33
2025
Having Shen in my life, who is a year older than me, gave me a glimpse of what my life might look like in the near future. I recall wishing him a happy birthday last year when he turned 33, which we dubbed his ‘Jesus Year’—the age at which Jesus was crucified. It amazes me that there are people who are well past that age and are still very much in pain, lashing out at others. Coincidentally, that was also the year our friendship began to dwindle, as he was in the midst of his architecture license exam, and I was still living a relatively carefree life: working, eating, playing.
The summer after my brother returned from Shanghai, he told me I had been possessed…by entities. He was deep into his meditation practice at that point. It’s hard to escape them, living in Downtown Los Angeles, I thought. Also, is not living under our current social conditions a form of indenture, as represented by the Devil in the tarot? After I graduated from college and before moving to Los Angeles, I received a tarot reading while staying at a friend's mom's place in Boston. I remember the horned figure appearing in my future position on the spread. One time, while living in San Francisco, a woman—who I assumed was a psychic—called me by my name and asked to see me immediately, free of charge. Perturbed, I never went. There was also the city college English professor who lived next to the courtyard, by the communal kitchen on the first floor of the single-room occupancy apartment in Little Tokyo. He invited me to see his room after I remarked on the painting hanging on his wall of an abstracted figure of a boy in muted pastel colors. As I walked into the room, he gently closed the wooden door behind him, and I noticed what appeared to be a “Tree of Life” diagram etched into it. There was a shrine on a shelf to the right of the door with bronze winged figures and two red candles, and I noted the spine of a board game box with an image of a black hole. To the left was a room—a study, perhaps, with a simple writing desk and chair. I began to feel a little faint and told the professor that I wanted to leave immediately. He appeared startled by my sudden request but opened the door nonetheless. I subsequently called my friend from college to tell him about the incident. In that same apartment, I read an online blog about a 666 meditation, and the following day, at the Whole Foods in Downtown L.A., my food order totaled $6.66. I kept the receipt somewhere, but today I forgot where I had placed it. A friend once heard an unearthly language—which they described as angel song—in their ear while experiencing sleep paralysis.
Once, when I was about nine or ten years old, during a daydream in the room I shared with my brother—while my parents were in the midst of a prolonged argument—I went somewhere, to a place where nothing exists.
What does it mean to ‘make sense’ to others? I struggle with this—not least with myself. I once told a friend that I don’t really ‘think’ in the way most people seem to—that when I do something, the decision arrives intuitively. I rarely weigh the options in my head beforehand. I can communicate with apparent ease when I’m with friends and family, but in social settings beyond that, I become crippled by anxiety. I can barely open my mouth, let alone form a coherent sentence. Some of this debilitation comes from the looks I receive from others in public—looks I perceive as threatening or hateful, for reasons unbeknownst to me. From a young age, I seemed to sense the ill-wishes of those around me—most vividly, my grandmother’s sister, whom I once, in my toddler’s honesty, pointed out as the witch in a fairy tale my mother had read to me.
I’ve long felt like a sacrificial lamb, offered up to the shifting desires of others—my mother, my schoolmates, even my high school art tutor. I let my mother shape my resentment of my father, carrying a bitterness through much of my young adulthood. I became the canvas onto which middle school boys cast their uneasy masculinity. I let my art tutor sculpt me in her own image, to the detriment of my own creative voice. Perhaps now, in the stillness and solitude of this chapter, I am reclaiming what was deferred, outside the demands and expectations of others.
As I grow older, I realize that power is not inherently good or bad. I used to deeply resent the power the system held over me. I can still recall the rainy night in early February when I brashly quit my first job out of college at the fashion company in West Hollywood, just off Santa Monica Boulevard—a place I still pass on my most recent commute. The outburst has been building for a while. On my meager entry-level income, I struggled to pay my monthly private student loan, which, unlike federal loans, couldn’t be deferred. Then there were the petty insults and subtle acts of disrespect from some coworkers. On several occasions, my team would go to Erewhon for lunch without me—not that I could afford it anyway. In 2015, my coworkers were already comparing each other’s birth charts. I’ve come to realize that having Uranus in Capricorn in one’s chart can manifest in two ways: either as instability in one’s career—frequently changing jobs—or as the disruption of systems from within the boundaries of a relatively stable career. The former was true for me when Pluto conjoined my natal Uranus (and Neptune, for that matter) in Capricorn, setting off a decade-long period of career instability. Two of my friends, who were born the same year as me, have held stable jobs for nearly a decade and experienced deep transformation within their roles. Two other friends, on the other hand, have had career paths similar to mine, changing jobs at least every two years over the past decade. Now that Pluto has moved into the sign of Aquarius, what will be transformed in the process?
Suddenly, after last Tuesday—and every night since—the dogs in the neighborhood have barked incessantly around the witching hour, as I wake to the buzz of a mosquito. I swear, the insects in the apartment are inter-dimensional beings––they seem to disappear as readily as they appear, zooming in and out of here and there. I sent a message in my head for them to quiet down—it seemed to work. The disinstalled toilet seat outside the gate is being lifted up and down. I tried to fall back asleep by listening to a podcast on the current state of the United States. The next thing I knew, it was a little after nine in the morning, and I woke later than I’d like. It’s always about to rain every afternoon, but never does—the gathering clouds edging us on, the people in the square making plans for an escape from the impending storm.
The people in Taiwan have become desensitized to the threat of a Chinese invasion. This year, my brother finally fulfilled his compulsory military service—albeit in an administrative position. In early July, his daughter was born. Her name is a homophone of two characters that together mean “Heart of the Universe.”
I had not read Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower until after June of 2020. Yet, looking back, it makes sense that I had a strange fascination with Pasadena, the place where Butler was born and spent most of her life. I would literally visit every weekend to daydream in its parks and cafés. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is nearby—perhaps a communication portal to other worlds. In the novel, the main heroine possesses what she refers to as hyperempathy, an extreme form of empathy whereby she can deeply feel the emotions of others. In the year 2024 (it was published in 1993), there is an authoritarian government led by a president named Donner. Fast forward to 2025, the 47th president’s name sounds eerily similar?
The world is ending and all you want (still) is notoriety. A college classmate once remarked that he wanted to be famous for not being famous. The mirror you peer into everyday is slightly distorted. Perhaps he was right all along—the fortune teller who saw a photo of me that my dad had shown him. He said I’d have a hard life until my mid- to late-thirties, and that I should work in graphic design. I can’t say I took his word literally when I enrolled in the visual design course at city college or took the job at an art gallery designing sales materials. I still cringe at much of the work that I did during my college days.
One night, as I was lying in bed, my mind took me back to Hammarskjold Middle School in suburban New Jersey—sixth and seventh grade, navigating each hallway and classroom, my former teachers appearing in succession: Señora Milazzo, Mrs. Dowd, Mr. Kelly, Ms. Kelly, Mrs. Whelan. The slim red lockers lined the hallways for the underclassmen, and blue ones for the upper grades. I remembered the persistent butterflies in my stomach before the start of each school year—anticipating the teachers mispronouncing my name—and the debilitating anxiety before every classroom presentation, every self-introduction. Where are you from? New J––I mean, L.A.: this is also what I tell people when I am abroad.
In Florence, on most days, as I walk down the narrowest of streets—what would be considered alleys in the U.S.—I find myself, head up, in awe of the architectural details on the building façades, which seem to have remained intact since the heyday of the Renaissance. Throughout my time here, I am constantly struck by a sense of familiarity—as if I have already been here, perhaps in my previous lives, or through Google Maps, and by the sheer ubiquity of Florence’s aesthetic—florets I remember seeing on the coffered ceiling of the underground metro in Washington, D.C. Not even the locals would believe you when you tell them this––all they see is a foreigner in spectacles with a black mop of hair––yet, you sometimes don’t believe it yourself either.
This year has been about my pursuit of feeling. Burdened by a lack of it—a sense of hollowness—perhaps a condition developed as self-protection, a hardening of the senses to survive the sensory overload of the city. Isn’t this why people escape to the countryside? What is boredom but a pent-up need to return to the familiarity of the city?
Examining my fascination with cloisters—where monks once dwelled—I had a vision of faded frescoes on vaulted ceilings, intersected by metal beams, sharp like Archangel Michael’s spear piercing the dragon’s flesh. You can find traces of their architectural influence across London, Paris, New York—they’re above ground in museums and libraries; underground in wineries and crypts.
I once entered a church on a whim in Florence. There I saw a familiar image of Jesus—an original painting from which countless reproductions have been made. Jesus appears to glow from a light source within the canvas, an effect achieved through a combination of pastel pinks, blues, and greens.
There is something uncanny about the figures in certain Renaissance paintings—their realistic yet stylized faces and candy-colored robes outlined in light brown.
Can you hear the chant of the friars?
I’ve lost count of the number of arcades I’ve walked through this year—no, not the kind with video games, but endless hallways with colonnaded archways—some with floors of black-and-white checkered tile, others of brick parquet. I play a game where I skip along the patterned tiles without touching the seams, lest doing so bring bad luck.
This year, I've returned to L.A. from Mexico twice, and from London once. The next time I'm back will be in January next year, from Taiwan.
Watching movies from and of the 1980s—the former made contemporaneously and the latter retrospectively (the most recent of which is Call Me By Your Name)—conjures imaginative memories of my mom’s coming of age. Although she married in 1990 at the age of 24, it’s hard not to transpose the film-grains from photographs of her onto the story on-screen. The emotions of first love depicted in the film—albeit a story about a young man and an older graduate student—moved me deeply, and I couldn’t help but imagine the possibility of her finding true love had she not married my dad. Or perhaps she could have become involved in a love-quadrangle like the heroine in Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L'Ami de mon amie), a lonely young professional who lives and works in a new suburban development near Paris and becomes entangled with her newfound friends.
Sitting here at my writing desk in Mexico, I could easily imagine hiding in the alleyway just behind the shop-fronts in Porto, forgotten for centuries at a time––unremembered. What are a few centuries to an eon or two where language doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Quick to name the aliens amongst us, we forget that we were the aliens.
I was too afraid to cross the entirety of Dom Luís I Bridge, stopping midway through and returning back to land with my eyes half-closed, remembering the drizzles of spring rain and being caught in a storm in a polyester trenchcoat traversing through white-bricked buildings from the 1980s, peacocks in the park seen from a distance through the haze, remnants of an agrarian past in the pastures dedicated to wine-making.
What can a year of rootlessness do to you?
And what were you looking for in the noise of the crowd walking along the street in Mexico? Although someone could tell you were not from here if they really looked, you had the dark hair and facial features vague-enough to blend in.
I’m always at a loss for words, perhaps
because I was never taught
to use them
to begin with
Reese Witherspoon in a red cardigan
and round tortoiseshell spectacles
As if red hot summer
never ended nor
began, for that matter
The summer after my brother returned from Shanghai, he told me I had been possessed…by entities. He was deep into his meditation practice at that point. It’s hard to escape them, living in Downtown Los Angeles, I thought. Also, is not living under our current social conditions a form of indenture, as represented by the Devil in the tarot? After I graduated from college and before moving to Los Angeles, I received a tarot reading while staying at a friend's mom's place in Boston. I remember the horned figure appearing in my future position on the spread. One time, while living in San Francisco, a woman—who I assumed was a psychic—called me by my name and asked to see me immediately, free of charge. Perturbed, I never went. There was also the city college English professor who lived next to the courtyard, by the communal kitchen on the first floor of the single-room occupancy apartment in Little Tokyo. He invited me to see his room after I remarked on the painting hanging on his wall of an abstracted figure of a boy in muted pastel colors. As I walked into the room, he gently closed the wooden door behind him, and I noticed what appeared to be a “Tree of Life” diagram etched into it. There was a shrine on a shelf to the right of the door with bronze winged figures and two red candles, and I noted the spine of a board game box with an image of a black hole. To the left was a room—a study, perhaps, with a simple writing desk and chair. I began to feel a little faint and told the professor that I wanted to leave immediately. He appeared startled by my sudden request but opened the door nonetheless. I subsequently called my friend from college to tell him about the incident. In that same apartment, I read an online blog about a 666 meditation, and the following day, at the Whole Foods in Downtown L.A., my food order totaled $6.66. I kept the receipt somewhere, but today I forgot where I had placed it. A friend once heard an unearthly language—which they described as angel song—in their ear while experiencing sleep paralysis.
Once, when I was about nine or ten years old, during a daydream in the room I shared with my brother—while my parents were in the midst of a prolonged argument—I went somewhere, to a place where nothing exists.
What does it mean to ‘make sense’ to others? I struggle with this—not least with myself. I once told a friend that I don’t really ‘think’ in the way most people seem to—that when I do something, the decision arrives intuitively. I rarely weigh the options in my head beforehand. I can communicate with apparent ease when I’m with friends and family, but in social settings beyond that, I become crippled by anxiety. I can barely open my mouth, let alone form a coherent sentence. Some of this debilitation comes from the looks I receive from others in public—looks I perceive as threatening or hateful, for reasons unbeknownst to me. From a young age, I seemed to sense the ill-wishes of those around me—most vividly, my grandmother’s sister, whom I once, in my toddler’s honesty, pointed out as the witch in a fairy tale my mother had read to me.
I’ve long felt like a sacrificial lamb, offered up to the shifting desires of others—my mother, my schoolmates, even my high school art tutor. I let my mother shape my resentment of my father, carrying a bitterness through much of my young adulthood. I became the canvas onto which middle school boys cast their uneasy masculinity. I let my art tutor sculpt me in her own image, to the detriment of my own creative voice. Perhaps now, in the stillness and solitude of this chapter, I am reclaiming what was deferred, outside the demands and expectations of others.
As I grow older, I realize that power is not inherently good or bad. I used to deeply resent the power the system held over me. I can still recall the rainy night in early February when I brashly quit my first job out of college at the fashion company in West Hollywood, just off Santa Monica Boulevard—a place I still pass on my most recent commute. The outburst has been building for a while. On my meager entry-level income, I struggled to pay my monthly private student loan, which, unlike federal loans, couldn’t be deferred. Then there were the petty insults and subtle acts of disrespect from some coworkers. On several occasions, my team would go to Erewhon for lunch without me—not that I could afford it anyway. In 2015, my coworkers were already comparing each other’s birth charts. I’ve come to realize that having Uranus in Capricorn in one’s chart can manifest in two ways: either as instability in one’s career—frequently changing jobs—or as the disruption of systems from within the boundaries of a relatively stable career. The former was true for me when Pluto conjoined my natal Uranus (and Neptune, for that matter) in Capricorn, setting off a decade-long period of career instability. Two of my friends, who were born the same year as me, have held stable jobs for nearly a decade and experienced deep transformation within their roles. Two other friends, on the other hand, have had career paths similar to mine, changing jobs at least every two years over the past decade. Now that Pluto has moved into the sign of Aquarius, what will be transformed in the process?
Suddenly, after last Tuesday—and every night since—the dogs in the neighborhood have barked incessantly around the witching hour, as I wake to the buzz of a mosquito. I swear, the insects in the apartment are inter-dimensional beings––they seem to disappear as readily as they appear, zooming in and out of here and there. I sent a message in my head for them to quiet down—it seemed to work. The disinstalled toilet seat outside the gate is being lifted up and down. I tried to fall back asleep by listening to a podcast on the current state of the United States. The next thing I knew, it was a little after nine in the morning, and I woke later than I’d like. It’s always about to rain every afternoon, but never does—the gathering clouds edging us on, the people in the square making plans for an escape from the impending storm.
The people in Taiwan have become desensitized to the threat of a Chinese invasion. This year, my brother finally fulfilled his compulsory military service—albeit in an administrative position. In early July, his daughter was born. Her name is a homophone of two characters that together mean “Heart of the Universe.”
I had not read Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower until after June of 2020. Yet, looking back, it makes sense that I had a strange fascination with Pasadena, the place where Butler was born and spent most of her life. I would literally visit every weekend to daydream in its parks and cafés. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is nearby—perhaps a communication portal to other worlds. In the novel, the main heroine possesses what she refers to as hyperempathy, an extreme form of empathy whereby she can deeply feel the emotions of others. In the year 2024 (it was published in 1993), there is an authoritarian government led by a president named Donner. Fast forward to 2025, the 47th president’s name sounds eerily similar?
The world is ending and all you want (still) is notoriety. A college classmate once remarked that he wanted to be famous for not being famous. The mirror you peer into everyday is slightly distorted. Perhaps he was right all along—the fortune teller who saw a photo of me that my dad had shown him. He said I’d have a hard life until my mid- to late-thirties, and that I should work in graphic design. I can’t say I took his word literally when I enrolled in the visual design course at city college or took the job at an art gallery designing sales materials. I still cringe at much of the work that I did during my college days.
One night, as I was lying in bed, my mind took me back to Hammarskjold Middle School in suburban New Jersey—sixth and seventh grade, navigating each hallway and classroom, my former teachers appearing in succession: Señora Milazzo, Mrs. Dowd, Mr. Kelly, Ms. Kelly, Mrs. Whelan. The slim red lockers lined the hallways for the underclassmen, and blue ones for the upper grades. I remembered the persistent butterflies in my stomach before the start of each school year—anticipating the teachers mispronouncing my name—and the debilitating anxiety before every classroom presentation, every self-introduction. Where are you from? New J––I mean, L.A.: this is also what I tell people when I am abroad.
In Florence, on most days, as I walk down the narrowest of streets—what would be considered alleys in the U.S.—I find myself, head up, in awe of the architectural details on the building façades, which seem to have remained intact since the heyday of the Renaissance. Throughout my time here, I am constantly struck by a sense of familiarity—as if I have already been here, perhaps in my previous lives, or through Google Maps, and by the sheer ubiquity of Florence’s aesthetic—florets I remember seeing on the coffered ceiling of the underground metro in Washington, D.C. Not even the locals would believe you when you tell them this––all they see is a foreigner in spectacles with a black mop of hair––yet, you sometimes don’t believe it yourself either.
This year has been about my pursuit of feeling. Burdened by a lack of it—a sense of hollowness—perhaps a condition developed as self-protection, a hardening of the senses to survive the sensory overload of the city. Isn’t this why people escape to the countryside? What is boredom but a pent-up need to return to the familiarity of the city?
Examining my fascination with cloisters—where monks once dwelled—I had a vision of faded frescoes on vaulted ceilings, intersected by metal beams, sharp like Archangel Michael’s spear piercing the dragon’s flesh. You can find traces of their architectural influence across London, Paris, New York—they’re above ground in museums and libraries; underground in wineries and crypts.
I once entered a church on a whim in Florence. There I saw a familiar image of Jesus—an original painting from which countless reproductions have been made. Jesus appears to glow from a light source within the canvas, an effect achieved through a combination of pastel pinks, blues, and greens.
There is something uncanny about the figures in certain Renaissance paintings—their realistic yet stylized faces and candy-colored robes outlined in light brown.
Can you hear the chant of the friars?
I’ve lost count of the number of arcades I’ve walked through this year—no, not the kind with video games, but endless hallways with colonnaded archways—some with floors of black-and-white checkered tile, others of brick parquet. I play a game where I skip along the patterned tiles without touching the seams, lest doing so bring bad luck.
This year, I've returned to L.A. from Mexico twice, and from London once. The next time I'm back will be in January next year, from Taiwan.
Watching movies from and of the 1980s—the former made contemporaneously and the latter retrospectively (the most recent of which is Call Me By Your Name)—conjures imaginative memories of my mom’s coming of age. Although she married in 1990 at the age of 24, it’s hard not to transpose the film-grains from photographs of her onto the story on-screen. The emotions of first love depicted in the film—albeit a story about a young man and an older graduate student—moved me deeply, and I couldn’t help but imagine the possibility of her finding true love had she not married my dad. Or perhaps she could have become involved in a love-quadrangle like the heroine in Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L'Ami de mon amie), a lonely young professional who lives and works in a new suburban development near Paris and becomes entangled with her newfound friends.
Sitting here at my writing desk in Mexico, I could easily imagine hiding in the alleyway just behind the shop-fronts in Porto, forgotten for centuries at a time––unremembered. What are a few centuries to an eon or two where language doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Quick to name the aliens amongst us, we forget that we were the aliens.
I was too afraid to cross the entirety of Dom Luís I Bridge, stopping midway through and returning back to land with my eyes half-closed, remembering the drizzles of spring rain and being caught in a storm in a polyester trenchcoat traversing through white-bricked buildings from the 1980s, peacocks in the park seen from a distance through the haze, remnants of an agrarian past in the pastures dedicated to wine-making.
What can a year of rootlessness do to you?
And what were you looking for in the noise of the crowd walking along the street in Mexico? Although someone could tell you were not from here if they really looked, you had the dark hair and facial features vague-enough to blend in.
I’m always at a loss for words, perhaps
because I was never taught
to use them
to begin with
Reese Witherspoon in a red cardigan
and round tortoiseshell spectacles
As if red hot summer
never ended nor
began, for that matter
Whenever I go into a trance during one of my exercise sessions, I keep seeing, in my mind’s eye, the same view of San Francisco overlooking Russian Hill, next to the tennis court I brought my dad to when he’d visited at some point during the pandemic. I want to live there when I retire––hopefully sooner than later. I started a manifestation journal in the form of photographs taken on my phone––collectively, they represent visions that the universe has revealed to me. I know that sounds a bit woo-woo, but I count them as some of my most prized possessions––if they can even be considered “physical” given their primary existence on the cloud and my phone. I had attempted to print them—to render them physical somehow—gifting them to friends with varying degrees of reception: mostly apathy, but some with reverence and intrigue.
Other times during one of my trances, I’d let go of grievances with certain people from my past. Just the other day, one of my ex-bosses, who was cruel to me and had been the reason I quit a particular job, appeared in my mind; I’d later found out on an Instagram post that he had recently passed, the reason of which had not been disclosed. I did some internet digging but couldn’t find anything.
Not all demons are bad—in fact, I’d argue that they’re beyond moral judgment. I imagine becoming one of them after I die—the fiery yet protective kind that watches over the innocent, warding off those that attempt to cause harm.
Cruel world
always waiting for the key change
in the song
waiting for it to drop
drop
I’ll finally go to therapy
once I move to New York
sometimes I want to hear a song
that I’m not used to
When you finally meet me
you’ll have already met me
in your dreams
some nights ago
By tomorrow morning
after the rain stops
everything will have changed
You’re impulsive that way
jumping into strangers’ beds
Letting them into yours
That song reminds me of
the soundtrack to the intro
of the news channel
from the ‘80s
right before the fall
of the Berlin Wall
flying to San Francisco
on business
Thinking you had
fallen in love
with him at the hotel
a Parisian’s fantasy
of California
Perhaps I’ll disappear
somewhere between San Luis Obispo
and Monterey Bay
For my thirtieth birthday, I had a small gathering at my studio apartment in Silverlake; it was a home-coming of sorts after returning to L.A. from a three-year personal sabbatical in San Francisco. I had invited my friends Joann, Shen, and Shen’s ex, Nick, and ate Chinese food take-out from Woon Kitchen in Filipinotown. My parents came to celebrate a week before that––Joann said that my eyes looked vacant in the photos of my parents and me.
Is it self-indulgent to write during times like these? But it is one of the only ways I know how to cope right now.
Perhaps the reason why some of us are obsessed with climate change is because we either can’t wait or are terrified for the end of the world to arrive.
I imagine a house collapsing in on itself––along goes its shingled roof, attic, cane furniture, bed, inheritance. Yet, you’re not inside it––only observing from the outside––situated in a cornfield like in a Stephen Shore photograph of an unnamed town in America. There are no buildings next to the house, just an AI-generated version of a golden-hued pasture.
On the day I leave this Mexican city for the next, there are butterflies in my stomach. The only food that seems to quell it is miso soup or some type of broth. And my thoughts have already turned to Paris: What will actually happen to me once I’m there? A revelation—or perhaps some type of miracle. You recall the tingling sensation when the lottery prize was drawn and your grandma won an airplane ticket and an iPad. My astrocartographic match is Paris—although I’m only following this imperative loosely.
My brother is living in a parallel world relative to mine: he has a wife and a daughter, and I strangely have not accepted this fact in my subconscious mind. Even the sound of it makes me think of a 40-something with a job and responsibilities––yet, he’s 31 and lives on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, a few hours drive from the Tropic of Cancer.
I know eventually I will go back into someone else’s lair, someone’s cage––in the Big Apple, but not in the City of Lights. I can feel my throat constricting, and I see the Devil card from the tarot in my mind. I am hoping for a change in the weather pattern––a shift in the clouds––now desperately willing it to happen. What if you moved to the Berkshires, to a small town somewhere? You will still feel limited, albeit in a different way.
You were never not comparing yourself to others. In fact, I had deleted Instagram multiple times in the past week––each time coming back to the same gay couple that I’ve been following for years now. They had just announced their five-year anniversary, and I imagined that the (asian) one among them could have been me. A couple of years ago, I ran into a college schoolmate (asian; petite) and her six-foot-three white boyfriend at a ramen restaurant in Little Tokyo. I remember having shed tears at the thought of them together.
Waking up from yet another nap in the afternoon, I noticed the chrysanthemum patterns etched on the bedroom window. I walked to the kitchen table, covered with a crochet-flowered tablecloth beneath a glass panel, trying to conjure up words to write now that the rain has stopped. The windows had been left open so some water got inside, and what’s left of the lavender incense––ash––is scattered all over.
I often feel dragged down by the energy of those around me, like a maiden on her way through the mountains, shoved to the ground by a ferocious tiger––except I sometimes feel like the tiger too, or the witch in Chinese folklore who can turn into one.
I like listening to Vivaldi’s magnum opus, The Four Seasons, asynchronously––for instance, Spring during autumn, Winter during summer. Growing up, I never mustered the courage to learn it––having quit violin in junior high school due to neck problems. I have an unusually long neck, for that matter, but I might pick it up again as an adult.
Eventually you’ll have seen all there is to see. Yet, there’s another art exhibition at the museum, another visiting musician at the concert venue, another spin on some age-old trope––such are Sagittarian plights for endless novelty. Then all you want to do is collapse in on yourself––perhaps to find something within that couldn’t be found elsewhere. The things that used to captivate your imagination––the Neoclassical façades and the Tuileries Garden in Paris––will lose their appeal, their luster. You will grow old too and wither like the leaves on the trees that line the square in the Palais Royale come autumn. And that is precisely when you will desire to retreat to southern Mexico, like the French-Mexican actress and singer, Arielle Dombasle, who had once been a bombshell and married a prominent public intellectual.
I didn’t tell anyone about my plan this time, lest I jinx it.
I rode backwards on the train to Union Station—as I peered out the window, I saw the San Gabriel mountains in the near distance. My mind took me to a map view of a place in California called Soledad—Spanish for “solitude”. Algae and other plant life have grown along the “banks” of the L.A. river since the last rain, while other parts along the path remained dry. An unidentified moth accompanied me in the next seat.
Everywhere I see
archways
in every way I see
you
Wondering soul
I wonder
if
That blue building in the distance
A data-center
Or a government spy-entity?
No, it’s just a corporate center
next to Costco
Labor day weekend
My friend, Joann, lends me their place
on top of the hill
on my way to Paris
Where are the signs?
Walking in the path of the sun
but in the opposite direction
late afternoon in Paris
I can’t seem to adjust
the jetlag this time
I still saw Notre Dame
for the first time
on that same afternoon
The setting sun
against the stone figures
on the church facade
I went to Palais de Tokyo
on its “free” day
but it wasn’t worth it
the crowd was too overwhelming
however,
I saw an unexpected piece by Matisse
at the modern art museum next door
Its pale figures framed by painted archways
in my preferred method
I won’t be going to Nice
this time
The boys on the apps here tell you when they are not interested
instead of ghosting
Other times during one of my trances, I’d let go of grievances with certain people from my past. Just the other day, one of my ex-bosses, who was cruel to me and had been the reason I quit a particular job, appeared in my mind; I’d later found out on an Instagram post that he had recently passed, the reason of which had not been disclosed. I did some internet digging but couldn’t find anything.
Not all demons are bad—in fact, I’d argue that they’re beyond moral judgment. I imagine becoming one of them after I die—the fiery yet protective kind that watches over the innocent, warding off those that attempt to cause harm.
Cruel world
always waiting for the key change
in the song
waiting for it to drop
drop
I’ll finally go to therapy
once I move to New York
sometimes I want to hear a song
that I’m not used to
When you finally meet me
you’ll have already met me
in your dreams
some nights ago
By tomorrow morning
after the rain stops
everything will have changed
You’re impulsive that way
jumping into strangers’ beds
Letting them into yours
That song reminds me of
the soundtrack to the intro
of the news channel
from the ‘80s
right before the fall
of the Berlin Wall
flying to San Francisco
on business
Thinking you had
fallen in love
with him at the hotel
a Parisian’s fantasy
of California
Perhaps I’ll disappear
somewhere between San Luis Obispo
and Monterey Bay
For my thirtieth birthday, I had a small gathering at my studio apartment in Silverlake; it was a home-coming of sorts after returning to L.A. from a three-year personal sabbatical in San Francisco. I had invited my friends Joann, Shen, and Shen’s ex, Nick, and ate Chinese food take-out from Woon Kitchen in Filipinotown. My parents came to celebrate a week before that––Joann said that my eyes looked vacant in the photos of my parents and me.
Is it self-indulgent to write during times like these? But it is one of the only ways I know how to cope right now.
Perhaps the reason why some of us are obsessed with climate change is because we either can’t wait or are terrified for the end of the world to arrive.
I imagine a house collapsing in on itself––along goes its shingled roof, attic, cane furniture, bed, inheritance. Yet, you’re not inside it––only observing from the outside––situated in a cornfield like in a Stephen Shore photograph of an unnamed town in America. There are no buildings next to the house, just an AI-generated version of a golden-hued pasture.
On the day I leave this Mexican city for the next, there are butterflies in my stomach. The only food that seems to quell it is miso soup or some type of broth. And my thoughts have already turned to Paris: What will actually happen to me once I’m there? A revelation—or perhaps some type of miracle. You recall the tingling sensation when the lottery prize was drawn and your grandma won an airplane ticket and an iPad. My astrocartographic match is Paris—although I’m only following this imperative loosely.
My brother is living in a parallel world relative to mine: he has a wife and a daughter, and I strangely have not accepted this fact in my subconscious mind. Even the sound of it makes me think of a 40-something with a job and responsibilities––yet, he’s 31 and lives on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, a few hours drive from the Tropic of Cancer.
I know eventually I will go back into someone else’s lair, someone’s cage––in the Big Apple, but not in the City of Lights. I can feel my throat constricting, and I see the Devil card from the tarot in my mind. I am hoping for a change in the weather pattern––a shift in the clouds––now desperately willing it to happen. What if you moved to the Berkshires, to a small town somewhere? You will still feel limited, albeit in a different way.
You were never not comparing yourself to others. In fact, I had deleted Instagram multiple times in the past week––each time coming back to the same gay couple that I’ve been following for years now. They had just announced their five-year anniversary, and I imagined that the (asian) one among them could have been me. A couple of years ago, I ran into a college schoolmate (asian; petite) and her six-foot-three white boyfriend at a ramen restaurant in Little Tokyo. I remember having shed tears at the thought of them together.
Waking up from yet another nap in the afternoon, I noticed the chrysanthemum patterns etched on the bedroom window. I walked to the kitchen table, covered with a crochet-flowered tablecloth beneath a glass panel, trying to conjure up words to write now that the rain has stopped. The windows had been left open so some water got inside, and what’s left of the lavender incense––ash––is scattered all over.
I often feel dragged down by the energy of those around me, like a maiden on her way through the mountains, shoved to the ground by a ferocious tiger––except I sometimes feel like the tiger too, or the witch in Chinese folklore who can turn into one.
I like listening to Vivaldi’s magnum opus, The Four Seasons, asynchronously––for instance, Spring during autumn, Winter during summer. Growing up, I never mustered the courage to learn it––having quit violin in junior high school due to neck problems. I have an unusually long neck, for that matter, but I might pick it up again as an adult.
Eventually you’ll have seen all there is to see. Yet, there’s another art exhibition at the museum, another visiting musician at the concert venue, another spin on some age-old trope––such are Sagittarian plights for endless novelty. Then all you want to do is collapse in on yourself––perhaps to find something within that couldn’t be found elsewhere. The things that used to captivate your imagination––the Neoclassical façades and the Tuileries Garden in Paris––will lose their appeal, their luster. You will grow old too and wither like the leaves on the trees that line the square in the Palais Royale come autumn. And that is precisely when you will desire to retreat to southern Mexico, like the French-Mexican actress and singer, Arielle Dombasle, who had once been a bombshell and married a prominent public intellectual.
I didn’t tell anyone about my plan this time, lest I jinx it.
I rode backwards on the train to Union Station—as I peered out the window, I saw the San Gabriel mountains in the near distance. My mind took me to a map view of a place in California called Soledad—Spanish for “solitude”. Algae and other plant life have grown along the “banks” of the L.A. river since the last rain, while other parts along the path remained dry. An unidentified moth accompanied me in the next seat.
Everywhere I see
archways
in every way I see
you
Wondering soul
I wonder
if
That blue building in the distance
A data-center
Or a government spy-entity?
No, it’s just a corporate center
next to Costco
Labor day weekend
My friend, Joann, lends me their place
on top of the hill
on my way to Paris
Where are the signs?
Walking in the path of the sun
but in the opposite direction
late afternoon in Paris
I can’t seem to adjust
the jetlag this time
I still saw Notre Dame
for the first time
on that same afternoon
The setting sun
against the stone figures
on the church facade
I went to Palais de Tokyo
on its “free” day
but it wasn’t worth it
the crowd was too overwhelming
however,
I saw an unexpected piece by Matisse
at the modern art museum next door
Its pale figures framed by painted archways
in my preferred method
I won’t be going to Nice
this time
The boys on the apps here tell you when they are not interested
instead of ghosting