on holding on

during today's last recess a child came up to me and told me this is the first day she has ever wished would not come to an end. at the end of the day they are putting down her dog. the sun is out for the first time in so long. I sit with her and we share a space of grief in advance, watching our shadows and willing them not to shift with the passage of time. please slow down. we are still holding on.

I do not tell her that I've just received a text from my mom asking if there's anything I want her to say to my grandmother for me because she is going to say goodbye and is leaving in an hour. I've known the end is near for several days now and it takes all of me to face anything other than this fact, but for the first time I am presented with an opportunity to put my thoughts into words, and I am unable to. so much of who I am was gifted to me in gentle hands and soft songs by my grandmother. how can you unbundle that and arrange it into a text message? would I be able to if I weren't bound to subtraction problems, recess games, and the perfect present tense? if I could, would she hear me? 

instead I will whisper my last words to the wind. 

three weeks ago I went to spain. after two cancelled europe trips and the looming threat of expiring flight credits, my friends (chiefly my dear Henri) performed a series of miracles which resulted in the acquisition of radiohead madrid tickets. Rebecca says she thinks this is evidence of how loved I am. I say I know, and mean it. my flights were delayed several times over and I ended up spending 8 hours each in the Denver and Munich airports on my way to Barcelona. in these moments of solitude I committed myself to moving slowly over the course of the week. 

Frankie apologized a few days later for our late starts and aimless meanderings but I could not be more grateful. we move so slowly and yet we get so far. see so much. 

on one such outing we are walking down from the Joan Miró museum (Holden's recommendation; a source of substantial reflection on visualizations of consciousness) and I don a green bunny balaclava I've just crocheted, debuting my new wig a few weeks before I end up needing it. I have never considered myself an artist but it is impossible for me to live without creating. Frankie asks about my creative origin story and it is, of course, one of my grandmother. 

most Yakama ceremonies involve a "giveaway," wherein each person brings things to share with the community and places them in the center of the longhouse. then you go and take whatever you need or want. diapers and coloring pages and soap and pottery and coloring books and beautiful beautiful beads. as I write this I am sitting with a memory of one such giveaway, standing in a circle around the floor and waving to my grandfather across the room. I am five years old and this is a naming ceremony. I know that at a similar ceremony many years prior my grandmother was given her name, Huli Iwashisha. Wind Dancer. 

I will whisper my last words to the wind. 

in preparation for each naming ceremony, root feast, berry harvest, and medicine dance, I would go to stay with my grandmother. we let hours spill into days as we wove baskets, beaded earrings, sewed wing dresses, sculpted pottery, and crocheted medicine bags for the giveaway. she taught herself all of these skills and passed them on to me in this production line driven by love. for this reason I know that to make is a sacred act. I tell Frankie this, and he tells me he has baby fever. 

most creative endeavors I pursue today were first gifted to me in moments like these. I say as much to my brother the next weekend when I step off the train in his college town and we discuss art and our relationship to it. this is the day our grandmother first goes unresponsive and is rushed to the emergency room, though we will not know for five days. 

I find out on the day of Winston's car crash. they are okay but the car they grew up in is not. today they go and collect the last of their things from it and surrender it to the tow lot. as I read their text about this grief I remember the first time I felt the loss of my car when it was totaled in march. on my birthday I realized the family drum was in the trunk. this was the loss of a vehicle I had planned to own in some abstract "forever," but it was not true what I said about it being my only possession in life. please let me take that back. 

today the car is gone but in my apartment the family drum remains. by some stroke of luck the trunk was the only portion of the car left unscathed. now together we move slowly, and yet we have gotten so far. 

on sunday, one week after my grandmother's seizures began, Winston buzzes all of my hair off in their bathtub. as I'm crouched there, naked, my period begins. I had been waiting for it for three weeks, but it was waiting for this moment. I feel feminine in a way I haven't for a long time. I think about my grandmother when she was just a few years older than me, a parent of three, a PhD student, a woman of such grace and beauty and power. I think about how she kept her hair short too. 

it has been so long since I have lost someone to time. the past ten years have been thoroughly imbued with grief, loss lining the walls of most memories, but never a loss I had the opportunity to prepare for. so many friends gone too soon, but none that I watched leave. now here I am, eyes open and burning as I hold back tears and hold on to this moment of grief in advance. I am given the opportunity to prepare and yet there is no way to. I am given the opportunity to say goodbye over text message and I am unable to. I am still holding on.

so I sit on the playground, watching my shadow. I reach up to wipe away the tears I've failed to hold back and feel the wind brush across my freshly buzzed hair. I feel the wind and speak to it and she is with me. we are dancing. 

this is what I whisper.

unmaking minds

(written a few days back) 

they punched a hole in my california license today. i still do not know this place and yet now, legally, i am of it. do i want to be? my mind is not made up. but now i've belonged to the entire west coast which feels sweet and special. i am my mother's daughter though our paths find different order. ca -> or -> wa / wa -> ca -> or. i don't think either of us will stay where we are now. what's next? 

last night i said "i wish i had," by which i think i mean i hope for the future. how vast that seems in the face of this fleeting moment. when i think of friendship i sink into memories of held hands as we run into the ocean. pure joy so sweet the weight of it is heavy on my lungs, in my stomach, in that place my soul is. where i keep my memories of you, and pry open to sneak glances in free moments: in the time between alarms in the morning, on my lunch break, as i doze off at the end of day. so much pleasure in these visits to the past tense. to yearn with hope and to yearn without.  

i'm embraced by the arms of such meaning and am asked if there's a tear coming from my eye. there always is. i may not experience anger but that does not mean there is no ferocity to my emotions. sadness is, for me, a viscerally passionate endeavor. overtaking, blinding. empowering. nothing in the world could convince me to surrender it. i'm here for it all, and especially the hard shit. i love the love, too, but i think the lines between the two are much less clear than we make them out to be. what is love without longing? i keep coming back to this. i'm happy to fall into it. and so grateful to the many loves of my life who have given me the opportunity. 

small world

 

Love and Longing in Manhattan Koreatown

 I. Chair

One of many 34th street chairs. At this hour, all others of its kind are piled together across the park, but none are locked. There is a level of trust here I rarely witness elsewhere. Opportunity for these objects to journey, untethered. This one sits alone, away from the conversation and the warm embrace of its family. Sometimes love means departure. Late last night it was carried gingerly by a passerby, one of many lovers in its lifetime seeking an early morning meal and a place to watch over the park. A love still hanging in the air, distant and fleeting. This is how the chair knows love. To take new forms, to find new love and lovers in perpetuity. This is how the chair knows itself. A place to sit as a respite to one’s (many) journeys. This thing was made for love.

II. Motorcycle

The love this one knows is long distance – temporal and physical. Perhaps taboo. A long-standing love that has known many forms, many names. They once lived and loved freely, but now find themselves relegated to small gifts (glove) and unsuccessful escape attempts. As time has passed, this love has been reconfigured so many times that the motorcycle itself must admit its past selves may not recognize it. Now it faces partial attention and infrequent visits, wondering what may take the place of hope in its heart as it wanes. It whispers to me messages to pass to its lover should I find them: “how is it that I find myself now incomplete without you? Why weren’t you there to protect me? Where do we go from here?” I do not find any opportunity to seek these answers.

III. Table

On the corner opposite of the chair, the table finds itself leaning towards ecstasy. Yearning. It has been watching the chair for what seems like ages now, though it has been merely a few hours since the chair’s arrival on the scene. And yet it finds itself fallen victim to the kind of love and longing that has such gravity it cannot help but stumble towards it. Such gravity that it’s palpable. Walking on these streets in the early morning hours I myself can feel it, the source of today’s heat though the sun has not yet risen. The table insists it was not looking for love, but reminds me that indeed all love is circumstantial. All love is circumstantial and this one is unrequited (yet) and beautiful (yet).

 

autoportrait

 this is what i looked like today 

quebec city 28 june 2025 

light waltz / what's the time?

lying in the grass at willard with brett and we both agree that there's something special about the way the light and the trees relate to one another here. in this bay area , the Bay Area, they dance. it is beautiful. i think i'm here for inventories. i carry four notebooks with me that i use every day for different purposes but what it all boils down to (and what won't come out in the wash) is that i live by lists. here is the latest addition to the collection. 

may 29. the sun rises early and i'm watching fiona apple. no she cannot be referred to in any other way. that's the name the vet knows her by. she is sweet. breakfast and tea in the backyard where i watch the leaves and the light in their waltz. i have more of a morning routine now than i've ever before and this is the first time i haven't needed one. 

day two of trying for dead and company tickets at golden gate park. i'm in. 

first in-person interview since my first job. bart to city. i sit at the table and look at the panel of interviewers and i feel like a child. i'm sixteen years old and this is my first service job. 

bus ride home i'm dozing off reading nausea, which i read 20 pages of on the 8th of july 2024 and did not pick up again until this day (two days later as i'm writing this, i have finally put it to rest). 

the knicks win. frankie and i wear blue and orange wigs that he found on the side of the road (2 of 12). 

olivia and brett share red.

at willard park jovan does not recognize me because my hair is not usually orange. he reads sci fi and the hip house dwellers eat cherries and pie and drink sweet wine. this is where we look at the leaves. chris who they met the day prior tells me "i love these hippies," referring to us. he tells me every time his children (who are older than me) asked what time it was he would tell them "it's time to get ill." it is hacky sack summer. it is park summer. it is stone fruit and sunlight dance summer. storm brings bubbles and it's as if i've just arrived at hip house for the very first time. dead and company and sunshine and the bubbles and the park. what happened in the interim? 

the night ends with funk night. we ride bikes and i have one to ride for the first time in a long time. i've gotten used to being without wheels. jordan had rope access level three re-certification in san diego last week and met a french man who offered him a job in france. the story goes that this man pulled up on a green cruiser bike with a cigarette in one hand every day of the class. now the bike is mine. no gears and no hand brakes. a learning curve. 

we dance in our wigs and the bartender dons one. we dance so hard. 

after we meet romeo, who went to berkeley high school and who loves it here. he asks where we go out and we realize we don't. there is pride in being home bodies here, though. somehow it is home everywhere with hip house. i sit on the fire escape the next morning and i'm all gratitude, boundless, ebbing and flowing down onto parker street below. 

graduation weekend (fuck the future, space oedipus)

 

taking inventory: it is the 18th of may 2025, two days after the semester's end and two days prior to graduation (this is the last time that it's all about timing for the time being, I think. savoring it?) 

I wrote directions to Kyler's house in one of my many notebooks... loose guidance for a day of wandering. Things move a lot slower this way. The entry on the page before is some words of wisdom from my dear Henri in the kitchen after we saw revenge of the sith in theaters a few weeks back: 

"i say fuck the future. that's why i love star wars. fuck star trek. as someone who loves sophocles i want oedipus in space, and that's star wars."

I met Kyler's parents and we talked about trying to figure it all out. How does one ever know where they're supposed to be? At some point they thought they'd transition to living in Vermont full-time.  I think it's really just about what feels right when you wake up that morning. 

Last night I decided I'd stay in San Francisco and said so while standing at the Kona Club bar with Michelle. We ordered piña coladas. Someday I'll wake up in San Francisco and it won't feel right that morning and I'll figure all of that out then. 

Today I also met a finance guy who lives in Chicago and is from Westchester ("oh, I've heard of that," - me, Suraya, and Alyssa, independently) and talked to him about how important it is to be able to speak to people on the street. I would love to meet someone new every day. Upon further reflection I think I probably do. Still no good at goodbyes, though. I'll just keep making future plans instead. 

Lots of sweet conversations about future and past and the convergence point of the two. I think it is a privilege not to know what is going on although I have been running from that for so long. But it's good to face it, to plant your feet in the dirt and stare it in the eyes. I'm here for all of the hard conversations and will hold your hands through them all. So many bouquets of flowers!! Mead and bee's knees and Martha Stewart wine. The sunset is beautiful and I am reminded that there are so many people in my life whom I am certain are the reason the sun rises the next day. love abounds, and this too shall pass.

Here is a cool photograph of Ameen and Esteban, posing (posers)