Have you ever had a favorite butterfly? As a child, mine was the cabbage one. It was off-white and a bit moth-like, and everywhere you turned you could find one, if you really looked. Cabbage butterflies aren’t as publicly celebrated as their monarch companions, and they aren’t rare but rather sort-of-everywhere—the evidence of grass and perhaps a few dandelions. Perhaps as a child they represented to me an evenness, a groundedness, a connection to the earth beneath my feet.

I am an adult now, which means I haven’t thought of butterflies for a long time. But I was offered the chance just yesterday, when I met up with a high schooler who wanted to chat about college applications. She had prepared an extensive list of questions and possible job tracks, and she wanted to ask me what I thought of her chances at success. All this a few minutes’ drive from where I grew up, from my own high school, from the little bedroom in which I dreamed every dream I am still chasing today.

It’s been nearly 10 years since I graduated high school, and still I remember the ache and press of it; the yearning; the eagerness; the need to leave—get out—go; the inward demand to chase after something, anything in a different and proverbially more magical place. So I answered this 16-year-old girl’s questions as best I could, all the while realizing that as her senior I had no specific wisdom to offer, only kindness.

“What advice do you wish you could have given your high school self?” she asked me, her eyes peeking out from her turquoise iPad. And I sort of laughed, and as I laughed I noticed this girl, who reminded me of my younger self, looking at me—really looking at me—soaking every minute detail of my response as if it would grant her the key to something, anything, a peek at the winning hand.

It was as if the knee within my soul jerked. The words tumbled out of me, not pieces of advice at all but a series of affirmations: Don’t worry; It’s all going to be okay; It is so tough; You’re doing so well. I said all this while still averting her gaze. I was looking into the distance, conjuring this image of skinny little high-school-me. When I realized I was speaking to the past, I turned back to my 16-year-old companion and spoke directly to her instead. It really is all going to be okay. You are doing such a good job. You’re going to be okay. And I was telling myself that, too. I would like to think that my 16-year-old friend’s smile was a beaming, and that the beaming was a softer window of kindness which she was finally allowing herself to step through.

From 16 to 25, whatever short and ostensibly successful life I have lived is a testament to some lines in Charles Bukowski’s “butterflies”:

I believe in earning one’s own way

but I also believe in the unexpected

gift1

, which brings me back to butterflies and the hierarchy of monarch ones over cabbage ones. At one point in our conversation, I reflected on the privilege of having graduated at a place like Brown: I have friends in high places, I have casually met strangers with more wealth than I ever dreamed of as a child, I can speak a particular jargon of language, I can eat at a Faculty Club with believable non-awkwardness, I am part of some global brand of Ivy League graduate, etcetera, etcetera. I believe these things are important to recognize aloud, especially because they have real, material impact. And this impact can be so often hidden by its beneficiaries: people unwilling to invite criticism of their generational privilege, or people who want to flaunt their newfound privilege (but are, despite themselves, ashamed of the place from which they came). I have met all kinds of people. As such—and as someone who wasn’t exactly raised within the mirror halls of prestige but who now carries with me several fancy worldly titles—I have witnessed a strange and uneven world, in which certain people navigate privilege with ease, use decorum to intimidate Others, and fight for the chance to demarcate the lines of “in” and “out.” (In these circles, the point is not if you belong; the point is to become the person who can dictate others’ belonging.)

In the past year, the strangeness and unevenness of that world has become more violent, audacious, public, and customary. We are living under a comedically blatant fascist regime, helmed by a selfish and arrogant leader elected by a selfish and arrogant majority. We are living in a time of genocide and unabashed violence; we are living and people are being shot off the street; we are living and death is a game for the powerful. Everyone wants to be a monarch (butterfly). Everyone wants to believe that they’ve earned their own way. And, it is true that I, too,

believe in earning one’s own way

but I also believe in the unexpected

gift

, which is what I told this high school girl who reminded me of my younger self. At the beginning of our conversation, she had called herself—so effortlessly—an artist, and I hoped she wouldn’t throw it all away because her peers were all talking (at sixteen!) about nabbing secure, profitable, stable, well-paying jobs. I thought of myself at 16: strong bones, the ache and the pride, the unknowing and the hunger. Everyone wants

more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:

I am living. I remember you.2

We are living in these terrifying, troubling times, facing the open mouth of an empire ready to devour us. And still we are living, making art, counting the butterflies, meeting our high school selves.

There is a poem I love that ends like this.

There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.

When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine

and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.

And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out

and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point

she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.

She looks up, down, at the mice.

Then she eats the strawberry.

So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse

in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,

slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel

and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.

Oh taste how sweet and tart

the red juice is, how the tiny seeds

crunch between your teeth.

The poem is titled—ironically, deliberately, contentiously—“Relax.”3

I welcomed the turning of the new year in the place that once held me (my birthplace, my childhood neighborhood, these streets of my teenagedom) and was held.4 I over-ate the way I did in high school; I dug a few holes in the backyard; I sang hymns in Vietnamese; I learned the difference between pelicans and cranes and storks; I shed a few tears because a dog I loved had died; I played Bananagrams and Overcooked and Super Smash with my cousins.

such an offer

such a communion

must be taken

as holy

, Bukowski writes in that beautiful poem of his, “butterflies.” In the past week, I’ve driven by my high school, newly reconstructed, barely recognizable to me now; and I’ve lain on the grassy field of my elementary and middle school, which was also the backyard of the church I grew up attending. There are ghosts of a little Kaitlan walking those grounds, and each time I return they greet me.

At the turn of the new year, I woke up thinking of a word, or rather, a prefix: “Re-.” No new year’s resolutions, no bingo cards; just this fragment of a word I am beholding.

• return

• relax

• repeat

• reciprocate

• reinspire

• reinvoke

• remember

• render

• regenerate

• rest

There is a newness, a tenderness, about the things I once considered old, even wretched, even shameful. There is forgiveness, recalibration, reintegration, a softer window of kindness and return. Recently, I found my middle school glasses tucked away in a cardboard box at the back of my shelf. I put them back on, these glasses that I once despised—glasses that once made me feel so ashamed of myself. They were not too small for me. They were not stupid or painful. They were, in fact, quite chic and cool; and at the same time they represented a side of myself that I had hated and repressed as a child.

Back in middle school, these glasses had fallen under the budgetary restriction of my parents’ insurance plan. They were the only ones we could afford. So I felt poor and nerdy whenever I wore them, and to make matters worse my middle school crush made fun of me the first day I dared to wear them in class (mostly out of flirtation, but the insecurity stuck). Needless to say, I chose to squint most of my way through middle school.

Now at 25, out of curiosity for the past and in the name of silly reenactment, I donned those awful plastic bifocals once more. Somehow, almost magically, they were not the bad and monstrous thing I had always remembered them to be; they fit like Cinderella’s slipper; they corrected my vision perfectly; and as soon as I put them on, the person I’d fallen in love with in adulthood kissed me and gushed over them; I love them; I love them; I love you, he said—the tilt of the world felt somehow forgiven, everything aligned, everything accepted and acceptable.

That is how this new year feels, and I don’t want to be alone in that feeling. I want to draw everyone I love together, closer and closer each day unto the next. I recently fell upon Audre Lorde’s “A Burst of Light” again, which feels to me like an invocation for the new year:

A better question is—how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to ensure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

Yesterday, I dreamt I was back in high school. Then I woke up this morning and thought of butterflies. And not too long after that, I wrote this letter to you.

Love,

Kaitlan

The first time I began my blog posts this way—“Dear Friends”—was November of last year, mostly to remind myself that I had friends. I was so lonely then, so very literally alone. I remember journaling something like, “What does living abroad look like? It is reminding myself every day that I exist, and that there are people who love me.”

Ever since then, any time I write to you, I begin with great intention: in my head, it’s always, “Dear Friends.” Mostly, those words are for me; I write them to remind myself; my posts are bids for attention. But in the times that you need it, I hope my greeting can remind you that you exist, too, and that I love you, and that I am thinking of you. This is the point of my blog post today.

So much has happened since the last time I wrote: I traveled to Taiwan, Japan, back to the States, back to Vietnam, around Vietnam (with my parents—the first time my dad was back since ‘75). Then I moved home altogether. Several of my friends got married—to each other and to people I don’t know. I visited my college, and there I walked slowly down the same streets I had once raced through like a speed demon, convinced I was needed somewhere. Needed now. Everything used to be a crisis. 

I have come to realize that I am not needed, per se. And that most things are not in crisis. These are not sad realizations, just humbling ones. I am not the center of my friends’ lives; they are not the center of mine. Friendship is more like a sitcom than it is a Greek Odyssey. We orbit around each other, and when the orbits intersect, well, that’s what you call a celestial miracle. 

I met her when I was 18. It was at a freshman mixer, and I noticed her because we were the only ones crying. Someone had mentioned missing home and suddenly, completely unprompted, we both started sobbing. I didn’t know this girl, but deep in my heart I felt this was someone I could be with, actually and fully. I bought her milk tea boba on her birthday and said “it’s on me” —a feign of generosity because what I really wanted was friendship. She was lactose intolerant. We became friends anyway.

There is a picture of the both of us, which someone took with a distortion filter: her face is squished into a blob and I look like an unhappy squid. We were 18 then, maybe 19. Several late nights became hundreds of Messenger calls, became misunderstandings and forgivenesses, became several years of knowing each other, became deep and sometimes unfathomable friendship. I don’t know all of her. There are things I’m sure we don’t tell each other, not because of any dark reason, but because life happens, because there are other people to tell besides each other, because of this and that. She is married now, a ring on her finger; I flew halfway across the world to witness it. 

I realize that this is a bit of a corny post, mostly because of its universal truth, mostly because there are a million ways people say the same thing: “I felt this was someone I could be with, actually and fully.” There are a million ways those stories then end with the same conclusion: “I didn’t realize how rare those moments are, those people.”  

I think we write these sweeping statements because friendship is the slipperiest love that exists—and it requires the most difficult, most tender balance of desire and letting go. Friends are not bound to each other out of responsibility or tradition. And once something bad sours the mood—guilt, abuse, disinterest—it is no longer, by definition, a friendship. Friendship is, in this way, entirely inconsequential. If you leave, likely nothing will happen. No grand break-up, no splitting child care, no huge family blowout. “Friendship is unnecessary,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself.” 

Then: “It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

I love my friends, and after traveling the world for 2 years, I miss my friends. As corny and obvious as it is, I have found that friends are indeed difficult to make. Thankfully, I have also found that the best ones are a lot easier to keep than I once believed. 

Today, I met up with my now-married friend. We walked into a cafe together, sat down near the electric plug so I could borrow her charger. Have I borrowed this charger before? There is so much of my precious friend that I do not know, so much that perhaps will never be known. What is my role here now? Who am I within this friendship? 

Several months ago, on the way to her wedding, I read a book she had been recommending for a while. It was a memoir on friendship, an ode to college, an anti-eulogy for the author’s friend who died in a carjacking. I wept. 

From the book1: “Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would ‘choose knowing rather than being known.’ I had always thought it was the other way around.” 

I wept. I wept because a mother and her son were seated to my right, and when would my friend become a mother? I wept because how was my friend already getting married? I wept because there was so much I wanted to know about her, and so many more ways I wanted to be known. I wept because I wasn’t as big of a person as Derrida makes himself out to be. I wept because my earlier flight had been canceled midair, and no other flight would make it in time; wept because I had booked a one-way ticket headed in the opposite direction (instead of through the Pacific, I was flying through the Middle East, the UK, Greenland); wept because even then, I would be landing at the same exact time my friend would be exchanging her vows. 

I wept because despite my effort, I would have to Zoom into her wedding from a clunky, lonely Uber in the middle of nowhere; because I would screenshot the kiss, screenshot the flowers, pinch the screen to scan her face; she looks so happy, I’m so happy for her. I wept because I hoped my friend would know I was happy for her. I wept because I hoped she knew I loved her. I wept because I loved my friend. I wept because there was a part of me that—so inconsequentially—needed affirmation that she loved me, too.

I have always found it so interesting, so moving and poignant, that the shortest (and by some metrics, therefore the most “inconsequential”) verse of the Bible is about a friend. John 11. The Death of Lazurus. Verse 35. Jesus wept. 

His friend died. Jesus wept. It is so simple. It is so small. So unnecessary, one might say, for the Son of God with the power to raise people from the dead, why the trouble of crying? But there it is. That terribly inconsequential, completely unnecessary yearning. His dear friend. His dear friend. Jesus wept.

After my friend left this cafe, some hours ago—routed to that new apartment she now shares with my other friend, husband and wife, these huge, ordinary, unfathomable titles—I pulled out my laptop and began writing. The balding middle-aged man seated on my left pulled out his phone and started talking to his friend. I’d like to think my own laughter, my own shushing and joking and serious reflection with my own friend, just some minutes ago, gave him the courage to phone his.

“Been so long, man,” the bald man coughed, trying to sound cool, unfazed, as if dialing his pal had been an inconsequential slip of the thumb. He said he hoped his friend didn’t mind him calling. Yeah, he’s seen his therapist recently, yeah, it really sucks, yeah, she’s not really talking to me, yeah, hey, thanks so much for calling, man, and, oh, hey, I’m happy you got to see your kid recently. Thanks so much for calling. Thanks so much. Really, thank you. By the way, can we do this again? 

On her wedding day, when I saw my friend for the first time in a year, fresh off the $150 Lyft, my hair half-washed in the airport sink—

When I scrambled with my luggage into the bridal room as if I belonged, as if I was needed, as if it was a crisis—

When I looked at this beautiful woman in her beautiful gown, I knew she had just been married. I knew I had tried so hard to be there. I knew they had just been several inconsequential seconds, but I also knew that I had missed them anyway.

I knew sometimes things cannot be helped, and yes.

I wept then, too.

Dear Friends, 

Thank you. When I was back on campus for a short moment, you reminded me that it is possible, after all, to be loved inconsequentially, through accidental bump-ins at Shake Shack, over pizza at the Air BnB, texting this person who will text this person who will text this other person to pick us up and then we can all walk the canal together. Thank you for telling me you read this blog. Thank you for telling me I inspired you to take a creative writing class, or two, and/or possibly start your own blog. I couldn’t believe it. I spent two years reminding myself I exist. You told me I exist and more.

When I began this blog, I had no expectations for where it would go, or how many people would read. Now, there are 100+ people subscribed. That is no small number. Some of you I have known so intimately, in the way of inside jokes and leftover Chinese takeout. Some of you I have met on the other side of everything I thought was familiar, in a country that changed me. Some of you are strangers—beautiful, cryptic email usernames that trusted my writing enough to subscribe. 

Either way, no matter what it is, thank you. So much. With all my heart. There have been no consequences to our friendship, at least in the way that there are no consequences in poetry or philosophy or art or the universe or beautiful living. 

If it at all moves you to write back to me, I would love to hear how you are. You can drop a line in the comments, send me a private email response, anything. Thanks so much. Really, thank you.

Love,

Kaitlan

For the past half-year—since my last blog post in May 2023—I have written 70+ pages to you—yes, 12 unruly, unfinished, half-baked drafts—wondering how I could possibly begin writing, and, throughout the course of several pages, continue writing, in honesty. 

For the past half-year, all my beginnings changed. I tinkered with them, disliked them, and threw them away. Then I happened upon this one: four em-dashes, six prepositional phrases, seven commas, the most unartful breed of the bunch. 

It feels bumbling, and apologetic, and ugly. It’s terrible, sure, but it’s the most honest thing I’ve got.

My favorite piece of writing from Ocean Vuong is his essay on hope, desperation, and the calendar restart from which we have again emerged.

On New Year’s Day, 2013, Ocean Vuong stood outside the apartment of a man who had killed himself, a man he knew as “uncle.” He could not cry, and he could not bring himself to comfort his mother. So Ocean Vuong lied. 

Of honesty, he says, look to the fire escape—that “clinging extremity, inanimate and often rusting… in its hardened, exiled silence, with the most visible human honesty: We are capable of disaster. And we are scared.”

On New Year’s Day, 2024, a horrible earthquake shakes Japan. Tsunami warnings are issued, city evacuations, airline cancellations. My schedule, miraculously, stays unchanged. 

The next day—the day of my flight back to Vietnam—Japan Airlines (my carrier) reports a crash, a burning plane, 5 deaths, and all in the very airport I am to land. 

“There might be a significant delay at the Haneda airport,” the airline attendant tells me as he checks my bag.  

“That’s alright,” I say.

“Because of the accident,” he clarifies. 

“Okay.”

Indubitably, the beginning of my flight is rockier than any flight I have experienced, with the ignition starting up several times, as if the engines are broken, or the pilot thinks there is a malfunction. We are bumping around in the sky, and to save myself from nausea, I force myself to fall asleep to thoughts of a burning plane and the song I’ve been learning on the guitar: “If I were crash, and I never made it home…”

Over the summer, my dad had a heart attack. In a version of this blog post I had drafted a few months ago, I had written, “I feel I have been sitting very near Death. My life has unfolded in a ‘deathly’ direction, like some ghost has attached itself to me, or that I have myself become an omen, a bad luck charm, a memento mori.” 

Thankfully, we made it out of the surgery bend. But after that, a lot of people adjacent to my life started dying. I had this horrible thought that these strangers were paying, with the very coin of their lives, for the upsweep of death that almost caught my family. I know death doesn’t work like that—neither does joy, or success, or love—but sometimes you can feel so deprived of something that you convince yourself that life is a zero-sum game. 

During my drives to and from the ICU, I envisioned my return to Vietnam as a dreamy sort of “running away,” and with all the hospital complications, with all the support I believed my family needed, I felt tremendous guilt—terror, really, at my own desires. 

Because I boarded that flight back to Vietnam. Because I didn’t look back. Because I left home, with so many bows untied, so many sadnesses etched into the shape of my body.

When I wake up, I am alright. Flight JL 016 isn’t burning. And I have landed in Haneda. 

I think to myself, well, what the hell. I’m alive. I might as well check this out. Spurred on by the natural adrenaline of spontaneity, I bumble out of the airplane with only my excitement, a 20% phone charge, and the Japan Airlines blanket I have stolen to my body. I’m going to get out of the airport. I’m going to explore, with what little layover time I have, Tokyo, Japan.

My beginning is rocky. I need to store my luggage, but the flight attendants are too fast for my sprained ankle. The voice at the “Information” phone booth tells me to seek help elsewhere, and the next hour is spent in embarrassingly non-Japanese, super-foreigner-American English. After another hour of limping up and down the same airport corridors, I secure a coin locker, some cash, and a juicebox of banana milk. Then I sit smack-dab in the middle of a rowdy pack of hypermasculine U.S. Army soldiers, realize my mistake, and decide not to move because I have to charge my phone. 

At 35%, I limp towards Keikyu Station, Apple-Maps-prepared. When the screen flashes, I’m ready to hit “Shinjuku,” but an incomprehensible assortment of numbers pops up instead. A Japanese man dressed like a train conductor kindly approaches me, asking, “Where?”

“Shinjuku,” I attempt.

“Ah, 新宿!” 

I nod, and the train conductor points at the map above us. The stops here are clustered into numbers and colors. The train conductor points to Shinjuku, then he points to a number: 170. He nods to the screen, taps 170, and exclaims, “Ah!” 

“Arigato kozai-mas,” I say, but he is already helping someone else.

So I walk towards the metro gate. As I slip my tiny ticket in, I wonder if this man realizes he has taught me, in 3 seconds, how to begin. 

I am lost, my phone is at 13%, I’ve traveled for 2 and a half hours, and the ramen shop is not where Apple Maps says it is. I look like a human camel, on account of the beige Japan Airlines blanket draping my backpack, as well as my limp, which bounces the hump up-down-up-down when I walk. 

I hobble past the ramen shop, not recognizing it. I circle back, then pass it again. I’m surrounded by loud, disrespectful foreigners on an otherwise quiet street, and I am embarrassed. So I decide to give up, but then halfway through giving up, I change my mind. I circle back and brave the bar alley. 

As if I had stepped on a magic brick tile, a man opens a door that was not there before. A staircase glows red behind him, and to his right, a line. I step into it with feigned casualness—it snakes along a tiny alley, whose width can only accommodate one set of human shoulders. English-language posters pepper the wall, teaching foreigners the etiquette of eating ramen. There is a lot of etiquette. 

This is how you begin entering the ramen store – quickly and quietly; ramen is fast food; you can take pictures of the food, but please do NOT take a picture of the staff. Japanese people are sensitive to public photography.

This is how you begin eating your ramen – without adding extra ingredients; you should sip the broth first, to pay your compliments and respect to the chef, and then afterwards can feel free to add any flavor to taste. Otherwise, it is considered very rude.

This is how you begin your exit – by catching the chef’s eye and thanking them for the food — “gochisosama” (ごちそうさま); if there is a towel nearby, you should wipe your table, which signals the server to clear your things, and is also a polite gesture.

Suddenly, it’s my turn, and I follow the server up the staircase, order my food by inserting money into an ordering machine, and sit down atop a wooden stool. I have forgotten the other 15 rules on how to properly begin. 

“In the golden light of filters,” Ocean Vuong writes, “it has become more and more difficult for us to say aloud, to one another: I am hurt. I am scared. What happens now?” 

He was right. Even on the cusp of my father’s death, and for half a year after his surgery, I was unable to say those things, perhaps most of all, to myself. My father was unable to say those things, too, so instead he asked me if I was happy.

Are you happy, con gai? —which means, my daughter.

He held his arms out to me then. I looked at him; it was as if his stitches were poking up from under his shirt. It was as if his body was shrinking infinitely, as if he was younger than me, or much, much older. He was a stranger, and also, my father.

I did not know how to answer him then—did not know if it was right for me to answer him at all—because I was going to leave my father and his heart to begin a different life, by myself, for myself, in the country he had left as a child of war. 

Tokyo reminds me of Hồ Chí Minh City, and Hồ Chí Minh City reminds me of New York. There are fire escapes in New York, and dangling telephone wires in Hồ Chí Minh City, and neon signs that blink too fast in Tokyo. These are all reminders that there is terror and doom and decay all around us, that there is nowhere to hide, that we will die. 

When the large bowl of Special Ramen is placed in front of me—corn and sliced pork and egg, seaweed, house-pulled noodles—I forget if I wipe my chopsticks or not, and I forget if I’m supposed to wipe them or not. I just plunge my spoon into the bowl and slurp because I am unforgivably hungry. I have travelled so far. That is all the honesty I am afforded in that moment. 

A bumbling, terrible beginning. An imperfect, impromptu trip to Tokyo for 5 hours, 4.5 of them spent lost. I know I did not remember all the proper ways to begin. I know I messed up the pronunciation of “thank you.” But I didn’t know what else to do.

I think of the train conductor, his quick pointing, his ushering me to the train station with just enough knowledge of how to operate the ticket machine and a tiny stub destined for Shinjuku. 

I think of the burning airplane that could have been mine but was not.

I think of a girl with a boombox the size of her body, strapped atop her motorbike, who, in the midst of Sài Gòn’s traffic—its darkness and dangling telephone wires— filled the streets with her favorite music. I remember she danced. Everyone was looking at her.

I think I want to say now, finally, after half a year of not knowing how to speak, I am hurt. I am scared. And, also, I am happy.

Your daughter, Dad. She’s happy.

Dear Friends,

When Toni Morrison quit her job to begin writing full-time, she experienced this startling feeling she could not place: 

A few days after my last day at work, sitting in front of my house on the pier jutting out into the Hudson River, I began to feel an edginess instead of the calm I had expected. I ran through my index of problem areas and found nothing new or pressing. I couldn’t fathom what was so unexpectedly troubling on a day that perfect, watching a river that serene. I had no agenda and couldn’t hear the telephone if it rang. I heard my heart, though, stomping away in my chest like a colt. I went back to the house to examine this apprehension, even panic. I knew what fear felt like; this was different. Then it slapped me: I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty.1

That is my New Year’s wish to you—the wish of the train conductor, the wish of decadent ramen, the wish of a girl blasting her boombox on a motorbike at 9:38 p.m in a city whose traffic is mocked by foreigners because, actually, they are terrified of it. May we all have the courage this year to admit hurt, and fear, and happiness. May we all encounter the purer delight, the rogue anticipation, the certainty.2

There is no other side of terror. There is only beginning, every second of this life. 

Love, 

Kaitlan

It rained today. 

What I mean is that today, something in the asphalt mixed with something in the rain, and the streets smelled like they once did. Summer. August. Beginning. I was reminded of Hà Nội and my first walk to Highlands (Vietnam’s most popular coffee chain)—sky darkening, rain pouring unannounced onto my shoulders, into my shoes, which then squelched and smelled, even days later. I was reminded of my first Vietnam purchase (an umbrella, the same day) and my first bún chả. My first bookstore, my first dessert, that time we walked to the rock climbing gym in the pounding rain because all the taxis were booked but we! were! determined! I was reminded of my many firsts in this beautiful, complicated country that has formed me and then changed me—in more ways than a sentence can muster. And so I let the clean, earthy smell in and further in. And so a wave of feeling followed. 

People have been asking me about The Ending. I have been journaling about it, too, counting down the 5 flights left, 4 lesson plans left, 3 weekends left until The End of my Fulbright grant. I suppose that is the way endings work; they are signaled to us. They are constructed—art forms we clutch onto for moral and meaning, moldings for the Self, so we might cope with our Next Unknown. What have you learned? How have you changed?

My Next Unknown does not seem too far away now. It lies just beyond this Fulbright grant—beyond May 26, my last day of teaching; May 29, the first day of our final meeting; June 7, the day I fly back to LAX. 

But more so than any other goodbye in my life, more so than any other “stepping into,” I feel content and sure. A good thing has run its course. The next good thing will come. And, anyway, my next good thing—my Next Unknown—is a refusal of ending altogether, which is this: I have decided to stay in Vietnam.

“Why?” my cousin texted me when I dropped the news. 

Was it too blasé to reply, “bc I want to” or “idk, it feels good”? But it’s the truth. Of course, I could give you all the other side-answers:

• I want to continue learning Vietnamese.

• I want to develop deeper relationships with my family here.

• I love the concept of being abroad.

• I want to try.

• I want to rest.

• I want to see important projects through—projects about family history, identity, storytelling.

• I want to write, and I want to write here.

But what makes these reasons more valid than the blasé ones? At the end of the day, those four-word texts may be the closest I’ll ever get to the truth. I am staying because I want to, because it feels good, because I don’t know, I guess I’ve decided it’s the next most meaningful step in my life. 

I am staying in Vietnam, and it is not to save anyone. I am not Uncovering The Incandescent Truth Of Life, or Recovering Family Secrets, or Venturing into the Great Unknown. If I do any of the above, it will be slightly accidental, a side effect of the real reason: because.

Simply: “One day, [I] finally knew what [I] had to do, and began.”

Simply: I am saving the only life I can, and that is my own.1 

After 23 years and a host of choices that led me to a year in Vietnam, and now another—decision to me seems less a work of action, more a work of belief. 

Two years ago, I was tasked with finishing a book, Outline, by Rachel Cusk. Like many tasks, I failed this one. But I have since returned to it, slowly and via audiobook. I tend to listen in small chunks: while I am scrubbing my bathroom, or hanging up clothes to dry, or trying to stop some mental spiral (often about being unloved). 

One line I have returned to: “The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.” 

The unexpected is precisely what I have been learning to manage these past nine-odd months. More often than you’d expect, my phone pings, “Hihi, are you free?” More often than you’d expect, I say, “Yes!”

My affirmatives have taken me many places: an empty beach house, a food tour, a family home in the countryside, the local market, free breakfast, free lunch, a wedding, a memorial service, a church service, a kids’ English club, and free dinner, too. I’ve gone to a small mountain (breezy), a larger mountain (breezier), a watering hole (someone peeled persimmons for me here, and we ate while dipping our toes in the cold water). 

I’ve been taken to a crowded night festival (on Halloween), an uneventful night festival (I lost at bingo), a volleyball tournament (which I lost, too). I’ve been introduced to a favorite cafe (where I met someone’s son and husband), a favorite dog (named Orange), a favorite hidden restaurant (which I’ve since been unable to find). I’ve been left in the care of an eleven year old, with safety helmets, 150K, and a key to the motorbike on the dining table. I’ve been told to nap in the air-conditioned family room. I have collected cicada husks with children, been gifted European chocolates, visited the place where someone proposed marriage (she said yes). I’ve been told to eat, sit, make myself at home. I’ve been told to come back anytime I want, nhé, text whenever.

The truth is, I never know where or for how long a mere “yes” will commit me to. I am often bone-wearied by the end of the encounter, and I spend the following day in complete (and necessary) solitude. I sleep in; I recover. Sometimes I do feel pushed around—on the one hand, a puppet to strangers’ schedules, on the other, a happy-go-lucky freeloader who can only offer a paltry “thank you.” Sometimes I feel I have no choice in the matter. Sometimes I feel I have too much: an entire key to an entire motorbike. I am still learning to ride it, and she trusts me to take her eleven year old back home—a whole half hour away? Yes.

However weary I may be, I do step away from these encounters grateful—always—chance, unexpected, fated as they are. I know I will only have these moments for so long. I know they are teaching me something about what it means to live. So I, too, say yes.

The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate, two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and both of them are the same.2 I choose one because I have to. Or maybe you choose it for me and you slap on a 150K, the keys to your motorbike, and an eleven year old friend. The point is the road we choose will lead us to another road, and another, and another. The point is that we never actually choose alone. The point is that turnpikes are continuations, not endings. What have you learned? How have you changed?

I entered this world not wanting

to come. I’ll leave it not 

wanting to go. All this while,

when it seemed there were two doors

there was only one—this

passing through.3

“Why?” my cousin asked me when I dropped the news. 

It is hard to explain because the explanation is so simple.

Why? Because.

Why? Because it is enough.

And anyways, I think decisions—as related as they are to belief—are often beyond proving. Every decision is an act of faith: I will change; so will the world. The roads are the same, and still I choose. This is the only way we can (un)reasonably fall in love, get married, move cities, countries; how we can write books, stay in museums all day, devote our careers to a craft, make friends and keep them for eternity. “If I had three lives,” Sarah Russell writes, “I’d marry you in two. / The other? Perhaps that life over there.”4

So if all of life is a passing through, when you have found something that feels so brilliantly, ordinarily enough, why turn elsewhere? The turnpikes are continuations. The roads are the same. We will cross the other bridges when we get there; we will smell the rain when it returns. Your job here is joy. 

And for now, it is good, it is good, and it is enough. So choose it.

Love,

Kaitlan

Tuesday

by Alex Dimitrov

When I can’t talk to anyone1

I like to sit in front of water.2

If I have a minute to feel good3

I take that minute. I have a cigarette.4

I walk into the museum of past lives5

and rearrange all the chairs.6

This poem is meant to be read7

at the bar on a Tuesday8

when you’re dehydrated9

and not feeling so great.10

I want to know you11

like a dog touches the wind12

with its tongue. I want to know13

why time moves impossibly slow14

when pain rises, and what makes it15

speed up like two people16

looking for each other17

at the end of the night.18

When was the last time someone19

looked at you like a bridge20

held by cold air? Like the cars21

flying down the FDR22

taking us where we imagine23

is better than where we are.

I imagined it differently also.24

I imagined more than mixed feelings,

tough leather, the last yes coming25

so quickly. Men and how they

pace awkwardly before parting.26

Cats and how they roam

freely in bodegas at dawn.

The towers in photos.27

The tulips of April.28

The person in a theater

now watching the credits,

reading the names, stalling29

to put on their coat or their scarf 30

or their gloves. Or maybe

not stalling. Maybe they’re 

waiting for the music to change.31

Not everything is an ending.32

Not anything’s worth believing.33

And you can begin anytime34

like this whole world began

out of nothing. You can walk out

tonight and feel totally new.35

All you need is the right pair of boots.36

5

This photograph was taken on November 17, 2022, the day after I had motorbiked myself to Hồ Chí Minh City on impulse without Google Maps and as the sun was setting. It took 4 hours, in between which it poured, I got lost, I asked a guard for help, but he also had no sense of direction, I got lost again, and I had a major life epiphany. See footnote #25 for more. For now: this photograph of the Fine Arts Museum. 

I loved capturing this moment—I was witnessing love after love from the window of the museum’s second floor, which overlooked an arch which overlooked the city. If you look closely, you can see three different couples taking photographs of each other, talking to each other, waiting on each other. It reminds me of the poem “Credo” by Matthew Rohrer: “I believe there is something else // entirely going on but no single / person can ever know it, / so we fall in love.”

9

Here is a picture of that one time I was so stressed out about meeting the freshman class that I forgot my water bottle at the local park and left it there for a day and a half. 

You’ll see it’s at the edge of a lotus pond because I’ve taken to dusk-time meditations here (usually after a run). 

This BPA-free Nalgene gem had been hand-delivered by C when she came to visit me in February (I couldn’t find any large BPA-free water bottles in Vietnam and had been dehydrated for several months). The truth is that my mom had sent me the same exact Nalgene before, but I had lost it on a chaotic bus ride to Sài gòn. I moped for about a week. 

Anyways, thank you again, C. And—sorry again, Mom.

12

I ran into my student, L, after class at my favorite fried rice/noodle place. Turns out that it’s also L’s favorite place! (IMHO it deserves to be many people’s favorite place.) Both L and I had been planning to order take-out and eat by ourselves, but then the opportunity arose to eat together! And so we ate. Up until that point, I had been having a “bleh” day. Sharing this meal with L made it so much more than “bleh.” 

Then! To top it all off, this little dog meandered over and found shelter under my legs! Then he smiled at me! 

L and I ate together again today. We decided it’d be a Thursday ritual.

16

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

I was sitting at the edge of the lotus pond with L. We watched as the sun fell from the sky, and we witnessed another kind of falling, too:

20

Providence, Rhode Island, is home to both my alma mater and one of my favorite places in the world: Pedestrian Bridge. If you talk to me, you know I like to talk about Pedestrian Bridge all the time. All the time! In my last year of college, I would walk to Pedestrian Bridge, I would go on runs and end my route at Pedestrian Bridge. I would eat there; I would cry there; I would invite friends there and talk about faith and ice cream and the stuffy erudition of—ick! but also wow!—academia. 

When I first arrived in my teaching province and was hit with living-abroad loneliness, S would send me picture updates of Pedestrian Bridge. And about two weeks ago, S sent me another update:

21

I forgot to tell you I bought a motorbike. It’s like my Pokemon. I named it Clifford. Notice I have not given it any pronouns because I hate how people (often men!) name their luxury transportation goods feminine names. It’s totally gross. But I like “Clifford” because it reminds me of my childhood, and Clifford was big and friendly and not-sexist, and he would happily (and safely) take Emily everywhere. Anyways, here is a picture Clifford right after my purchase (The bike next to Clifford was also mine, gifted by my school. It has since been stolen):

We’ve been through A Lot together, like almost dying at 10 p.m. in the middle of nowhere and then almost running over a kid on a bike. The first was my fault; the latter, not so much. I promise I’m a good driver. Come to Vietnam and see for yourself.

27

Photographs of towers in Saigon, Singapore, and Thailand, respectively and in chronological order. These photographs were taken with my (new, overpriced) film camera, which I proceeded to break (and whose film I proceeded to burn/rip, as well). I made a friend in Sài gòn, who fixed my film camera. I call him “uncle” and I have his number saved. Unfortunately, a different part of my camera broke recently. I may need to return to the city and ask for his help again. Beware film cameras! They are fragile, albeit precious, things!

36

Today, I am wearing the same pair of shoes I wore the first day I wrote to you. Please write back to me! I miss you, and I still cannot wait to hug you.

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot, a lot, endlessly and a lot, about how to share my heart with you. Months it's been since I last wrote (at least publicly, and to you) — and months it's been since I’ve sat down and let this thrumming, fleshy glob of human organ beat wildly, through words, in tandem with your own. 

It’s been beating, of course. Wildly and impossibly—across time zones, and oceans, and days and nights and different temperatures. I’ve been living in ways I would have hitherto thought impossible—living the stuff of movies and dreams, the kind of romance stories your grandmother tells you, which you don’t quite believe because they’re so incredible, but which regardless you want to believe because they’re so incredible. Also because your grandmother’s eyes sparkle each time she tells them. 

I feel like I’m sparkling now. I feel tender and brilliant and, yes, sparkling. Like the firework sticks children lit during Tết on the streets of Sài gòn. Like the beat of the dragon dances across the Buddhist temples, and the lights of District One skybars. Even in my quiet moments, I am jingling in concert with the bells atop cafe doors and the giggling group of girls in my afternoon class. Between the last time I’ve written to you and now, I’ve boarded eight planes with my dilapidated turquoise carry-on, booked nine buses with my notably improved Vietnamese, and completed my 23rd revolution around the sun. 

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are a million and one ways I’d like to go about sharing my heart with you. And that I have an endless array of blog posts in the queue. And maybe right after I publish this one, I’ll begin the next, which will say the same exact thing but in a different way, which maybe in the end is saying a different thing after all, which is maybe also the same thing. I’m living out something like Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, or A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, or Richard Siken’s “You Are Jeff.” I’m writing it, too.

Art imitating life, life imitating art, everything a novel, me trying to write the space in between, you writing back.

Needless to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about interpretation, and documentation, and silence, and memory—and what it means to be in a world so quickly fading. I’ve been thinking about what it means to hold joy in one palm and grief in the other. Writing and loving, I’ve come to realize, are classical variations of the same motif: an attempt to hold an infinite person in a finite space, failing inevitably, dangerously, delicately, and doing it anyway. 

Ocean Vuong writes, “On earth we’re briefly gorgeous.” Bashō writes, “the above - the clouds / life is surely joy itself / but tempered / by knowing life even there / cannot go on forever.” And the night of Gethsemane—before his betrayal, arrest, and death—Jesus prayed, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, [though] they are not of the world.”1 Then he asked God to love his friends. Then he died, yearning still.

So what does it mean to be not of the world yet walking in the world? What does it mean to hope for eternity in a geography of inevitable end? How can we share our hearts when there are so many ports of entry to traverse before we can even touch each other? I board plane after plane, watching strangers slip in and out of airport terminals and crowded parking lots, and I wonder what it means to begin and what it means to end. Why is it so hard to say goodbye—so hard that even when the end is far from us, “so often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time”?2

How is it possible to hold so much, and then have to leave it, and sometimes be the one who is left behind? How can we know, before the thing becomes a heartache, that it will become a heartache? How can we know, before the thing becomes a miracle, that it will become a miracle? 

When God gives you a choice, what do you do?

CLEMENTINE: [impatiently] What, Joel? What do you want?

JOEL: [at a loss] I don’t know.

JOEL: [pause] Just wait. I just want you to wait for a while.

They lock eyes for a moment: Clementine stone-faced, Joel with a worried, knit brow. Clementine cracks up.

CLEMENTINE: Okay.3

Some of my favorite songs in the world are sung by Lizzy McAlpine, who, like me, has also recently completed 23 revolutions around the sun. Her songs are strung together by a particular brand of acoustic tenderness; her lyrics acknowledge the fragility of love and the inexorably human attempt to hold it anyway. Even as she plucks her guitar strings, singing sound into the world, Lizzy McAlpine understands the complexity of silence. Silence, she sings, is the mark of gentle beginnings and the stamp of safe and easy love. Yet it is also the token of endings—the trademark brand of hesitation, regret, and heartache.

In “Pancakes for Dinner,” for example, Lizzy confesses her feelings without confessing them at all; she is at a romantic standstill. Her silence is ironically conveyed through an overabundance of question-confessions adjacent to the most important, most silent question-confession of all (“I love you. Do you love me too?”):

To tell you is too scary,

So I'll just say something else.

Like how was fall semester?

And what was that song about?

I'll try to hide the way I feel,

But I'll just wanna shout.

What do I have to lose right now?

“I want to eat pancakes for dinner,” she sings—and the silent part we fill in is, “with you.” Yes, what Lizzy McAlpine means to tell her lover is, “I want to eat pancakes for dinner with you.”

But she never says the words after all. And when we sing along to her guitar tune, we never say them, either. We never say what we want to: “I love you.” 

“Why is this?” Lizzy seems to ask. What are we afraid of? Why are all of us, all of us, everywhere and all of us, so terrified of a “falling through”? 

What if we, in our prospective fear, speak into existence heartache? But then again, what if we cannot help it?

Either way, silence reigns the day. And after she silently sings about pancakes, Lizzy McAlpine silently sings to her walls:

‘Cause you know and I know

That promises sometimes can hurt

When it’s barely begun,

And I don’t want this to fall through.

Collapsing is what I’m used to.

But we’re all in agreement

This is something I should hold onto.

If we are talking about love (we are always talking about love), and love is a riddle (the most important things are), allow me now to ask you a riddle. 

What is so fragile that saying its name breaks it?

or

What disappears as soon as you say its name?

or

What is broken when you name it?

or, my favorite version, so intimate in its plea, so tender and heartbreaking:

Say my name. Say my name, and I disappear. 

Yes, you are right. The answer is silence. And now we have broken it together, like bread, or a wooden flute.

JOEL: This is so beautiful. 

CLEMENTINE: Isn’t it?

JOEL: I don’t know. What if it breaks?

CLEMENTINE: What if? Do you really care right now?

Maybe what fascinates me so much about silence is its essential impossibility: silence is an infinite slippage, violent and tender, accidental and deliberate, always occupying an in-between. It is impossible to inhabit silence for too long; it is likewise impossible to evade it. (The silence between words, for example, is what makes language possible.) 

Just as silence is an infinite slippage, so, too, is walking this broken earth. So, too, is loving another human being. Our attempts are as vital as they are feeble, and still we close no circles. We will never know all of each other. We will never evade the ache of life. 

“I’m not a concept, Joel,” Clementine tells her lover in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She is desperate and running away, on the verge of tears. She has told him this before, probably more than once, but her memory has since been erased, and so now she says it again. “I’m just a fucked-up girl looking for my own piece of mind. I’m not perfect.”

JOEL: I can’t see anything I don’t like about you right now. I can’t.

CLEMENTINE: But you will. You will. You will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.

And do you know how Joel responds? And do you know how Clementine responds to his response? It is one simple word, which slips, and slips, and slips—into music, and memory, and melting snow.

“Okay,” Joel says, tenderly and with a shrug. 

“Okay,” Clementine says back. 

And then they laugh, and cry, and shyly study the hallway floor. 

Say my name. Say my name, and I disappear. But who is to say multiple things can’t exist at once?

I suppose what I’m getting at is the gravity of life and love, the antithetical lightness that accompanies such weight, and the human capacity to sit with everything, everywhere, all at once.4 When we attempt to share our hearts, we are attempting to reach into a chasm of boundless collapse—a million and one ways for us to showcase our deficiency, and precisely zero chances at perfection. But even in the greatest deficiency resides a glimmer of heaven. 

Maybe this is what it means to be human: desperate and needy and still unable to dim that miraculous glimmer of heaven in us. Maybe this is what it means to be human: catastrophic and still capacious—still tumbling towards fullness, towards eternity and infinitude. If everything is a heartbreak and a mistake and a failure, so, too, is it a piece of heaven, a shard of joy. 

“That is God in you,” someone once told me. 

“Okay,” I said back.

“Okay.”

Say my name. Say my name, and I disappear. Or perhaps, I appear infinitely—so much that I, in a spray of dramatic color, enter a prism and become more myself: a brilliant white glow. And you? So many galaxies, and you my bright particular.5

CLEMENTINE: [eyes welling] This is it, Joel. It's gonna be gone soon.

JOEL: I know.

CLEMENTINE: What do we do?

JOEL: Enjoy it. Say goodbye.

She nods.

Let’s say the law of conservation of energy is true—that nothing ever dies. Let’s say entropy always increases—that there is only upward movement. Let’s say that there is no limit to love, and that our hearts are more capacious than we can comprehend. Let’s say eternity is real, and the only point we can enter into it is this one and precious present moment.

God is giving you a choice. What do you do?

Suppose there was a book full of only the word,

let – from whose clipped sound all things begin: fir

and firmament, feather, the first whale – and suppose

we could scroll through its pages every day

to find and pronounce a Let meant only for us –

we would stumble through the streets with open books,

eyes crossed from too much reading; we would speak

in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself – and still

we’d continue in rounds, saying let and let and let

until even silent dreams had been allowed.

— “Book of Genesis” by Kei Miller6

So here I share my heart with you, speaking into an impossibility—through time, across waters and temperatures, always aware of the fact that I stumbled across you, and you stumbled across me, and that we found each other in this world of 7.888 billion beings. I’m writing, and I’m failing, and I’m hoping you can hear me, even if my voice is very small and somewhat in the distance. Squint to see me. Strain your ears for me. I am looking for you, too. I am trying my best to see you in this blur of smoke and mirrors. 

Here we are, in an upward loop of attempted connection. Here we are: you and me and these words, mortalizing, ultimately and infinitely, into a chart of meaning, and sanctification, and love.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. 

I’ll meet you there.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul

and you are that.

But we have ways within each other

that will never be said by anyone.

Come to the orchard in Spring.

There is light and wine, and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter.7

Again, I am in an airport, writing. A baby cockroach is making its way towards me, but instead of jumping up and running away to a seat in the far corner, variations of filth spinning through my mind, I stomp my foot gently. I am telling the little fellow I am here right now, so would he please scurry in a different direction? And he does.

The cockroach jumps atop a discarded tree leaf. I realize this leaf has also found its way into the airport, miraculously, perhaps on the back of somebody’s shoe, or else the sticky wheel of a carry-on suitcase—through security, through the dusty corridors—an entire journey of rough and tumble to sit in unobserved peace next to my foot, and now under the belly of this baby cockroach. 

I think about the way I have learned to turn hard things soft, or, at least, softer. A stomp—lightly—for this tender little bug. A beep—or several beeps—to signal to other motorcyclists that I am crossing the intersection. It is as if to say, “Hello, I am here!” but not in an imposing, attention-seeking way. Instead, as the traffic noises blur, we are all whispering a slow and quiet refrain: “Friend, I see you.” 

These three words are a stand-in for three other words, I think.  

Two months ago, Bà Rịa (the province I teach in) experienced a power outage. This meant no WiFi. The same day, I had run out of money on my SIM card. This meant no LTE. This meant no access to any form of internet or social media, which meant no mindless scrolling, no work, and no distractions from present life at all. With only my memory of the streets to guide me, I biked to the local Winmart. But the store could neither accept my payment nor upload money into my SIM card. 

“I’ll just stick around until the power is back,” I told the cashier in Vietnamese.

“The power probably won’t be back until the end of the day.”

“Oh,” I said dumbly.

How was I supposed to get around?

That same month, as I was walking home from office hours, it started to rain madly. I texted my friend a video of the downpour. Her split-second response: BRUH how do you get around!

I began typing my own split-second response, but then a pair of students approached me, so I tucked my phone away and smiled. I stood above the stone steps leading to our soccer field, watching the fat raindrops pelt the ground. Even when the students left and the rain subsided, I stood atop the stairs a little longer and admired the sun glinting against the fresh puddles. 

For some reason, this moment reminded me of the power outage a couple weeks before—how I had biked home from Winmart with no LTE and no WiFi. That evening I had read in bed and, because of the lack of AC, had sweated a little. I had eaten dinner and grown sleepy when the sun went down. 

I wondered if maybe life was supposed to look like that: quiet and slow and good, without running away from myself.

Rain dripped from one stair step to the next. 

BRUH how do you get around!

u wait for it!

In America, so much of my life meant having to know, to choose, to prove. So much “how will this serve me”? So much functionality, so much punishment. 

There is a running joke in my Asian American friend group that all the books we’re interested in are the same: I have a grandma, I have a grandpa, I have a mom she’s an immigrant, I have a dad I guess.1 Talk about a war, talk about intergenerational trauma, talk about racism and rescue and reclamation. 

Here are a list of other words I have kept stock of during my time as an Asian American university student (whatever that means): diaspora, remembrance, ghost, war-torn, boat people, shame. 

You learn how to regurgitate the most depressing topics with a distanced, distracted sense of ownership. You sprinkle in some academic sophistication, and people think you’re smart and radical and that you’re breaking intergenerational trauma (whatever that means). 

You pass your classes, you write some non-fiction essays about your identity, you submit to the AAPIA journal and get rejected. Your rejection sends you into a spiral: was the way you packaged your identity ethically wrong or unsuitable? Maybe you’re just not good at writing? You would be flippant if it had been a board of old white people reading your work, but it was other young AAPIA students that rejected your submission. You try to forget about what you think that means.

So with a friend, you make your own course on Southeast Asian Diasporic Literature (there is no one else to do it)—but you don’t finish any of the books you voted to be in the syllabus. As your friend writes in the group chat, “this book is not helping my mental health to say the least.” You write a thesis on diasporic memory, and you think it’s very important, but the truth is, it tires you out to your bones. You have a grandma, you have a grandpa, you have a mom she’s an immigrant, you have a dad you guess. But really you’re just sick of the same old depressing packaging of self. 

It’s important and it’s stupid, the constant regurgitation, because the only space in which you can talk about identity is already structured for you.2 Truth is, whenever you mention your heritage, you feel sticky and claustrophobic. Truth is, you’re even tired of writing this part of your blog post. But even if it’s stupid, it is important. So you do it. Even if you’re over it. 

You don’t say that last part out loud. No one says it out loud. But any time you talk about things in the Asian American context, it’s as if you must prove you’re proud of something you don’t even have a grip on.

Now you’re 22 and a half, choking on coconut water on some balcony overlooking some beautiful, polluted Hanoi lake. And now you’re 22 and three quarters, and you’re in Dalat surrounded by flowers. And now your good friend Gus is walking beside you, listening, waiting as you figure out your point.

“It’s not that I feel more proud of being Vietnamese since coming here,” you tell Gus. 

You shrug for the tenth time that morning. “Or maybe I do. I don’t know, I just don’t like the word ‘proud.’ It signifies a binary of ‘not proud’ versus ‘proud,’ as if our relationship to heritage is something linear, or conquerable.” 

What you’re saying is that America has made even identity a thing of function, a thing of proof and choice and violent urgency.

Gus listens, waits, walks with you as you try to figure out your point. You are almost there, but not yet.

While you're deciding, the afternoon light

is streaming through the windows behind the bank of checkout coun-

ters. Take the light inside you like a blessing, like a knee in the chest,

holding onto it and not letting it go. Now let it go.3

ii. keeping flowers

Have you ever thought about the fact that when you try to keep a flower, you kill it? 

Red and yellow and purple bloom before me. The gardeners have created hedges out of these colors, grown heart-shaped arches from the pink lady blossoms. I do not want to kill the flowers, and I know this means I cannot keep them. I suppose they were never mine to begin with. 

My friend Gus is walking beside me. The joke is that our friendship began thanks to a poisoned coconut: I had misheard something, half-thought my coconut had been poisoned, freaked out a little, choked. Somehow this checked off Gus’s friend criteria, and thankfully so. Because now I am alive and well, and now I have a friend walking beside me. 

I shrug for the eleventh time that morning. “I don’t know, Gus. For the first time I don’t feel tired when I think about my heritage. 

“Like, sure, sometimes I feel my Americanness is a commodity, and Mỹ góc Việt is a phrase I often tell vendors who ask about my accent. But… I don’t necessarily think about war and boat people and the weight of history every time I think about ‘identity.’

“Here,” I say, “I just get to… be.”

Later that same day, our group of twenty-something-year-olds rides motorbikes to Pongour Waterfall, hills of green and yellow rolling past us. We stop by the side of the road to drink water, to wait for each other, to take pictures of the water buffalo. 

Then we park our bikes, climb down stone stairs, and sit on a chip of rock. 

“I feel like this year is healing me,” someone thinks aloud. So we begin talking about the ruptures of home and how Vietnam is an escape from the violence of America. I think about how America, for so many of our parents, was an escape from the violence of Vietnam. 

The waterfall is crashing in the distance, but from where we sit the lake is still. There is something so soft and natural about this sacred place. Maybe the murder of crows circling above means death, and maybe the way someone slipped was dangerous. But still the sun is shining, and here, with water cascading all around us, we feel safe enough to share our secrets.

The other thing we feel is wild. And joyful. And startlingly alive. So we strip down to our underwear, and, as the sun begins to set, we jump into the water, one by one. We are not sure if we are allowed to, but this beauty is like a siren, and the water is clear and cold, hugging our bodies like a friend or a lover, calling to us. Who are we to resist?

Now I am screaming into the crashing blue and white. Now I am screaming into the rocks. I am screaming as if to say, Hello, I am here! Look at this gorgeous waterfall! I am alive! 

And then we are screaming together! Screams upon screams! A slow and quiet refrain: Friend, I see you!

Look, hasn’t my body already felt

like the body of a flower?4 

Look, I want to love this world

as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.5

iii. but there is beauty

The sun has set for a while now, and our motorbike caravan has lost its way back to the city. Night bugs are flying into our eyes and mouths as we zip through the country roads, and Gus shouts, “This feels so perfectly right!”

We have been talking about what comes after our teaching grant: jobs, graduate school, how our friends back at home have comfy posts that are not at all appealing to us. People keep asking us what’s next, and we have no answers, so now we’re asking each other. 

Anyways, Gus has shouted, “This feels so perfectly right!” and I cannot help but agree. So many people back home have plans for the next couple years, and they are worriedly chipping away at them. I used to envy them. I used to ask, How am I supposed to get around?

But now, I am shouting on the back of a motorbike, “I don’t even know what country I’ll be in this summer!” What a statement of freedom, and privilege, and utter joy.

How do we know? How can we tell? What do we do, and who do we love?

“Try to love the questions themselves,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now.”

I think of rain, and the waterfall, and how I wish I could keep the flowers. 

“Live the questions now,” Rilke says. “Perhaps then you may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.”

See what I mean? Take one small thing in hand,

open it up, and there’s another door,

and another, long corridor of views

into the heart of darkness or of light.

There’s no such thing as a small portion

once you bite in and savor the flavors.6

So savor the flavors. Maybe you don’t know where you want to be next year. But what you do know, with all of your being, is that you want to be precisely here. That’s more than most of the world knows.

Here, you wait for the cockroach to scuttle, and for the motorbikes to pass you. Here, the rain stops if you wait for it. Here, “identity” means figuring out what 22 years of life looks like, and whether you want to stay in Vietnam a little longer, and, sure, once in a while, what “being Vietnamese” means. What a silly question, though, that last one, in comparison to everything else. Even if it is important. 

You look up at the pink lady blossoms, and you wish you could hold them in your hands. But you don’t want to kill them. So all you can do is stop, and listen to your good friend Gus’s response, and smell the air. All you can do is hope you’ll remember this moment, even when you know you won’t. 

There is no function to your madness. But there is beauty. 

Friend, the world whispers. I see you.

And you think that is enough.

Life these past couple months has been desperate, aching, adventurous, slow. What I mean is that growth is good but often painful, and I am trying my best. “None of us are the same as we were a moment ago,” says the movie I watched before writing my own script here, to you. “And we shouldn’t try to be.”

I am writing to you after battling a week of COVID—a week of fragmentary living, loneliness, rest, and grief, on the other side of which I am not yet sure I have emerged. I am also writing to you after attempting seven other drafts since my last post. And after buying my second tube of toothpaste. And figuring out my laundry machine at last. What I mean is that time is passing, both too quickly and too slowly, and I am trying my best.

These days, when people ask me how I’m doing, I say that things are coming together. And they are. But maybe they also aren’t. Or at least, sometimes it can feel that way. One day, I am living out my dreams, and the next, I am a lost child who just needs a hug. Do you know I haven’t hugged someone for three months now? Yes, I have kept count.

There are many things that have bubbled up, over, and out of my mind since I last published anything. Things about history and politics and identity and language. Things about how it feels to ride my own motorbike or bike 8 miles to see a beach sunset. Things like how I was reminded of my grandfather when the only thing I could do to say “thank you” and “I love you” to a child was give her candy. 

But I am just so very tired of packaging my thoughts into beautiful, effervescent things. I don’t want to prove that I’m intellectual or thoughtful or that I think about my identity and my family. I just want to talk to you. I just want to write bad poetry and not overthink it, and I just want to love and not worry about regretting it, and I just want to make mistakes and I just want to fly over the city and perch on a streetlamp and sing a song for no one or everyone to hear.

As Ada Limón writes, “enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy… Enough of the pointing to the world, weary and desperate… enough of can you see me, can you hear me… I am asking you to touch me.”1 I just want to touch you.

Before my bike ride today (the way I decided to celebrate my release from quarantine), I received a text from a friend back home. He had read my most recent article after a difficult day, and it had comforted him. He wanted to let me know. When people tell me these things, I am not sure how to respond. Maybe I am scared of what it means to touch someone. 

But I also think it’s a great gift, and that we all have it. So I think that maybe this is the unruly, imperfect superpower I have in this world—this fumbling desire to write. This aching desire to touch and be touched.

I wrote earlier that I watched a movie before composing this quasi-letter-quasi-essay to you. This movie won an Academy Award, stars Joaquin Phoenix, and is called Her—but to me, none of that is as important as its portrayal of what it means to touch and be touched. The film’s premise, which beholds a man falling in love with AI, has all the anti-technology elements of Frankenstein. But beyond the AI warning, what this film reminds us is that we humans—even in our incredible irrationality and fragility—are the only beings on this earth that can touch, and be touched, and stay touching.

The hard part about touching in a new place is that you’re afraid of getting hurt. I am afraid of getting hurt. 

Still, things are coming together. I am learning what hurts and doesn’t hurt. I am learning who I’m expected to be, who I am when I’m by myself, and who I want to become. It’s just that at the same time, I feel this incredible grief wrapped around me. Maybe it’s the COVID, and maybe it’s the isolation. Or maybe it’s just November. 

I thought about November in the shower today—the month, the idea, the feeling. After the bike ride, after my friend had texted, I turned on the cold water and thought to myself, I am wearing grief like a cloak. Maybe there is a familiar softness to it.

I thought about how it was late October into November when one of my friends passed away in high school and I never knew why. I thought about how it was late November into December when my grandfather died of a stroke, the nurse unplugging his machine, his heart rate flatlining so loud I can still hear it. Then I thought about my other grandfather and how, strangely enough, he’ll be visiting me in this month of November, and then I wondered whether or not he sees his visit as coming home, and so I thought about home, and I missed it too.

I thought about how in Rhode Island, the November sun sets at 4 p.m., and how, in my first year of college, I hadn’t known how to deal with so much darkness. I thought about how this eleventh month seems to symbolize such long and heavy waiting—waiting for the year to end, for Christmas to come, for the darkness to subside. I thought about how even so, in this month of lonely desperation, we Americans have a holiday to celebrate thanks. 

So after my shower, I ran to my desk and scribbled on my notepad, “I feel older now because I feel that only time and quiet can get me through this. I just need to take a deep breath and walk into the world, even if it will disappoint me.” 

After that, I put down my pen. And I picked up my phone and made plans to breakfast with my co-worker.2 So in less than eight hours, I will take a deep breath and walk into the world.

I am not quite sure what I have written, only that I feel I have written enough and that I’ve done my best to share my heart. That’s all one can do sometimes. I don’t want there to be an eighth draft because I don’t want to try to impress you. Just to touch you, and maybe to be touched back. 

Anyways, what I’m trying to say is thank you for being in my little life, and thank you for teaching me the hardest lesson of all, which is how to love. Thank you for wading through my fumbling desire to write, even when the words feel a little rusty and crummy and when they don’t quite make sense. 

I’ll leave you with a photograph slice of quarantine, a final quote from Her, and a couple other pieces of my November heart, in case you’d like to peek inside. I miss you lots, wherever you are, and whenever you may be reading this. Even if you read this ten years from now, I can’t wait to hug you.

Love, 

Kaitlan

“We’re only here briefly. And while I’m here, I want to allow myself joy.”

This is the Nonsense of Love - Mindy Nettifee

Two Places at Once - Haley Joelle

Hurricane - Mary Oliver

Carry - Billy Collins

Happiness - Raymond Carver

From Scratch - Nzingha Stewart

Brooklyn - John Crowley

It is October and there are no trees to tell of it. There are trees here, of course—papaya trees and jackfruit trees and cao su trees peppering the road to my friend’s house, their skinny trunks now black from harvesting—but none of them tell me the story of fall. 

I suppose this is because fall has never come to Vietnam, and it never will. The streets are the same kind of hot and sticky as they were when I arrived—we call it wet season, and after this season, a dry one.

But there is fall where you are. It is in the sky, and in the coffee, and in the new selection of Costco decorations. I think of you every day, and because I think of you every day, my brain ticks in time zones. So maybe it’s not too far off to say that fall has come to me too. 

I wish we could walk together under the red-orange trees. I wish we could turn to each other and say, “Oh, just look at that sun.” And then that sun would set an hour too early, and the wind would feel a degree too cold, and maybe that once-a-year loneliness would begin creeping into our hearts. 

But anyways, I am in Vietnam right now. I am standing on the edge of my run-down terrace. I am feeling the fat raindrops slide off my fingertips, and I’m thinking to myself, I can do this. I can love this. I love this. And I do. 

But I still want you to know I miss everything. Fall, I mean. And you. 

There is always so much to tell you. How does one begin to tell, anyway? Maybe with a bicycle. Or rice. Or a fish. Have you ever caught a fish? 

I have, but only one, and just three weeks ago. Three weeks ago, I visited the countryside with a kind group of families. They asked if I wanted to try fishing, and when I said I did, they gave me a fishing rod, and I cast it into the water. After a couple of minutes, I felt a tug, and there he dangled—that precious silver fish. I reeled him in, and a little boy helped me unhook him. 

That was when the fish jumped. He jumped again, and then again, and we screamed. That was when the fish fell back into the pond. 

So the first fish I caught was never really caught, and for a while this fact disappointed me. But when I thought about it later, I was glad I didn’t have to exchange my victory for a life. 

Over the past two months, I have exchanged so little for so much. Two dollars for lunch. Three hours for coffee. Coffee for a conversation, and conversation for the closest friends I have made in Vietnam. I’ve bought áo dài from a friend of a friend, visited an orphanage, become a regular at the rice place across the street. And every day I order something in Vietnamese. Every day my pockets are Pepto-Bismol-free. I suppose it’s a good thing the cells lining my stomach have regenerated—it saves me the bathroom troubles—but now I worry all the other parts of me are regenerating too. I don’t want to dissolve into something else. I want you to remember me the next time you hold me. I want myself to feel familiar. I want you to know it’s still me. 

For the entire month of September, I found myself perpetually on the verge of tears. In those moments, I yearned for fall the most. I think I wanted a season to be safely sad inside, like a house or a bed or a worn-out sweater. I watched Little Women and cried. I called my mom and cried. It rained and I cried, and then it didn’t rain and I cried.

I taught my first several classes, which was hard, and I spent an entire weekend speaking only Vietnamese, which was hard too. But it is hard and good. I ate bánh khọt, and mì cay, and the best takoyaki the world has known. I will eat them all again, and then some, I’m sure. 

I am riding on the back of a thousand different motorbikes. 

I am learning how to sleep early and wake with the sun. 

Every day, I take a deep breath, and I open my little door, and I walk out.

It is all very hard and very good. 

And I am getting better at it every day.

Really. You wouldn’t believe how good I am getting.

Bà Rịa, my home for the past month—and the next eight—is a quiet city. The most common establishments here are cafes, pharmacies, and English centers. I am one foreigner in a mix of very few. Everyone else here seems to know everyone else. 

There was this one time I went to buy sanitary pads at the general store next door. When the shopkeeper rang up my items, she asked me if I was new around town. 

“I don’t think I’ve met you before,” she said, and I told her that she was right, I was new here, and I was teaching English at the Cao Đẳng Sư Phạm. “For a year,” I said, and then she said back, “Have you met my brother Hảo?” 

“Oh my gosh, Anh Hảo? He helped me with the sound system yesterday.”

“Right, that’s him. Hảo.”

“No way!”

“That’s right.”

Before I left the store, the shopkeeper asked me if I wanted to go to Saigon with her and Anh Hảo that weekend. “There’s space in the car,” she shrugged, but I told her thank you, I’m so sorry, but I cannot. I had already been invited to a family memorial service that weekend. 

That weekend, at that family memorial service, I would meet the fiance of the nephew of someone I knew, and she would invite me to her wedding. And we would sit on red plastic chairs, and she would tell me, “You know, after I get married, I’ll live in Boston for a long time.” 

“Oh my gosh, Boston? That’s in Massachusetts—that’s near my college.” 

“Right, that’s it. Boston.”

“No way!”

“That’s right.”

And I would think to myself, what a strange, small, lovely world.

From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., the gates to my dormitory are closed. In fact, most everything is closed: the school office, the gym I frequent, that one milk tea stand I have yet to try. There was this one time I went lunch-hunting past noon and could not find an open restaurant. They were all sold out, or sleeping, or sorry-you’re-too-late. 

“It reminds me of Portugal,” a friend told me.

“It reminds me of Spain,” another friend said.

“But I wish it was more like the United States,” a student sighed during office hours. “I like that Americans have calendars with lots of colors. I like that people are really busy.” We talked about hustle culture, and I remembered how just a year ago, I was averaging five hours of sleep a night. I told her about my favorite dining hall, which closes at 2 a.m. So then I thought about burgers and 24-hour libraries and, of course, you.

“Do you get bored at night here?” another student asked me. “In Bà Rịa, it’s so boring at night. Unlike Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi or New York.”

But I said I didn’t know. I did miss the burgers and the 24-hour libraries. And I missed you too, but still I said, “I kind of like it. I get to have some time to myself. I’ve never really wanted that before.” I’ve also never had it before, I realized.

So anyways, I am learning how to be quiet. 

I am learning how to be with myself. 

I am riding a little aluminum bicycle next to a sea of cars and motorbikes—and when the light turns green, I am pedaling hard, left in a haze of smoke with cramping calves and another hundred meters to go. 

The trees on the way to my friend’s house give my heart the most incredible peace. I am sitting on the back of her xe máy, and we are talking about our secrets and our grudges and how cashew and cao su sound so similar. 

As the wind whips past us, I look into the grove and breathe deeply. If I can just remember this smell, maybe I’ll remember this moment forever. I open my eyes again. It is green, and green, and green for miles. It makes me miss fall, and when I miss fall I think of you.

“Such things as these cherished tears / coloring / the scattered red leaves,” Basho writes. I wish these leaves were red.

I think about the essay I wrote a year ago, and what it means to have a season (and a darkness) to cast all our sadnesses upon. Let me see orange. Let me see red and yellow and brown. Let me taste badly salted butternut squash from a dining hall, please. It is October but there are no trees to tell of it, and how can one be sad when the trees are so green?

When it is hard to open my door, when I wake up and automatically do the time calculations, and when I hear Jo March cry on my computer screen, “But—I am so lonely,” I just want fall to fall upon me.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment

the long tapers
of cattails 
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its 
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know. 
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

— “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver

Here is what I mean.

No matter where I ended up this year—California, Providence, Greece, Vietnam—I would be writing about the same things. Every year, it is the same series of questions. Do you love me? Do I love you? How can we know? 

Can I do this? Can I hold this? Can I keep it forever? 

It always comes back to this longing.

Sure, I have traveled eight thousand miles. Sure, I have lived sixty days in a foreign country. But what I mean is that anywhere, at any time, even if I were you and you were me, I think I would be writing these words. 

In Vietnam, I have encountered an infinite array of stories and people: a grandmother who smokes cigars late into the night, waiting to greet her granddaughter’s boyfriend; a baby nicknamed after his mother’s greatest dream—deferred because she must raise him instead; a young woman who cannot drink coffee, yet who helps her mother each day with their family coffee business. 

I think to myself, what a strange, small, lovely world. I think to myself about how all of us, every way, every day, across time zones and life stages—all of us have the same underbelly to our story, and the same plea to each other: love me, love me, love me. 

I know it’s old, this love talk. I’m sorry to write about it again, but really I’m not sorry at all. 

I am sad. I am happy. You should know I am doing well, but also sometimes it is hard to get out of bed. Also, I miss you, though not enough to fly back.

I am figuring things out here. I still need time. It’s okay if you do too.

Finally, and here’s the most important part: I love you. 

It’s how every good letter ends. I’m sure you know those words by heart, but I think I should say them anyway and then repeat for good measure. So here it is again:

I love you. 

I love you.

I love you even more than trees can tell, and now I’m learning to love myself.

I sit in front of her, a life vest strapped to my body. Nguyên is not wearing a life vest. Why? I ask. 

Because if you fall, you could drown. 

But what about you? 

Nguyên says she doesn’t need one. She says it like I asked a silly question. Then she says something like: Mostly it’s a liability thing.

The further Nguyên rows us into the water, the heavier my life vest feels. I think about what it means to be a liability—and what it means that Nguyên is not. I also think about how loud I must look, and how, if someone were to take a picture of me, my foolishly orange life vest would devastate the soft green river. I suppose, picture or not, it already is. I already am.

Someone takes a picture of me. 

Smile! the photographer yells. Hello! SMILE!

The green silence is shattered, and, shocked by the sudden command, I smile. My mouth involuntarily creases upwards, teeth bared, cheeks taut. My body, too, jolts towards the sound of his voice.

In the mere seconds it takes the photographer to point the camera and shoot, I suddenly feel naked and taken advantage of. I feel the weight of my unawareness, my illiteracy, and indeed, my state of liability—all choking my entire body into a tight smile.

Smile! the photographer shouts again. He looks at me, and I look at him, and I realize he does not look at Nguyên. I realize Nguyên does not look at him, either, and I think to myself: they are used to this. I am not.

Let me take more pictures of you, the photographer tells me. You buy later. Good quality pictures! 

I say no more, no thank you. I look at Nguyên. He says, come on. I say no thank you, I don’t want it. 

Come on. 

No thank you.

Come on. 

No. 

Only when I insist in Vietnamese does the photographer stop asking me to play the role of the tourist. 

But as Nguyên rows the boat into the first cave, the life vest only grows heavier. Even in this darkness, I am glowing orange. 

Her name is Kim Phúc. She is 59 years old and lives in Canada. Her cropped black hair and square face remind me of my aunt’s mother, and she, like Nguyên, has two boys. In 1997, Kim Phúc founded the Kim Foundation, which provides medical and psychological assistance to children affected by war. In the same year, she became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace. 

25 years later, Kim Phúc is on my computer screen. She is naked. And screaming. 

I am sitting on my neatly pressed hotel bed, and Kim Phúc is part of a Zoom presentation on the history of Vietnam. It is clear that the presenter does not know her name. The presenter says, here is a picture of a naked girl, running. This might be the most famous picture of the Vietnam War.

The presenter says, Did you know there is a book written about this girl called The Girl in the Photograph Or Something Like That. (The real book is: The Girl in the Picture.) Then the presenter repeats the word napalm over and over and over. Devastating, she says. I turn my camera off and wonder just who is doing the devastating.

It’s been 50 years, Kim Phúc writes. I am not “napalm girl” anymore.

Someone types in the chat, Napalm girl lives in Canada now.

I type, Her name is Kim Phúc.

I have failed. I know this. 

Her name is Nguyên, and her name is Kim Phúc, and my name is Kaitlan Khánh Lan Bùi, but I have failed, and I know I will continue to fail again and again these next ten months. 

When Nguyên tells me that she has never spoken to anyone this much while rowing a boat—and she has been doing this for five years now—I cannot help but feel proud of myself. But very quickly, this pride feels off kilter. 

“In order to do the critical research,” a friend once told me, “you have to pay to see the attraction you don’t want to support.” Prison relics, and war museums, and, even now, perhaps, a boat ride. 

“So what do you do?” 

The truth is, I didn’t even board Nguyên’s boat to do critical research. I boarded it because it was part of a team bonding weekend, and also because the American government paid for my touristy pleasure in the name of cultural exchange. 

I wanted to speak to Nguyên, to know her life, and to share mine—but there were times my questions were either insensitive (why are you rowing with your feet? / because it makes me less sore) or laced with privilege (would you ever consider going back to school for math? / i have never considered this because i can’t afford to). It took me minutes, even hours, to realize my insensitivity, the double lag of language learning and self-reflection. 

I desperately wanted to become Nguyên’s friend, at least for the duration of the boat ride. The truth is, I might have even felt morally compelled to do so—which is such a sticky, othering, and unwarranted thing to say. But what felt even stickier in the moment was watching a man and woman ride down the river with a selfie stick, blasting something on a speaker while an old lady rowed their heavy bodies. What felt even stickier was knowing that locals were underpaid by noisy tourists, who would undoubtedly gush about how cheap everything was when they moseyed into their hotel room later that night. What felt even stickier was judging these people and knowing that I, too, was just as bad, a tourist in a boat, being paddled around, impressed by—I’ll say it—the exoticism of paddling with one’s feet. It’s true, I couldn’t stand to watch the selfie-stick scene. But maybe what’s truer is this: on that boat, a fluorescent orange piece of nylon strapped to my body, I couldn’t stand myself. 

“The right to conquer is intimately connected to a right to know,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write. Maybe the truth is that I wanted to know—Ninh Bình, Nguyên, that boat, that river—and maybe, in that knowing, hid some impulse to conquer. The truth is that if I’m not careful, my cultural exchange experience will just mean imparting my American ideals, and imparting my American ideals will mean imperialism, and imperialism will mean colonialism, and then I will be perpetuating all the ideals I meant to shred. 

What was I doing on that boat? How was I listening to Nguyên's story? And what does it mean to know someone not from a place of pride and conquest and violence—but from a place of empathy and humility and co-creation? What does it mean to be a writer when writing has so often hurt others? Can I ever write at all? Does it matter?

Perhaps, even in this piece of writing, I have failed. I am sorry. With words we create genies which rise on the table between us, and fearfully we watch them hurt each other; they look like us, they sound like us, but they are not us…

“The general killed the Viet Cong,” Eddie Adams wrote three years before his own passing, “[but] I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.”

“This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn't taken the picture, someone else would have, but I've felt bad for him and his family for a long time. I had kept in contact with him; the last time we spoke was about six months ago, when he was very ill. I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, ‘I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes.’"

Perhaps, even in this piece of writing, I have failed. I am sorry.

So many of us fail: we divorce wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half-pleasures—or, as Eddie Adams wrote, “half-truths,” not whole because they are not shared.

Yet I still believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth.

“Yet you still have to write,” a friend told me on the bus back to our hotel. “And of course it matters.”

My time is confused and lonely and fearful and short, but for these moments, with these people… [I] have been given an eternal touch.

So here I am. I am writing, and I am failing, and I hope you forgive me.

SMILE! and I do, without realizing it, and then I do while realizing it. Only when I say no thank you, no thank you, and only when I slip into my accented Vietnamese, and only when Nguyên rows the boat further and further away from the camera, do I realize the weight behind my orange life vest.

This vest marks my privilege over—yet my inability to survive without—Nguyên, and the photographer, and the boat itself. It marks my demand as a tourist to be taken care of—as well as the locals’ demand of me to play the role of tourist. The truth is, I do need the care; I am a bug-eyed, inarticulate child. The truth is, a large portion of Ninh Bình’s revenue does come from tourism; through my program, I have the money to spare. So much of me feels sticky, and still I cannot do anything but sit, enveloped in this orange trap.

Nguyên, I attempt, Thank you for talking with me.

I’m sorry if I’m the reason your shoulders are sore.

The river is beautiful.

Will you text me the address of your parents’ restaurant?

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. 

‘To be’ is to ‘inter-be.’ We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.1

Let me begin again.2

This is a sheet of paper, and here I am, and here you are, and that is all we can really say for now.  

This is a story about Nguyên, and Kim Phúc, and the presenter, and the selfie-stick tourists, and me, and I couldn’t tell you, even if I wanted to, which parts of this story have already failed. 

So many of us fail, reads the PDF my friend sent me at 8:28pm—my first Andre Dubus read, and the one that got him through a difficult, difficult breakup. 

So many of us fail… and yet I still believe in love’s possibility.

Too often the words are the wrong ones, and we cannot know and understand all of each other. 

Still, we can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together. 

The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved.3

Or it can be a boat ride, a stumble of questions, an attempt at connection, several failures and a follow-up text: 

Hi, Chị. I am writing something right now. Would you mind if I used your photo? It’s okay if you say no.

K sao đau em. Chúc em gặp nhiều may mắn và thành công trong công việc nhé.

Her name is Nguyên, but on this texting app, she calls herself something else. 

Hope.

Here is an irrelevant piece of information: my fanny pack is worth a lot more than it looks. This is why I strap it so carefully to my chest, even when soaked in sweat. My fanny pack is worth, among other things, a hundred USD. 

The thing is, no one wants the money, this hundred USD. No one wants it, and I don’t know what to do.

When I first arrived in Vietnam, suitcases trailing behind, I tried exchanging my money at the airport. “Chuyễn tiền dược không?”

Perhaps my Vietnamese was too hesitant, or too American, or too quiet, but whatever it was, the lady at the counter answers me in English. “Yes, change money! Here, here, here.”

“100 dollars,” I say. But when I hand the lady my bill, she shoves it back at me.

“Cannot take.”

I don’t understand.

“Tại sao vạy?” I try, but she only shakes her head again.

“Too old. Ripped. Cannot take.”

I look down at the money in my hands. There is nothing wrong with it, save a small rip and a softness from use. 

“Different one,” she insists. “Not ripped.”

That day, I pull out two fifty-dollar bills, quietly accept her cash, and walk away. I decide to try my luck again at my hotel one week later, only to be met with another head shake.

“Cannot,” the concierge tells me. “Ripped.”

“It’s just a little rip,” I say. “Is there any way you can take it?”

“Cannot. Different one?” 

I look at him for a second too long.

“Not ripped one,” he clarifies.

ii. heartache

Today is the first day I feel a little lost. Today I begin wondering what I am doing here. Here in Vietnam, I mean. As an American, I mean—or a Vietnamese, or an American Vietnamese, or a Vietnamese American, carrying a hundred-dollar bill no one wants to accept. I don’t know, I think to myself in the morning. It’s nighttime now, and I still don’t know.

I teach a class of Vietnamese students at the American embassy, and one of them asks me what I am doing here. “You work for embassy?” he wonders aloud, and I say, “No, I don’t.” 

“Why you here?” 

“Teaching English!”

“You from America?”

“Yes, from California!” I attempt with enthusiasm.

“Oh,” he pauses. “Việt Kiều,” he says.

I think I sense disappointment, but I don’t really know. When the student sitting beside us laughs, I still don’t know. For the slightest second, what I do know is that some small, horrid part of me wishes I am neither Vietnamese American nor from Orange County. Perhaps it is the way the student, immediately after laughing at me, turns to look at my co-teacher. Perhaps another way of saying all of this is that I don’t feel worthy enough.

It is a different day. I am listening to an ambassador claim that his favorite book is named “Vietnam, but I forgot the author.”

It is a different day. I am listening to a presentation on prostitution, poverty, pollution, and polygamy in Vietnam, and I can’t help but think to myself, stop. Just stop.

It is a different day, or many days, or every day, and I listen to Mostly White Important People rate the differences between American and Vietnamese. As somebody who claims both identities, I still don’t know how to rate the differences. The truth is, I don’t think I should know. The truth is, I don’t think anyone can.

The truth is this. I have been examining the rips in my existence and feeling, no matter my worth, unworthy.

After four intensely reflective years of college, after finally loving my little rips, after learning how to care for the nuances of my identity and the stories they contain—after all of it, this.

What do you do when Mostly White Important People (ambassadors, presenters) don’t want your little rips? Perhaps more importantly, what do you do when the Mostly Non-White Normal People (airport counter ladies, hotel concierges, English-language students) don’t want them either? Why are there Mostly White People and Mostly Non-White People anyways, and why are they “versus” each other in these presentations, and why are there Important People and Normal People, and also who am I?

One other thing: what do I do with this silly, old, unwanted (and ripped, yes) hundred-dollar bill in my irrelevant fanny pack?

A final thing: what am I doing here, and how am I doing here, and also who am I?

iii. stomachache

Here is an irrelevant piece of information: I eat bún chả Hạ Nội for lunch. It is two dollars for a full meal, a cup of tea, and a conversation with friends. As I slouch atop a plastic stool on the side of the street, inhaling motorcycle gas and stove smoke, I feel the weight of the world sinking into my skin. The pollution, the thick humidity. The privilege of complaining about having a hundred dollars. The breakfast this morning, our Zoom meeting, how I had listened to a mostly backward presentation about a mostly backward vision of Vietnam. 

Breakfast goes like this: I am taking notes in my irrelevant, overpriced Moleskine. While I do that, a female hotel worker clears my plate of dragon fruit. Over Zoom, the presenter shares a graphic: one-third of prostitutes in Vietnam are under 15. The hotel worker clears the coffee cup. The graphic reads: Vietnamese virgins range from a few bucks to a thousand dollars. The hotel worker clears the last fork. The graphic reads: a Vietnamese woman at a karaoke bar can likely be a prostitute. The hotel worker clears the last napkin. She wipes the counter. She leaves the room. Who am I, and how am I, and also what am I doing here?

iv. headfirst

Today is the first day I feel a little lonely. I think there will be many days like this. I think, too, that lonely is not an entirely bad thing (even if it might seem like it for a bit).

Lonely is the moment for writing. It is the moment we cannot do anything but speak to ourselves. In fact, lonely is the thing that propels us into fullness—for even tomorrow, you will have today.1 Yes,

                        There are men who touch breasts 

                                                            like the tops of skulls. 

                        There are men who carry dreams

over mountains, the dead

                                    on their backs.

                        But only a mother can walk 

                                                with the weight of a second

beating heart.

Today I feel my heart beating in my chest, and my arms, and my fingertips. Maybe I can even feel two hearts inside me, or three. Maybe it is the beer, or the pounding karaoke music, or the sweep of sudden solitude. Maybe it is the fatigue. Maybe it is just missing home. 

                        When they ask you

where you’re from,

                                    tell them your name

was fleshed from the toothless mouth

                                                            of a war-woman. 

Today I call my mother for the first time since coming to Vietnam. I just want to hear your voice, I say. Yes, she says back. Yes,

That you were not born—

                                    but crawled, headfirst—

                        into the hunger of dogs.

Today I am trying my best to say stop. Just stop. Just take in, as best you can, the motorcycle gas and stove smoke. Live. Write. Be lonely a little, it’s okay, as long as you let yourself stop sometimes, long enough to call your mother.

Someone one day will take the hundred USD. They will.

Someone one day will share your second heart. Even your third.

Someone one day will lighten the weight of the world, and maybe they will be you.

For now, let the silly old thing rest in your irrelevant fanny pack. Let your sweat soak. Let the humidity seep between the cracks, and the rips, and all your folds of possibility and purpose.

My son, the body is a blade

                                    that sharpens

            by cutting.

That portal led to a staircase, and the staircase led to the first floor, and the first floor led me to a table where strangers sat—strangers who soon (so wonderfully soon) will be friends. Those strangers led me to a large, muggy lake, and then to the fifth floor of a cafe shop, and while we were waiting in line to pay, one of them said, “oh, don’t worry about it” and bought me coconut water, and afterwards they asked me about all the things that mattered to me and my life. And what I’m trying to say is that these strangers, and these friends, and this humidity, and this jet lag, and this joy—they are all pulling me further out of my world and into another one. They’re pulling me so far that even now, as I return to my room after 15 hours of rediscovery and wonder, there is no returning to the old door. The old door is gone, actually.

What I’m trying to say is that over the past 15 hours, I’ve become a different person—grown into a different person. Or maybe I’ve just grown more myself.

I am thinking about how people slip into our lives like an accident, and how they stay with such purpose that they help us find our own.

Yesterday, I wrote that I’d let this year guide me. Today, I realized that this year won’t guide me so much as the people in it will. Today, I let myself be pulled into a walk along the lake, a walk back to the hotel, a walk to hunt down an ATM and, along the way, a vegetarian buffet. I gave myself over to the smell of smoke and nước mắm, to the generous beeping and buzz of the street. I bought my stranger-friends water (“oh, don’t worry about it,” I had learned to say earlier), and in return they bought me coconuts and avocado ice cream, and together we ate bún chả Hạ Nội on little plastic chairs, and we scuttled across the street for cà phê sữa đá, only to get drenched in the pouring rain, nearly slipping into a puddle, catching ourselves, one person’s left shoulder wet, the other’s right shoulder wet, sharing an umbrella far too small for two bodies, using broken Vietnamese and a soggy couple bills to buy another one. 

Today, I told stories about myself, and my father, and my mother, and everything and everyone that mattered to me. I listened to stories about re-education camps and hostel stayers and how trying to recover family history feels like reaching for something you can’t ever touch. I dipped fried lotus root in a tangy, pink sauce, and my stranger-friend—mostly friend now, I think, said—I’m sorry, I just don’t know what to say. Thank you for telling me this. I just don’t know what to say. I have chills right now.

Later in the conversation, I said, we have to talk more about this later. And in an entirely different conversation with an entirely different stranger-friend, I was told, we have to talk more about this later. I guess it’s true. We have to talk more about this later, even if there is always so much more to talk about, and too little laters.

I feel like a miracle. This is what I said today to a stranger-friend, as I swirled egg noodles onto my plate. For real, I said, when he looked up from his plate-swirled eggplant. For real. I actually feel like I am a miracle.

Here’s the thing: there are so many ways I could have never existed. My mother could have died of that illness, back in 1979. My grandmother could have left my mother at home; she could have said, Sister, take care of my child. I don’t think she’ll last the boat ride.

My mother could have been the sick girl tossed off the side of the ship, the news of which returned to my grandmother’s Sister (my great aunt) and my great grandmother. They wept. They did. But here’s the other thing: my mother did not die. She lived.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It is the miracle of my mother’s existence that makes the miracle of mine. So here it is again:

I am in Vietnam, and there are so many ways I could have never existed. My great aunt’s father could have never fallen sick. He could have lived. The fortune teller could have never flirted with her mother, especially not so soon after the husband’s passing. My great grandmother could have never had an affair with the village fortune teller. They could have never loved each other.

And then my grandmother could have never been born. Even if she had been born, she could have drowned the day her older brother left her by the water to join the Việt Minh and their nationalist movement. My great aunt and their mother could have returned to that hut a couple minutes too late. That crying baby—my grandmother—could have never been rescued. She could have drowned that day, tied with a rope to the rickety bed. 

Here it is, again and again: there are so many ways I could have never existed. And there are so many ways, even if I had, that I could have never ended up back here, writing this essay from a bed in Vietnam.

There are so many ways you could never be reading these words. There are so many ways you could have clicked on anything else. But here’s the thing. I am writing this. You are reading it. We are existing like this, through these fragile paragraphs, touching each other.

There could have been so many ways the world spun in a different direction, and yet, out of the billion ways our lives could have tumbled—and our grandparents’ lives, and our parents’ lives, and our stranger-friends’ lives—yes, out of those billion, trillion paths: this is the one we have tumbled into. This is the door. This is the portal. This is the only reality, despite all the ways we could have been denied entry. Yes.

This moment is ours. It is sparkling so bright, slipping into our hands like a series of heavy raindrops, one after the other. It is slipping into our unworthy hands not because we asked it to, but because that is simply what rain does. 

So here’s the thing: there are so many ways I could have never existed. But here’s the other thing: I’m walking the rain-kissed streets of Hanoi, a silly grin on my silly face, a puddle of sweat painting my back. I’m sharing this tiny umbrella with a stranger-friend, and I’m talking about all the ways I’ve become who I’ve become. As we chatter and gossip and jump out of our socks from the sudden car honk, we wonder about the way this world has turned. It has turned for us, we realize, and for this moment. Yes.

The world has turned in this one particular, precious way—and it’s all we have to hold. I want to cup my hands and hold it gently, this life, this world, this turning. I want to say thank you. Just: thank you.

After All. If my life was lived in chapters, I think that would be the title of the chapter I’m paging through: it’s August 12, I’ve graduated, I’m saying goodbye, I’m going. I’m getting nervous. I’m getting excited. I can’t believe it. I believe it. I can’t believe it.

Today, life doesn’t feel like a happily ever after but rather a happily after all. After all of it, after all the things I haven’t written about because I was living the moments instead—the moon gazing and burgers to boot, the sleep deprivation leading up to graduation, the stranger who helped us find the right San Francisco bus, the midnight volleyball, the midnight photoshoot, the midnight, the stars, all of time collapsing, the world whirling around us, the future close enough to touch—after all of it, this. 

In an interview with OnBeing (my favorite podcast studio), David Whyte talked about what it means to become more “visible to the world.” I think this is what’s happening to me right now—not because I’ve graduated, or because I am older than I was a year ago, or because I’m doing this whole big move to Vietnam. Just: I think I’m becoming more visible to the world because I’m becoming more visible to myself. Isn’t that strange? How the world can spin the other way when we see ourselves anew? The truth is, I think I’ve encountered love. 

I know I’ve been saying this over and over. But I hope that the love talk isn’t “getting old” to you. Someone once told me that everything I write is like a love letter. I have never forgotten that. Maybe that was one of the greatest compliments of my life. I want to always write about love. So anyways, the truth is, I think I’ve encountered love again and again and again this year—and the truth is, the reason I cried in the car a couple days ago, face hidden in the darkness, is not because I am sad but because I have been loved. I’m becoming more visible to the world because I’m becoming more visible to myself, and I’m becoming more visible to myself because other people looked at me and listened to me and saw me. It’s not the kind of romance with one boy and one girl and one happily ever after, as Hayao Miyazaki said, but rather something “slightly different,” situations “where the two (or three or four) mutually inspire each other to live.” 

As I sit at this international terminal, Gate 150, typing on my battered laptop and watching a mother give her little son chocolate biscuits, I’m thinking of all these chance encounters that have given me so much more of a reason to live. “Your genius is the way everything is met in you,” David Whyte said. And I’m thinking to myself—in one year, what kind of genius will I be? What kind of genius will this little boy with the chocolate biscuits be? His mother? My mother, who called me on the way to airport to hear my voice—what kind of genius will she be when I see her again? When will I see her again?

Here is a poem I fell across this morning, as I was scrolling through Instagram waiting at the check-in luggage line:

To Hold (Li-Young Lee)

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I

make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,

we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,

measuring by eye as it falls into alignment

between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,

she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.

One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize

what we love, and what it takes

to tend what isn’t for our having.

So often, fear has led me

to abandon what I know I must relinquish

in time. But for the moment,

I’ll listen to her dream,

and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling 

more and more detail into the light

of a joint and fragile keeping.

After all this time, after the TSA line, and the car ride here, and the magical summer, and senior year, and all of college, and the heartbreak and the inspiration and the poetry and 22 years of trying so hard to do and be, I’m finally letting myself breathe a little. I want to take chances, and be scared, and not figure it all out right away. This morning, after 1 hour of sleep and a taro bun, I hugged my mother the way this little boy with the chocolate biscuits just hugged his mother. Over and over. Just before I pulled away, my mother tucked my hair behind my ear and said, “Love yourself extra hard for me.” 

I think this chocolate biscuit mother is saying the same thing. I can’t understand Korean, but I watch her as she holds him, as she plays rock-paper-scissors with him, as leads him to the restroom and then back to the well-worn seat beside me, and I think she is saying the same thing. “Love yourself,” she is saying. “I love you. So much.” 

And David Whyte is saying that this is our genius, this love: “all the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment.” “When I go back to Yorkshire,” he says, “just the taste of the water off the moors is completely different.” 

I think the water will taste different in Vietnam too. I’m not going back to Vietnam the way David Whyte goes back to Yorkshire. I’ve never been to Vietnam. But to my grandparents, and parents, and all the aunts and uncles and church grandmas, con sẽ đi về—I am going home. Or, rather, I am going to an old home, a home in which all of my history meets inside itself, in order to let all of me meet inside myself too.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.

One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize

what we love, and what it takes

to tend what isn’t for our having.

I am trying to listen to my dreams, your dreams, their dreams, all of them, and after that—after all of that, I’ll return to this airport. Everything will meet inside of me then, too. Differently than now, but still, it’ll be me. It’ll be you. I’ll hug you tight.

What makes something “sticky” to us? Why, in an art gallery, am I drawn to this painting and not the one next to it? Why, years later, do I remember the exact restaurant table at which we sat, but not the food we ordered? Why am I writing about these things when I could have written about anything else in the world? As you know by now, I don’t really have answers—only questions. And ideas. So I’m going to try a new idea here, and we’ll see if it’s sticky enough to stick. I’m hoping it is.

The idea is to archive all the things upon which I have stumbled in the past month, which have stuck with me: poetry, stories, books, articles, artwork, quotes, websites, whatever. I’m thinking I’ll update the archive once a month. But before we get to this month’s archive, a brief explanation of the title, “upon this have i stumbled.”

I have been thinking about the idea of “stumbling” with the same curious nonchalance as I have been thinking about “stickiness.” The word stumble implies for me rather negative images—maybe because I grew up in the church, where we often used stumble to reference folly or sin. But even outside of the church, stumble insinuates some kind of failure: an unintended falling, something that has kept you from getting to where you want to be. What stumble implies is accidents. What our negative association with stumble implies is that we are abominably afraid of accidents.

But Diana Khoi Nguyen, the artist-in-residence at my university, advises us after nearly every lecture and office hour to “leave room for accidents.” She calls it noodling, derived from the practice of catching catfish with bare hands. “It’s fucking terrifying,” Diana has exclaimed many-a-time. Catfish live in holes, she tells us, so in order to noodle, you have to stick your hand into a black crevice and hope something happens, praying that your hand emerges okay in the end. And it does.

As I continue chipping away at my thesis, and also as I write creatively, I want to noodle more often. I want to rest in the non-knowing, to dance in that in-between stage of discovery. I think reclaiming the word, “stumble,” has a lot to do with these practices.

When we stumble, we’re forced to reckon with our sense of balance. Suddenly the world is a little tilted, and we’re reminded of our mortality, our humanity, the fact that we have a choice. Stumbling reminds us we can stop. Also that we can go.

I love the phrase “stumble upon,” also because the word “upon” holds such magic. (The first time most of us stumble upon the word “upon” is through the age-old introduction, “once upon a time.”) The combination of stumble and upon mixes realism with magic, quickness with pause, and choice with a little bit of fate. It denotes a kind of “Chaos Theory,” as poet Clint Smith writes:

but what I mean to say
is that it would have been
such a tragedy if something happened 
that would have prevented me 
from meeting you
like a butterfly
who didn’t realize it was flying
in the wrong direction.

When we stumble upon something, it stumbles upon us too. I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but maybe this is an argument for some iteration of such love. Something simply sticks. And sticks. And keeps sticking.

So, without further ado, upon these things have I stumbled. Through them have I learned to love, just a little bit more.

• “Study Abroad,” an ekphrastic poem by Cassie Burkhardt

• “At Your Convenience,” a short story by Nancy Nguyen

• “Persimmons,” an essay-esque piece by Emily Parzybok

• “Melody,” a orchestral song by Myroslav Skoryk

• “Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi,” a poem by Nathan McClain

• “Tinder Bio,” microfiction by Christina Irmen

• “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation,” an essay by Ocean Vuong

• “A Poem for Tenderness in the Face of Violence,” podcast episode with Poetry Unbound and Pádraig Ó Tuama, inspired by Ocean Vuong’s poem “Seventh Circle of Earth”

• “Man in Boat, 1988,” an ekphrastic poem by Vi Khi Nao

• “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” an op-ed by Alain de Botton

• “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing,” a substack article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

• “When War Makes a Child,” a poem by Tatiana Dolgushina

• “You Wonder If You Can Write Something,” a poem by Susan Browne

• “Five Poems for Ukraine,” poems by Kim Stafford

“Living Tenderly,” written by May Swenson, is a poem about bodies and what they do. Not how they serve us, but how they exist, how they are art. If we believe that the body is a creation—God crafting us out of the soft dirt of the earth—then we also believe the body is art. Living, breathing, changing art.

And as we know, art does. But it does in a different way, speaking softly, filling us with emotion the way waves move through the sand. Art, like the ocean wave, moves slowly, naturally, even forgettably. But so often we force our bodies to move at unnatural speeds. We want them to make sense and be useful. “Productive” is the word we like to use, us college students.

So we push ourselves to the point of exhaustion, anxious about the future, reminiscent about the the past. Yet we, dreams and plans and all, cannot stretch beyond the boundaries of our bodies. Our bodies, after all, can only inhabit the present.

May Swenson brings us back to the place of creation and art—back to our selves.

Living Tenderly

My body a rounded stone
with a pattern of smooth seams.
My head a short snake,
retractive, projective.
My legs come out of their sleeves
or shrink within,
and so does my chin.
My eyelids are quick clamps.

My back is my roof.
I am always at home.
I travel where my house walks.
It is a smooth stone.
It floats within the lake,
or rests in the dust.
My flesh lives tenderly 
inside its bone.

“My body a rounded stone.” What a beautiful statement—the naturalness of it, the serenity. Swenson sees the body as an amalgamation of ordinary, forgettable things: a stone, a snake, clamps, a roof. Yet every body part is imbued with movement and detail.

“My body” is not just a rounded stone. Its pattern of smooth seams means that it is inscribed with intentional, purposeful art. “My head” is both retractive and projective… the range of motion, and therefore power, that is conveyed by those two words! “My legs” come out but also shrink, as does the chin. “My eyelids” are clamps: they can both open and close.

What does it mean that legs shrink within? Why does it matter that eyelids can open and close? Perhaps Swenson is trying to say something about retraction—that it is natural, necessary, and equal in power to expansion. (And decay with growth, and rest with activity.) What would it look like to treat silence and emptiness with as much respect as we treat loudness and fulfillment? Put another way, how can we understand not doing as a thing just as worthy and necessary as doing? Or: how can not doing actually be a more meaningful way to “do”?

I think Swenson answers this in the last stanza. It’s a beautiful one, really. “My back is my roof. / I am always at home. / I travel where my house walks.” There’s no need for explanation here; the speaker simply affirms the truths of their body. The affirmations are short, simple. As if they are saying, “No matter, here I am. This is all I need.”

The final recognition of what the body does is just as tender and beautiful. “It floats within the lake, / or rests in the dust.” How powerful it is to float within a lake or rest in the dust! (How much more powerful something is when it rests in its power rather than flexes it!)

Every micro-moment of lives, our bodies are soaking up memories of people and places—cataloging the sounds and sights around them, as well as the emotion those sounds and sights evoke—and still our bodies live so unacknowledged. Still, they are so often pushed to the point of exhaustion. What a waste of art.

Swenson asks what it might look like to breathe for the sake of breathing, to see the body as it is, to treat it with care, and to love it as we would a painting. In this way, we might lead more radical, more quietly powerful lives.

“My flesh lives tenderly / inside its bone.” Indeed, it does.

Living Tenderly

My body a rounded stone
with a pattern of smooth seams.
My head a short snake,
retractive, projective.
My legs come out of their sleeves
or shrink within,
and so does my chin.
My eyelids are quick clamps.

My back is my roof.
I am always at home.
I travel where my house walks.
It is a smooth stone.
It floats within the lake,
or rests in the dust.
My flesh lives tenderly 
inside its bone.