstood by everyone else as natural-born charisma.

“Maybe I do.” I took a step closer, trembling with clenched fists.

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We were drunk and half-high on a crumbling front porch, three hours into Saturday and talking about random, unexplained mysteries that had happened to us. Unexplained disappearances, anonymous gifts, unrevealed pranksters. Jenna, losing her glasses one morning, never to find them again; Steve, who’d one morning found a fresh blueberry pie in front of his dorm room with his name on it (which he shared with his roommate); Sora, whose life suddenly started presenting her with a small rubber duckies in random places every day for a month.

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Sometimes I forget about this: for three years I grew up homeschooled in a van.

It was second to fourth grade. Lessons were taught on the road, taught by my mother as she would snap Trident peppermint gum while explaining concepts.

“You have to understand that what I’m about to tell you is putting you light years ahead of your peers,” she’d say, adjusting her scratched sunglasses. “America is first and foremost a shitty-- shit. We’re running out of gas.”

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i.

I look up from my phone (opened to the News) and realize I’m no longer alone in my room. A bonfire flashes before my eyes. It’s young one, still feeding off of fresh wood, writhing out of control. Its body occasionally extends to my toes. My room feels otherworldly with dancing shadows that sway at the same rhythm as the flames. I rub my eyes.

It reaches out from its body to beckon to me in. The edge of its flame extends five little fingers as a shy greeting and I have the strongest urge to shake its hand, as if maybe its touch will feel like a cool balm. It’s silly. I know it’ll hurt.

When I look at the fire again, it has resumed its soulless shape. I turn back to my phone and keep scrolling.


ii.

How are wildfires born? I imagine it begins like a thought: circumstance, chance, and a bit of my own fault. Wind, a poorly kept campfire, a little bit of dryness, and a single persistent piece of glowing firewood -- that's all it takes to catch the world aflame. What a determination that last piece must have, waiting patiently for the hour in which it will grow thousands of times its size. A seed waiting for the world to provide it its due glory.

But imagine once it's grown -- it would be horrible for the people. What if I woke up to a fire in my room? How helpless would I be? The heat will press against my face and my eyes would open to a looming figure at my door. Between smoke and tears I'd watch it rapidly hug the periphery of my room, seep closer and closer until I cannot breathe. All of my previous thoughts at silly little bonfire events (“How much does fire weigh?” I had wondered) will seem absurd.

How crazy that a trivial thought, given time and circumstance, will grow so quickly. Left unkempt, a seed grows overnight into an inevitable beast. A beast that teasingly dances to a music I can't hear.

If I am to die this way, maybe I will shake its hand to see how it feels.

I had this dream in which there were fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster -- my freshman year biology teacher was so excited when she talked about them that I henceforth remembered the scientific name through all these years) embedded into the skin under my palms, dotted like living chia seeds sprinkled onto my hands, winged blackheads that squirmed and I felt them all, felt each of them wiggling around under my bumpy palms. I had to squeeze each of them out like an overripe pimple and felt the bugs leave my skin with stinging puss. I remember waking up that morning and checking my hands frantically to see if it had transferred into reality.

I don’t know why, but that feeling -- the feeling of uncomfortable squirming under my flesh in such an inevitable, un-ignorable way haunts me constantly. When I feel stressed, my palms tingle slightly as if I can recall the feeling that I haven’t technically felt before -- echoes of the flies’ movement that I felt the morning after the dream. It feels so real, so threatening, so violating. I can bring it up into my head upon command, the erratic buzzing and the pain as I squeeze them out, the way my hands become home to bugs and then craters of stinging, exposed skin after I’ve removed them all, many of them dead because I disembodied them in my strenuous attempt to rid myself of the parasites. Afterwards, my hands look like a sponge with small holes, as if someone took a metal suction straw and sucked out little bits of my palm, dot by dot so that when I make a fist, I can feel my skin fold around the holes, feel the sting of the fresh, sensitive skin five layers deep that met the world’s air months too early.

The Whites never had to buy words.

The words were handed to them, crowned upon their lips like little stars between their teeth, words they swallowed with their toothless mouths when they were born. They trickled down their stomachs.

The Whites never bought those words, mark my words. They didn’t buy them like my parents bought ours, dirtied and washed and washed and washed again, in umpteen attempts to maybe next time make the scars disappear. Our words have no stars. Our words do not get swallowed. We bought them, second-hand and slightly too small for us, too frowned upon.

We bought our words with our blood. With the purchase we are here. Not the Whites.

Words cannot be stolen. They are not exchanged. They are bought or taken, but I cannot cover your mouth to prevent you from speaking my words. I cannot stop anyone from saying what they want. All I can say is that I know some words are mine, some yours, and some unclaimed.

I bought my words.

Words which have been bought can never be taken; every instance is a borrowed one, unless spoken by the owner. Words which do not belong to anyone are always taken. Those words are nomads. Those words stay afloat. Each speaker is its owner.

I borrow your words which you have purchased (if you have). You borrow mine. But shall I not return your words with less scars? Shall I not return them, once it leaves my mouth and the expression is complete and the concept is conceived in my listener’s head--shall I not return them like new? Why should I slash more scars into your word, your word which I borrowed? I am humble; I speak your word with care, and I minimize my damage. Like borrowed books, I do not add more dog-ears, do not rip out pages, do not write over the meaning.

Sometimes we forget that we are borrowing. We let the scars stay open, still fresh to the stings of the rain, the dirt, the glares.

Sometimes, words should not be borrowed. Sometimes a word was so expensive that there is no chance that I will return the word with no more scars than it already has, because it has been bought with scars. The currency was blood, the middleman death; some words should not be borrowed. Some words belong only to their owners because these words weigh heavy even on their own tongues.

We are exchangers of words but borrowers as well. Forget not the words which have been bought with blood. Forget not to return your borrowed ones in good condition. Remember these words were bought by someone. They are not yours to keep, not yours to mutilate, not yours to toss in light jest when the word was bought with blood.

Lei tells me to trust my guts. It’s strange, though. Can’t explain it in quite the right way. I’ve tried writing it into some journal a few times but that notebook is lost somewhere in the dumpster, probably when I was cleaning the flat and got too lazy to actually look through the boxes I had laying around.

It’s been a while. I’ve long since abandoned my futile efforts to come to terms with this strangely unshakeable feeling. For some time I thought it was normal. Maybe it is. But I look around and nobody seems as stressed as I feel--or as haunted, I should say.

Haunted? That’s where it gets a little hazy. Haunted isn’t the right word. Haunted makes people think of those movies, translucent figures of death resembling past lives, bobbing around us “mortals,” trying to fulfill some sort of destiny, exact some revenge, pass on some desperate message. That’s not how it is. I think. I mean, people have tried to prove those kinds of haunts exist. It’s silly. Once you’re dead, you’re free from all responsibility. Why would you come back anyway? Who even cares after that?

It’s this--I don’t know. I just feel like I’m haunted by something--or the absence of it. Like there’s this metaphorical cavity cutting through organs and bones and veins and I walk, every day, feeling the air swish around in it, stagnating and bouncing off the architecture of the hole to make eerie little whistles between the cracks. Like if I put my hand into my mouth and dig deep enough I might be able to feel the walls of the cavity, feel the pulsating flesh inside of me, the hot air moving between my fingers. And my hand will come out clean because there’s no blood there. No me. It’s an absence. It’ll be just like putting my hand in a sterile, empty box.

I mean, it’s fine. I function normally. There’s nothing entirely abnormal about this feeling--it’s just this strange conviction I’ve grown accustomed to. That there’s something inherently missing about me, something integral to my life that I just haven’t gotten (yet? Don’t know if yet is the right word because it implies certain arrival in the future). I have a social life, friends, a job, education, all that. Just your standard disillusioned millennial swimming through the viscous bigot-filled snot pool of society. In sum, I’m doing alright.

And there it is. I’ll say I’m alright and momentarily it’ll occur to me that maybe I’m actually not alright. I’ve been living my life the wrong way. And that whole cascade of memories will come back to me and I won’t see my life as a line but a choose your own adventure path where I’m landed right in the middle, scoring a measly 66% because I didn’t make the right choice when Johnny asked me what pizza I wanted during his fifth grade birthday party twelve years ago. And god, that mistake I made when I told Sarah I didn’t need to room with her because I had my own place. Or the way I settled that argument with my now ex-girlfriend.

dream (v.)

1. to be haunted
   it looks me in the eye everywhere i go. i’ve tried leaving countries and following people, throwing away instinct down the drain but the drain isn’t as far as it goes because it comes back up and i see it sitting at the other end of my bed when i wake up in the morning. its wit is deceptive; i’ve fallen in love and i know it is my own fault. it hides in the space between my shadow and the ground when i walk and i can feel its weight behind me as i drag my dark outline, twice its weight because of the amount of ideas that i have fed it.
     
2. to be hungry
   harrowing. i can’t say i’ve attempted to relieve this sensation, this gut-itching soul-growling insatiable feeling that i cannot let leave no matter how many times i scratch my skin. i can dig to the bone but it will do nothing. there is no fight or flight in this one; it is fight or die or die trying. i’ve eaten so much of the wrong things but i feel as if i have had nothing since birth.