gamble

For the first time in a long time, I'm on the verge of excess, feeling reckless enough to afford the most unnecessary of emotional luxuries. Is there anything to be said for actively whipping up an infatuation? Of all the silly things to waste your emotional capital on, it's the equivalent of buying anything from williams and sonoma. A sign that all other emotional needs are met. Still, the vulnerability of having a crush--a most risky venture. What is it about having excess that makes us want to gamble? Even though the house has literally always won, I walk into the casino confidently. Odds be damned, I just want the thrill, not the jackpot.

**

city

City that never wakes or sleeps,
City in which your fortune keeps,
City that made you exchange for youth,
Worship for some elusive muse.

City that blinks night and day,
While finest hours slip away,
Shall blink years onwards too,
When cruel Time reaches you.

So march and skip on so long,
In a frenzy till next dawn,
On towards youth’s end, so breezily,
Pour into City’s hands, your mortality.

**

lucifer

I remember when I fell
I think I stained the sky
A stroke towards the bottom

Drank up the raindrops
The snowy mountain caps
The grassy dew
I think I stained them all.

There was no light,
No sound,
No brethren nor their song

Look at my hair!
Golden as nectar
See my feet and my knees
Purer than the mountaintops
I was once with wings
Now see my feathers fall
Faster than pebbles, weighted with sin
I think I spoiled the whole world.
They think so too.

Will they say--
That I may love still, or again?
Or will they--
Forget my fall
As I do now?

**

stranger

I walked with you to the coast
We sat on a bench and watched the city on the other side
It caught on fire
One house at a time
You weren't alarmed though.

I walked with you to the coast
There were purple wildflowers on the sidewalks
I bent to pick them up and my eyes made pitiful demands
So you plucked them too and gave them to me
Your heart wasn't in it though.

I walked with you to the coast
We sat silently in front of the burning
The fiery stroked a line across the river
Its tongues licked up the horizon
I might have left then
You kept on asking questions though.

**

dance

These will never be the last lines I write for you
Because I have never had you
Never tasted you
Never known your salty, never known your sweet
Because you elude me
And I am not worth you

Yet these are not the last lines I write for you
And this is not the last tango I dance with you
So listen!
Because Hope has sang her song in me
I stand still as her lullaby sways in me
As empty swallows the heart in me.

**

carry

I am going to carry New York City into my bed tonight.
Carry its sirens and silences and pretenses,
Carry the empire state building and things littered on its sidewalks,
Carry its lovers and their fingers which find each other.

I am going to carry New York City into my bed tonight.
Carry its weight and its weightlessness,
Carry its soft smoke so fragile so light,
That even the city cannot crush.

I am going to carry New York City into my bed tonight.
Inhale the city the smoke the lovers,
Inhale the littered people on the streets,
Inhale the silence and sirens and let nothing escape.

And nothing shall leave my lips tonight.
Until I breathe in the city's last breath,
Until everything else flees from my pores,
Until the city is so full in me -- that my heart is out of me.

**

post-war spoils

I wrote a few weeks about Hope. I was right about its power over me. About its inevitable invasion, its inevitable defeat. At the final moment before it bursts through my last line of defense and into the final chamber, I always have this epiphany, that what I had gambled on winning was rarer than I had realized. I think the rarity is what what drew me to the cards table in the first place. Deep down we all know the exact chances of these lotteries, but deep down we also know our uniqueness better than anyone else, and we think we deserve these prizes. Sometimes I think there's too much deserving in this world and not enough things to be deserved.

So we carry this consolation prize with us as we hand over the white flag. A second-tier product of Hope, cheap and empty, with a reassurance of quality trusted by neither the buyer nor the seller. The bitterness in the war-ravaged room thickens the air, so much so every air particle is forced to stand still. Maybe the bitterness is petty. But armed with the inadequacy of the consolation prize, I must make up for the difference somehow. And bitterness, regardless of its origin, always repairs my pierced armor better than anything else.

**

dorian's mistakes

I don't want this blog to be paused so long on such a negative note, especially since that chapter of my life has thankfully reached a satisfying period. What has taken its place are more frivolous problems instead. I savor the pettiness of these new worries, knowing deep down that it's a sign that the big picture is quite rosy. Rosy hardly ever breeds inspiration though, which is why this blog has stalled and sputtered. Still, I can't bear to leave it in so desolate a place anymore. It had escalated to a positively alarming note, and I want to rescue it. And to rescue myself from sinking back into that time whenever I come back here.

More or less, this blog is the mirror to my dorian gray -- it soaks up the hideousness of my life and is hidden away -- and I don't think this is a bad thing. Everyone should have a place to pour their darkness into, whether it's another human heart or just a blank page. Dorian's downfall is not in the mirror's existence but in his refusal to look at its reflection. Still, I need my reflection with a little bit of milk. So this post is nothing but an update, a reassurance that a particular reflection has been painted with too-sharp strokes, an attempt to round out the edges, a pledge to learn from Dorian's mistakes.

**

same

I can't post anymore about being overwhelmed by my incompetence. There are only so many ways to dress up a drowning metaphor. And there are only so many days I can sit on my high horse without it crumbling under.

For once, there are no more words. No words when even the most pungent of emotions like fear and desperation have gone stale. No words when their presence continues fluidly and without break. No words when the plummet is still the same speed as when I first faltered. No words when gravity's pull is the same as ever, and the earth is as flat as ever, and the what-ifs are as loud as ever.

**

flood

It's to safe to say you've left a mark, quite literally, on me this week. As the darkness wanes, I can't help but wish for the sharp, fresh pain to come back. Clean and jolting to the touch. The first seconds of the aftermath is always so exciting. Before the dilution of doubt, of analysis, of hope.

I wish I could stay in that moment. The first seconds of coming down after having been so high. The lazy drift toward the ground. The certainty of what just happened, and what will surely happen again. The unbelievable entitlement to such delights and their future promised recurrence. I struggle to keep Hope from slipping in, for she is always a double-edged sword, beautiful to the fortunate and oh so cruel to those who are not. I run around shutting all the windows and doors and nooks in my brain, so it would not sift in anywhere. Still, as I whip my head around the middle of the room I know it would come, after which my fate leaves me, either to plummet from great heights or to be mercifully kept afloat.

A shutter opens, and I see it edging closer. The thing about Hope is that it will be the last certainty, after which nothing is knowable, but before which even a fool will sense its coming. I touch the mark you left absentmindedly, its pain already dulled to an afterthought as I stand here, waiting for Hope to flood my windows and doors, waiting for it to defeat me.

**

secrets

What's your secret?

For the first time in my life, I'm scared the path I've chosen for myself at 5 years old is wrong for me. Not because I reject it, but because it keeps rejecting me, like a bad organ transplant. I wonder if anything can substitute natural aptitude--a question that rarely occurs to me because I've so often had it on my side. For this, I do not.

The older I get the more my tears are for things, not people. People change. People can be left. People are also fundamentally good, their first mantra always to do no harm. Things make no such promise. They are hard and immutable and devoid of moral value. My secret is that I've attached my desires to the wrong category. Perhaps to the wrong Thing. My secret is that the sunk costs have become insurmountably high. My secret is that the option to quit (never an attractive one) is no longer available. My secret is that I can only fight. And that I might lose.

**

let go

“The world is won by those who let it go.”
— Lao Tzu

This one is for my uncle. He didn't want to let the world go for a long time I think. When his mind started to deteriorate after his stroke, he decided to write down his memoirs while he could, including the entire family history. The children born to his parents, even those who did not survive, all of their birth years and why they couldn't make it. His memory of his mother trying to leave them because it was one too many mouths to feed. His underlying resentment towards his dad. His pride and slight envy of my dad, his younger brother, who got to go to college and make it in the city.

He shoved his memories into my hands four years ago when we visited. There were several notebooks' worth. By that point he had devolved into a childlike mind, repeating things four or five times to anyone in the room, whining about wanting juice, complaining to my dad about how their dad was the worst, even though my grandfather passed away decades ago.

I didn't say much, I knew only passable mandarin and even less about my dad's side of the family and their rural life. So I flipped through the pages while my dad listened patiently to his brother's ramblings. I remember grimacing at some of the cliches in the writing, the grandiose-ness Chinese writers are prone to. I remember the shock of how little I knew about my dad's life, how he never spoke of the siblings he never knew or knew for only a little while, and how poor people can be, so much so they die from it. I remember the elegant, elegant penmanship, a mark of scholarship in Chinese culture. It belied the fact that my uncle was deprived of the education he deserved, the education my dad was lucky enough to get because of his being born a decade later, after the cultural revolution.

My dad took the notebooks as we were called to lunch. He took off his glasses and tried to hide the tears. I looked away. It was too much to see. I think he always felt guilty of the opportunities he had that he knew his brother should've also had. I think in a time when they were so steeped in poverty that parental care was a luxury, not a right, his brother took care of him more than maybe their parents could have. Once, when my dad was a teenager, they both rode miles into town to get my dad new glasses, on the way back my dad was so exhausted he said to my uncle: I don't think I can go on anymore. So my uncle went into a store, bought a rope, tied their bikes together, and dragged my dad's bike behind him the rest of the way. I don't think that story made it into the notebooks. But I knew it was the one my dad was thinking of when he was flipping through them.

I stayed away from reading the notebooks after that, they made me cry and my family is easily embarrassed by displays of sentimentality. I did, however, photograph almost every page on my digital camera, because I knew my dad would want to read them, because I knew after my uncle died very few people would, because I knew there was a great likelihood they could even be carelessly thrown out.

Because they might be let go. Because they scream my uncle's desperate attempt not to.

**

epicureans' mistake

A respite. A sudden silence amidst a downpour. A -- dare I say it? -- moment of exhilaration. I hardly know what to do. How to reconcile this with what I've been internalizing so far. I don't worry much though. It is far easier to internalize good things than bad ones. I will swallow this up. Lap up the last drops. Make it define me more than it should.

The Epicureans believed that pleasure is only the absence of pain. You would think this experience has proven to me that they are right, that the best we can hope for is a rest from the pounding rain. But the opposite. Relief is only relief. The first relief is even less. The first relief comes with fear of temporality. Fear that it is only a blip and that the default state of being remains the crushing torrent. Pleasure is something else. Of what I'm not sure. But its absence has only convinced me all the more of the Epicureans' mistake.

**

do not

Do not let your fears be downsized by others, because it is a monster that grips everyone differently. Its talons will reshape only to scratch where the membrane is thinnest. Do not expect words to translate these fears fully to others. Do not expect the others to understand. Do not give away the fears lightly, because the worst another can do is not to use them against you, but to diminish them in a way that makes you carry their weight yourself. Do not confide in those who call your feelings melodramatic. Do not trust those who admit no fear after you've admitted yours. Do not divulge these secrets hastily even if the weight becomes too much, because a fear rejected by others is ten times more crushing than before. Many are happy to take on your happiness. But even more are afraid to take on your fears.

**

cuts and scrapes

I wonder what a spine is. What it means to have one. Is it to fight back? To walk away? To float alone? To struggle in midst of seediness? In human life, how much to forgive, and how much to avoid?

These questions always circle back around. This time easier than the last. Still, the fear never subsides. The fear of being alone, the fear of being unloved. Which poison more tolerable?

It's a stewing process. The skin slowly forms new, thinly stretched membrane as the immune system learns the toxin. No sharp victories here, but at least a continuous overcoming. Letting the self tap into its own resilience and watch as a parent watches the child fall from those first bike rides. Never knowing what the next fall will be like, but trusting it will be like the one before, and the infinite ones before that in the human experience.

**

between sinking and swimming

I have never spent so much time in the land of mediocrity. Did you know you still have to apply for a work visa here? The elite laugh over their sparkling wines, explaining that trying is what differentiates them from us, delivered with a smile and a tsk-tsk, one of which is sincere.

But staying in the land of mediocrity is itself work. Simply floating, without attempting to swim ashore, takes exhausting, wild, desperate treading of the feet. An immense output of energy. No less than those already parallel with the waves, their fluid bodies billowing in time with the tides. I wonder what it takes to go from vertical treading to horizontal swimming. I wonder what truly differentiates us and them. I wonder if knowing the answer would help us, or sink us further.

**

mice and men

"What things are steadfast? ...
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
...
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring...
...
We love a little, as the mice
huddle..."

--Linda Gregg


I found this poem a couple of nights ago, what a moment of serendipitous premonition. Had I known how perfectly it would fit this moment, 48 hours from when I first fell in love with it, I would have said: you say you are in love with these words (and other fanciful ideas), but you have no idea. You who barely tasted the air above the well of infatuation, beneath which a current runs to the oceans and other oceans. I would say, you are as brief, as contained, as mouse-like as this poem accuses you. You who wear the target this poem aims at, but have yet to feel the arrow's sharp piercing. Even 48 hours from now, the silver will only have scraped by with barely a scratch.

But who listens to the poets? What I have now is infinitesimal compared to the seas; what I had then was smaller still. Somewhere on dimensions not mine, the gods are savoring all things huge and mad and ignited, rolling them around their tongues as occasional flames escape out of their lips. While I--

while I barely make it into the world of mice and men.

**

breaking point

I've never felt more like a stranger, lying next to your skin. Outside of myself and not knowing if anyone is in or even if I am. The breath next to me barely registers. It runs into the back of my neck, gets lost inside my hair and stays there. The air is stained copperish yellow with reality and I wished you would go, and take the copper tones with you. You did. But I stay saturated in the unpleasant colors. I think it finally happened. I think what was enough finally isn't enough. I think we're done and I think you knew it too when you left with a closed mouth goodbye, your lips pressed firmly against each other. And not against mine.

**

scarcity

I called my grandparents last week. My grandfather told me about his morning. He had gone to the market and gotten five pieces of sweet cakes. He had gotten them, because he got some earlier in the week, but before my grandmother had any, my cousin came and had two with lunch and then took the rest home. So he went out and got some more for my grandmother. When I was listening to his familiar voice I could picture him carefully putting on his battered, honest, navy-blue linen shoes, rolling his cigarette deliberately, slowly, putting on one of his several newsboy caps, giving the front end a firm tug downwards to make sure it's snug.

I was rendered silent by something, and could not find words that should come next from my mouth. We don't say "aw" in Chinese. We don't say "that's nice" to your elders, like you need to tell them what's nice. But I doubt that was the whole problem. I don't think it was just an insufficiency of Chinese as a language. I think it was a feeling that is universal yet cannot be put into any language, a feeling that haunts someone at times like these.

It was not a fantastic picture, the one my grandfather told. It was a picture of routine. But routine is underrated. Newness explodes in youth, in New York, in a world where time is not a concern. But at some point we do face another side of life, when newness is not welcomed indiscriminately, when we will have to re-catalogue some old things; when we will see, sometimes despite ourselves, the shaping of our routine.

And my grandfather's routine. It was so ordinary, so unadorned. Yet at that moment, it seemed so scarce to me, that thing he has day in and day out, for the better part of half a century. It's a strange thing, having a surplus of new, unique things; and not enough the opposite.

**

frozen particles

The people you love become ghosts inside you, and like this you keep them alive.

--Unknown

I went back to Chicago this weekend and met up with people I were with only a few months ago, and for the most part they remained unchanged. But one person, I think, did recede into a ghost inside me, because he no longer feels the same way he did. Of course, selfishly, I wish he would go back to these feelings of the past, so I could always come back and figure out what we could be. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that we had an expiration date, of course we would, of course we would be subject to the same laws that bind everyone else. Under the always beautiful, always familiar Chicago sky, our expanding distance seemed more pronounced than ever. Our breaths came in between us and froze into frosted particles, even though they had come out so warm just a moment before. I wanted to fill the silences with something, but there was no way to push these awkward thoughts out. So I just let the silence freeze. Along with our breath. Along with our possibilities.

I wanted to fly faster than our plane back to Chicago, faster than the speed of light, back to the Chicago of 2011, when times were green and golden, and I would say, let's try us now because things are not always going to be this way, because I have seen the expiration date and I want to use up our pent up potential before then.

That would have been a failed experiment, I think. It too, would have become a ghost very quickly. Still, in my insatiable desire to have everything, I wanted every mistake as well.

**

december 31st

First, or should I say final?, blow of marks have come out. In opposite-land somewhere, a cherry is being placed carefully atop a great heap of ice cream. This past half a year has been a miserable experience. With little redeeming gems here and there. I had banked on the possibility of a final saving grace. But of course, that material belongs mainly to myths and Hollywood. In real life, real life with pantyhose and 9 to 5 workdays and gas price escalations, limits are quickly coming down like a metal netting over the exuberance of youth. Every five year old dreams of being the President or an astronaut, somewhere along the spectrum of the golden years, subtle and invisible things chip away at those dreams: maybe just Senator, local congressman, school principal, salesman. Slowly, we grow up. Or perhaps we grow down.

People say there's nowhere to go but up, but they never tell you how to go up. As a corollary, they fail to mention that there is a way to go down. A very plausible way. And that way is to stay the same. Not stay in the darkest pit for now, but for tomorrow, and the day after that. What is worse than bad? Bad without hope. How to climb out? How to stop the stagnant trajectories sputtering out in every aspect and direction? New Years are meant for new beginnings. But wait, that is another child of myths and Hollywood. It is an artificial and unfruitful cut, like taking a sword to a stream of water. There are no clean slates anymore. And the more the golden years slip by, the more the slate hardens and becomes harder to mold, yet easier to break.

Excuse this post for its rambling and uncohesiveness. I don't know how to make sense of something I have never known. These are failures both new in kind and more in number than I have encountered. And now I'm no longer fearful of the failures themselves, but of their persistence. Somehow, New Years does not seem enough a cap to stop the flood of the last few months. December 31st is still very much alive, stretching past its human-imposed bounds.

**