not elizabeth bishop

There the miracle of our meeting shone and sang, I did not want to go back to anywhere from there. Putting happiness before duty was my bitter joy.

I talked with someone I shouldn't have I talked for a long time. Let passions which demand an answer choke those who are in love, but we, my darling, are just souls at the edge of the earth.

The most famous Singaporean at Harvard, Percival, was a vermilion-haired classics major who organized seasonal Eleusinian Mysteries where they did psychedelics and roasted a piglet. Most non-Singaporean people didn’t know that Percival was from Singapore. But he was often invoked by the other Singaporeans, as a symbol of what could happen because of your bond. In high school they had known him as a compliant, blazer-wearing math Olympian.

The Singaporean students’ arrangement struck me at first as somehow extreme and archaic. But the more I learned about everyone’s situation, the more it seemed that everyone had a “bond”; it was just less formal, and not legally enforced, and came from their parents and not a whole country. (…)

But my parents were the only ones I knew who never acted like I owed them money for being alive, or talked about kids being “spoiled” or “selfish,” or said that I had to be a doctor, or took other adults’ side over mine. I was so grateful that sometimes I sat in my room and cried.