just havin a time

the established vocabulary of love confuses me. It's too familiar. I know what it means to put your head on someone's shoulder, to hold their hand, to lie an inch apart on someone else's bed, your eyes half-open, the skin on your arms tingling. This is easy to understand and easy to explain. A literature paper on love: love is the green thread between two bodies. Or so they say. Or so I'm told.

having read too much and too widely I can no longer distinguish between the things I want and the things I am told I should want. Consider love as a doctor's recommendation. Love as the eye doctor you visit on a Sunday morning, bleary-eyed and miserable. The doctor asks you how you feel about bodies and you say I read in a book once that a body is the answer to the question of god. That worship is a form of want. That want is a form of caring.

what do I care about? I care about you. But the established vocabulary of love doesn't mean anything here. I don't think either of us knows how to use any of it. There's a word for the way you scrunch up your mouth when you're thinking and a word for the seaglass of your eyes but they aren't anything like the words I've been told I should use to talk about someone precious to me. You're precious to me, though. I want a word for this.

parents weekend is this weekend. Your parents are coming. My friend suggests offhandedly that I should hunt them down and greet them. What is the word for this? What language should I use to say hi?

this, my friend says bluntly and with all the kindness in the world, looks like friendship to me. I know what he means but his language is the language of lovers and stories and clean binaries, either you love me or not, so answer me this: do you love me? There isn't a word for this either in your language. Neither is there one in mine.

what is want without the language with which to write it down? What is the significance of the undescribed smile? If I sit here with you, under this silver awning, if we sit next to each other under a midnight streetlight, if we keep talking about the things that keep us aloft, if we stay adrift in the deep blue sea, will we one day arrive at a new sense of wordlessness? Maybe I should stop going to the eye doctor. Maybe it is enough for me to ask you what you are thinking about when you grasp your chin with your hand. Maybe the word I am looking for is your name. That's the only word in the world that matters.

another day in the land of eternal summer, another day spent visiting places i wrote about from the other side of the globe, has anyone told you how weird it is to come home? it's like putting on a pair of shoes you haven't worn in ages and finding that in spite of the five centimeters you've grown since you last wore them they still fit perfectly. and yet walking around in them feels weird, like you're either too tall or too short, you can't decide, like you're wearing someone else's shoes- they're yours, though, so what's the deal, huh? you are still made of more or less the same skin and fiber. you are still, for all intents and purposes, the person you were when you left. but in some ways that can never be redeemed, you aren't. suddenly there are a hundred different versions of you, one for each one that stays behind, five more for whoever takes the plunge to the next level; let's say we're deep-sea divers and this is the big expedition. go big or go home. we aren't going home. we're going to find the biggest catch in the world and it's going to make us famous, and all of our grandkids will talk about how we fished the sun out of the sea. where were we? oh yeah, my shoes. i fucking love those van gogh shoes.

lately i've been thinking i can code switch after all. good for me. it means i know the code to begin with. so i can get inside the secret clubroom in the natural sciences building. so i haven't forgotten everything.

before you leave a place, you leave it several times over. you leave when you peel the sheets off the mattress. you leave when you take your mismatched socks and underwear out of the drawer and fold them into your suitcase. you leave when you take the posters off the wall, when you return the books you borrowed from the library, when you tape up the boxes and write your name on them so they won't forget who they are while you're gone. this is where you came from, you say to all the shit you've accumulated over the last five months. remember it.

since i threw all my bedding in the laundry this evening i wanted to fold it up while it was clean and still smelled like tide but the bare mattress was too gross to lie on for longer than fifteen minutes without feeling my skin crawl right off my bones, so i caved and pulled a sheet over it. that's the arrangement for the last two nights. single sheet mattress, bare comforter, two pillows. the extension cord lies in a twisted heap on the floor beside the bedframe and my headphones are on the empty desk. the clothes i'll be wearing onto the plane hang out of one of the half-opened drawers. there is a single packet of almond milk left. i don't know what to do with it and it's probably gone bad, so i guess i'll throw it away.

when i got here the first thing i did was tape up the photographs. i was only here for four weeks, but taking them down always feels like walking into someone's funeral. they're in a folder now in my backpack, which i'll be taking with me. the small suitcase isn't going back because it doesn't matter enough. i have two backpacks; one of them will stay behind.

they say it takes two hands to clap but it's important to consider the relationship between the hands. rarely are the two hands equal; one may be shorter, less flexible, or weaker. therefore, it follows that the other is longer, more flexible, and strong. when observing the dynamic between the two ends of a set distance one should always aim to identify the direction in which the ball is slipping down the slide, i.e. who's already up in the air, and who's about to be sent flying?

this time it's two flights back home. surprising everyone including myself, we were able to reduce the number by one. the flights are long, but they're not unbearable. nothing is, if you try hard enough.

my mother is disappointed that i've started sleeping at ungodly hours again, but it should be noted that singapore is on the other side of the globe and in two days' time i will be forced out of this twilit street whether i like it or not. call it preliminary jetlag conditioning if you will. i prefer the term hubris.

it's nearly three o'clock in the morning as i type this. today i had a stick shoved up my nose for the first time in five months and it was a gross kind of nostalgic that i hope not to relive and definitely will. on the way back a friend gave me a can of lemonade. 'i've been drinking a lot of this stuff recently,' they said, one hand on the steering wheel and the other braced on the finely-grated cusp of the evening. 'i don't know why.' 'well,' i replied. 'summer is hot.'

summer is hot. but i'm leaving it behind for another. two summers in the span of one, now that's a deal you can't pass up. when i get back i'm going to stand under the wet singaporean sun and yell at it until it acknowledges me as its child. you made me like this, after all. now own up to it. own up to what you did to these hands.

being brave in the face of new experiences

REID:  It’s like, I’ll… I’ll make a hole in myself for you.

— “Trevor,” by Ocean Vuong

“dont say americans are stupid for our leadership’s decisions because a lot of us, esp those of us who live in poverty + minorities whose voices arent represented in leadership, are not responsible and also targeted by these desicions and you will never feel the effect as hard as us. also, dont use the things like school shootings and our healthcare systems as gotchas against us because its fucking horrible + heartless”