红中麻将 (red zhong mahjong) takes its name from the red 中 tile. It’s typically excluded from play in standard Changsha-style mahjong, but this variation includes it specifically as a wildcard—hence the eponymous name of the game—in addition to other deviations: 吃 (chi), or taking a discard from the preceding player to complete a set of three tiles of the same suit in numerical sequence, isn’t allowed; 碰 (peng) remains the same; the aforementioned 2-5-8 rule is permanently suspended; and the winning tile completing a hand can only be taken via pulling from the deck, not other players’ discards. Therefore, players lucky enough to draw a 中 can dramatically accelerate their efforts towards assembling a winning hand, utilizing it to complete any one of the sets of two or three tiles required to achieve victory.

One of my uncles, the nephew of my maternal grandmother, made a point of having me learn red zhong mahjong one night a couple weeks ago as I accompanied him across Changsha in hanging out with his childhood companions, some of whom he has known since they were in primary school together. He relished telling them that I could hold my own in the standard Changsha-style mahjong (and that I could comprehend the local spoken dialect) as he introduced me to them, on which basis he expected that I would quickly master this version of the game. For my part, I was feeling eager to acquaint myself with it, a hitherto unknown yet exciting new adapted form, but I was also apprehensive because I was to learn by playing, trial by error, against seasoned adults who would pull no punches due to there being money at stake.

I left the United States for China in the latter half of March. It was an impromptu trip suggested by a relative who had planned to be in Changsha for just under a month, so it would be convenient for me to go as well. I had last visited back in 2024, when I had plans to spend my birthday touring Shangri-La in Yunnan before extenuating circumstances forced my return stateside. This time, I was determined to make the most of my brief vacation there.

It goes without saying that some of the fun in playing mahjong is attributable to gambling. While it’s true that there’s an element of skill inherent to creating the opportunities to draw what’s needed, that luck is all the more present when given more chances to manifest, it’s the adrenaline rush of winning followed by the happy neurons firing away in the brain as prize money is collected that can make mahjong addictive. However, as I sat for my very first rounds of red zhong mahjong, I was extremely conscious of the 500元 my uncle had given me to serve as my gambling funds. I considered the money to have been borrowed, despite his happy insistence to the contrary, and I was determined not to lose any of it at all; I intended to fully reimburse him at the end of the night. Thus, my learning curve had another layer of anxiety-inducing complexity: not only did I want to expediently become proficient in this new format, I needed to do so to such sufficiency that I would emerge with net pecuniary positivity by surviving unscathed against people who play it on a regular basis.

Although—or because—my uncle hovered cheerily nearby, watching me play and occasionally voicing suggestions, I was nervous. The games moved with great speed as my counterparts drew and discarded tiles as easily as they breathed, but I struggled to consider and reconsider the composition of the tiles in my hand at the same time as I attempted to divine from their rejects the probability of drawing particular tiles remaining within the deck. Every round was a Sophie’s choice, and I did my best to reconstitute my hands towards increased likelihoods of winning, but I erred many times and achieved the reverse.

Each misplay invoked a man’s voice in my head, a memory, chastising me. I learned mahjong very early on as a child, first taught by my grandmother and then my aunts and all of their acquaintances too, and all of these people have played a role in shaping my strategic philosophy—luck can be influenced, statistics must inform tactics, and games can be won even when lost so long as the losses are mitigated. Yet it’s one voice among these many that (harmlessly) yells at me whenever I make a mistake, that motivates me to stay alert during mahjong lest I invite its wrath: another one of my aunt’s friends, a man who I thought of as my gambling tutor because he would allow me to shadow him to games where they bet serious money whenever I was in town. If I wanted to play, he would coach me from the sidelines, always scolding me for not paying greater attention to the maneuvers of the other three players since losing would mean paying out hundreds of renminbi per round. Before and after game sessions, he’d treat me to some of the most delicious meals in Changsha.

My jovial uncle wasn’t like my mahjong tutor, but his advice was similarly successful in getting me to figure out the metagame. We were playing 10元 per game, with additional bonuses of 5元 for each red zhong tile in the winning hand as well as player penalties calculated by looking at the next two tiles to be drawn from the deck. By the time we called it quits around 11 p.m. after four hours of gameplay, I was up 150元. My mind was tired from working overtime, but I was happy to have finished financially solvent. I returned my 500元 seed money to my uncle and tried to press my winnings into his hands too, but he refused on the basis of them having rightfully been won by me. It was pointless to argue with him, but I would later “accidentally” leave behind the cash in his car.

I’ve devoted many paragraphs within my little project here to writing about mahjong, I know, and in my defense I’d proffer that it’s not indicative of me having a gambling addiction. Rather, it’s because I grew up with it as a placeholder activity for community time. It has always been an excuse for family and friends to gather, catching up and trading gossip over the clacking sounds of tile on tile gesticulation, and it’s also how I would come to sadly learn during this trip of my so-called tutor’s recent passing. There’s something to be said about the logically strategic nature of the game, about the way in which satisfying wins seem to scratch a very specific itch within my brain. It’s my favorite pastime every time I return to my old stomping grounds, and it costs me nothing to admit that this is also because it makes me feel connected to a culture and heritage from which I fear becoming increasingly separated.

Weeks ago, I arrived in Changsha at midnight. After twenty-something hours of travel, I’d finished reading the Britney Spears memoir and my limbs were exhausted from being cramped. My flight path had taken me from New York to Los Angeles to Shanghai to Changsha’s Huanghua International Airport, to which China Southern Airlines used to operate direct flights from Los Angeles until the coronavirus pandemic dictated otherwise. The first thing I did upon landing was grab our checked luggage from the carousel; the second was assist a man visiting from Somalia by translating his questions into Chinese for the overnight employees. (He’d been told there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken within the airport nearby and wanted to know where. The employees directed him to the shop around the corner.)

Eating anything late at night isn’t a habit of mine—I don’t enjoy the aftermath of feeling sluggish and bloated immediately before bedtime—but it’s a special treat whenever I’m in China. Night markets are commonplace across Asia, and I should have predicted that we’d go to one straight from the airport. We were picked up and driven to a street of late night vendors by my aunt’s best friend, who wanted to ensure that we’d have at least one good 宵夜 during our brief stay in Changsha. There, I replicated almost in entirety the same order of skewers and grilled oysters that I’d had two years ago.

Like an itinerant couch surfer, I alternated between the homes of aunts and grandmothers and other relatives alike. Daytime was devoted to family-arranged sojourns (to museums and monuments and thousand-year-old universities and grandparents’ graves), all scheduled between enormous banquet-style meals wherein I gorged myself on the most enjoyable food I’ve had since…well, since the last time I was in Changsha. I spent a weekend living with my cousin’s grandmother, whose home is conveniently located mere blocks away from the city center. Each morning, she introduced me to a new noodle shop, all of them locally renowned for their cuisine and rightfully so. Even my breakfasts were decadent affairs.

China’s rapid development over the course of these past few decades is a story that’s been done to death, but I still can’t help marveling at it each time I return. It’s one thing to understand it conceptually; it’s another to bear witness in person, contrasting what I could see laid bare before me with what I remember experiencing in my mind’s eye. The vast improvement in food quality is but one such measure, every bite I savored itself a thousand testimonies in accordance. That my aunt simply walked down to the local butcher shop, picked out a few pieces of chicken, and turned that into the most flavorful, golden broth I’ve ever had in under two hours for one of our lunches was illustrative of just how much the local quality of life has changed for the better.

It’s important I provide the context that Changsha is very much not a first-tier Chinese city—that distinction belongs to the likes of Beijing and Shanghai. For this reason alone, I never held expectations of encountering great technologies or urbanity in Changsha as I would in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. However, as I’ve grown and matured, so too has my hometown. An expansive subway system has popped up in the last twenty-something years; trash no longer litters every sidewalk, and public spaces are pristine; massive new megastructures, residential and otherwise, have sprung up everywhere I look. Yet beneath all of the newfound splendor and high-tech facades are a people I still knew in the aggregate, who felt more friendly and familiar to me than any neighborhood in the world bar my home in New York. The lifestyle and the personalities remained the same.

I spent my spare time getting lost in Nanmenkou, Changsha’s central district. When I had free days because we didn’t have enough players for mahjong, I wandered the city center and its surrounding alleyways. I wanted to commit to memory the sensation of being there, to memorialize those fleeting instances of spacetime. In little souvenir shops, I picked up mementos for my friends back home, and then I went to the adjoining stalls next door to indulge in milk teas and freshly fried stinky tofu. I observed from the streets as neighbors gathered in tiny mahjong parlors that were seemingly omnipresent, located on the ground level of every apartment building within a residential quarter, listening to the electronic whirring of their automated mahjong machine tables and eavesdropping on their conversations and breathing in the scents of the food being prepared nearby.

As I immersed myself, I pictured the life I never lived. The museum trip informed me that Changsha has been continuously inhabited for more than 2,000 years, existing at times even as a kingdom, and I pondered what it might have been like to have grown up surrounded by history, among people who don’t consider me to be othered. Someone, during one of my mahjong sessions, told me that I come from a long, local lineage through my grandparents, and I tried to imagine an existence full of untold numbers of relatives and friends and family acquaintances, a true social network not just in name but also in function. These people have all known me since I was born, yet I’ve spent lifetimes an ocean away. To reconcile such possibilities with the reality of my derelict life in America, where my parents had no family and few friends, where society is run costly and inefficiently and not only selfishly but also malevolently, it does beg the question—who would I be had I always lived here instead, unsevered from my ancestry? I thought about my grandmothers in the city core witnessing the rapidity of technological advancement as time raced by, about generations succeeding one another, about my grandfather cursing me with irritated sinuses for a week because I audaciously complained to him of his poor parenting with respect to his daughter, my mother, as I burned paper money for him to spend in the afterlife.

The truth is I’ve never experienced real hardship. My presence in China amounted only to a fantastical experience because the greenback enables me to move with relative freedom, affording me a degree of luxury that may have been at least six times (6.84, as of today) more difficult to achieve had I come of age there. I was romanticizing being peripatetic because I felt the weight of all the years ahead of me at once, worrying once again that I’d screwed up my life beyond repair, beyond recourse. For the majority of people here or there or anywhere in the world, I don’t believe it’s easy to make a living, and so I mustn’t conflate the life of a foreigner with that of a local. I am not an aggrieved victim.

I guess what I have to say is just that I’m thankful. I spent my birthday on the continent of my forebears with people who care about me—me, a singular individual on a planet of billions—and it means something to me that they do. That I don’t disappoint them, that I don’t let them down, it’s all I can do to repay them.

It’s my birthday in a little over a week and my government has launched yet another war of aggression, this time on Iran. More than anything, the human cost has been calamitous, as we’ve murdered schoolgirls and caused environmental ruin such as oil literally raining on Tehran. In response to our actions, Iran has rightfully followed through on a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, effectively crippling global energy supplies. For the United States in particular, this has catastrophic domino effects across every industry, not least because of our consistent failure to meaningfully invest in clean energy sources like wind and solar—in fact, as of July 2025, clean energy projects have been significantly sabotaged due to provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The most predictable outcome is an increase in the cost of transportation for virtually everything worldwide; as a result, stock markets are faltering.

I tell the Voya guy that I’m feeling particularly bearish because all signs point to a protracted market decline. The oil refineries and production sites that have been attacked in the past two weeks alone across Southwest Asia will take months, if not years, to resume activity at their full operating capacities even if the war ends today. Meanwhile, oil production from other international sources will be unable to fill in the gaps, and the United States is ill-prepared to weather this disaster of its own making. (There’s a clear through line from attempting to take control of Venezuela’s oil production to waging this war on Iran, but I avoid going this far into detail during the call.) I want to liquidate my stocks in favor of cash and bond positions before the markets tank further, but I can’t find that option on the Voya website. Likely, it’s because my accounts are under professional management.

I’m in partial disbelief that this is the world in which I live—partial, because I do my best to keep up with the news and to actively perform my civic duties as a citizen of the failed democracy that is my home country, and I’m disappointed yet unsurprised that our idiocracy has achieved this outcome. As a direct consequence of our continued depravity, the poles are melting and people are being killed and nobody is doing anything about the fact that there’s demonstrable evidence from the Epstein Files and the Panama Papers that our government is operated by a cabal of child molesters. Without hyperbole, I am a citizen of the evilest national entity in recorded history, but pointing this out makes me sound like a deranged conspiracy theorist because, fundamentally, Americans do not read and do not care that we bear responsibility for the havoc our tax dollars wreak. Ours is a profoundly selfish society.

The Voya representative, it turns out, is a senior consultant. He listens to and doesn’t contradict me, but when I pause he offers an obviously boilerplate response: Voya’s asset management formula accounts for market volatility. Dips are commonplace, and investors should be less concerned with the short term. I don’t think he grasps that I am thinking precisely of the long term.

I try a different tactic. Given the context that the material damage is measurable, it’s simply following a chain of logic to assume the economic fallout will lead to a widespread recession, and I need to protect whatever assets I have while I can. He tells me that Voya knows the money is mine, it’s been rightfully earned by me and therefore I should be able to exercise whatever control over it as I see fit, but that—if my assumptions are correct—this would actually be the time to invest, to buy low and sell high, as the adage goes. He notes that we’re the same age, and therefore that conventional wisdom dictates we adopt the same aggressive risk tolerance because we have decades ahead of us to compound our investments. Still, the choice is ultimately mine.

Quite often, I feel like a broken record. This was supposed to be my Sex and the City, I was supposed to discuss and ridicule the intersection of my life where sex meets New York City, but I guess this is just what it’s like to reside within the imperial core as a conscientious objector. (And, besides, I’ve been celibate for over a month.) I wrote about virtually the exact same sentiments around the time of my birthday last year as well, and I fear that it makes for a rather uninspiring read, but this is what’s been on my mind as of late. It’s been an uninterrupted onslaught of bad news followed by worse news these past couple of years and still I can’t stop considering the happenstance of birth, that so much of your existence is predetermined by a choice you did not make. It’s deeply unjust that the deciding factor between whether you launch or suffer missiles is where you are born, and even more so that there are no concerted attempts to right this wrong.

I want to believe that the long arc of the universe bends towards justice, but the truth is that it must be actively and collectively bent, and all the available evidence I’ve witnessed here in the Global North throughout my lifetime points to it curving in the opposite direction. The people who immiserated a generation by causing the 2008 financial crisis were never meaningfully punished and their actions were never reversed; record domestic protests against racist police violence were brutally suppressed, and ever-higher allocations of our tax dollars were funneled to the very perpetrators of police brutality; public outcries against our forever wars have made no impact on the fact that the Pentagon’s spending has failed eight consecutive audits; immigrant children are currently—literally, it's ongoing—being subjected to routine sexual violence in the concentration camps we've established. It’s not my interest to be a pessimist, but I do consider myself a realist and this is what is materially real. We don’t have a democracy because our elected representatives are unaccountable to us.

My Voya representative endeavors to dissuade me from timing the market, so to speak. I guess he presumes that I’m an unsophisticated investor—and I am, at least in comparison to institutional investors and brokerages and all the other industry players, but this was once my industry too and all those people were also my colleagues and I hope that my many years spent toiling away within have imparted some wisdom unto me. It’s not that I’m day trading or hoping to profit during this turmoil, particularly because I know that such volatility is inherently unpredictable, but rather that I strongly feel the protracted downturn is substantiated. Moreover, I don’t have the sort of excess cash to be pumping into the market right now, to buy low so that I can later sell high, like he thinks I should be doing. I just want to freeze what little I’ve accumulated so far.

I’ve reached the point where I feel like I’m planning for a future that won’t occur, but I go through all the motions anyways just in case. My father has finally stopped pestering me to date the (fake) women he meets online, but it’s in favor of trying to quickly push me into surrogacy arrangements with any available agency. Yet I can’t fathom bringing a child into this world, a derelict existence marred by ecological apocalypses under the yoke of pedophilic capitalists. There’s talk of Republicans gutting the FDIC and whispers of bank runs that they’re trying to preempt by moving to enact withdrawal limits, we’re bombing oil fields and assassinating sovereign leaders, and how many birthdays do I have left? Will I ever even arrive at retirement, and will I be able to rely therein upon a safety net that may or may not still exist?

By the time I hang up, I feel like I’ve been stonewalled. The best I could do was adjust my risk tolerance from aggressive to conservative, instructing Voya’s algorithm to re-balance my positions in accordance. There’s probably a way to get what I want, but I didn’t get it from that phone call. I plan to investigate further.

I confess that I am one of the many Americans who have paid diminishing attention to the Olympics, and I attribute that only in part to the fact that I don’t have my own cable or streaming subscription(s). I haven’t had cable since moving out of my parents’ house decades ago, and I never hopped onto the streaming train because I’ve never been a habitual watcher of television. (Whether I may or may not be currently using someone else’s subscription to watch The Real Housewives is irrelevant because this is a relatively recent development for me.) Olympics coverage is totally commandeered by one broadcaster in the U.S.—NBC has exclusive rights through 2036—so, absent a subscription to that broadcaster, the only Olympics content that I usually consume is anything I’ve accidentally chanced across on social media. It’s a perfect case study on the enshittification of media as a direct result of corporate monopolies, but I digress. After all, as I admitted, this is only a flimsy excuse for why I haven’t been keeping up.

The truth is that the Olympics are a very minor trigger for me, which is to say that I experience the smallest twinge of sadness each time they come around because they remind me of a life that I once lived and left behind: it used to be my greatest aspiration to attend and win a gold medal at the Olympics as a competing figure skater.

I originally commenced this sentence by writing that I never seriously believed I had a chance to medal in men’s figure skating, but I think that would be both inaccurate and immaterial, and such a statement would disrespect and disparage my childhood self. When I began training as a figure skater, I was young enough to count my age with my fingers and I didn’t yet possess enough self-awareness, maturity, insecurity, or whatever it is that would have caused me to doubt myself before I even started, to preempt myself before even trying. Instead, I simply trained. I dedicated hours and hours to practicing, attempting spins, jumps, and edge techniques until I’d mastered them. I committed full performance routines to rote memory in advance of (very junior) regional competitions such that, by the time I stepped onto the ice when it was my turn to present the fruits of my labor, I would excel, commonly placing first or second. I was never even nervous.

My most triumphant routines were set to “Theme from Jurassic Park” (composed by John Williams) and Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” (performed by Donny Osmond). I even had a wooden baton for my performance soundtracked to the latter (I actually have no idea how or from where my mother procured it). All these decades later, the opening chords to both songs still activate long-dormant emotions that have since been buried deep within my psyche; I can’t listen to them for too long because I’m liable to start crying. Figure skating was the one thing in my life to which I could point to celebrate my accomplishments on the basis of my own merits. It came easily to me, and I loved it in return. I spent most of my after-school afternoons at Norwalk Ice Arena, where I had weekly scheduled sessions with my coach who would choreograph my movements and set goals for me to achieve, and I would achieve them handily. Nothing frustrated me, not even my elusive first axel, because it was simply a matter of practice and repetition. Regardless of how often I fell, I could rest assured that I would always eventually master my techniques—it was a given. All I had to do was try and try again until the pieces clicked into place.

My dreams for Olympic success were real. It was my North Star, my raison d’être, it was how I defined myself before I really began to parse my identity in my teens, before I posited myself as gay or Asian American—I was a figure skater first and foremost. I heavily modeled my ambitions after Michelle Kwan: whatever she accomplished, I sincerely believed that I could too.

Nobody could tell me that I wasn’t going to be standing on that podium one day with a gold medal strung around my neck. Yet I would describe my diligence as one in passing or an unintentional consequence, and it was paradoxically true that I didn’t practice because I was so deeply enamored with the sport but rather because I was already there. I loved to skate, but it was also that I did it because it felt like an inextricable and uncontroversial part of me. It was a foregone conclusion that my free time would be spent at the rink; I didn’t really have a say in the matter. I was still young, and I did what I was told.

Before I turned fifteen, Norwalk Ice Arena announced its permanent closure and demolition. Yet that had no impact on my training because by then I had already switched to skating at Michelle Kwan’s East West Ice Palace and, later, was told to quit. I remember this time of my life as being characterized primarily by upheaval, when my parents’ divorce, my move away from my childhood home, my change of skating coaches (I went through four within maybe a year, if memory serves me), my growth spurt, and the formation of my anxiety all neatly coincided. It’s best exemplified by my struggles with mastering the “butterfly,” a slightly advanced maneuver defined by its mid-air switch-kick with a rotation technique.

Whereas I previously mastered all my elements by simply watching and doing, I was utterly baffled when instructed to attempt the butterfly. I could not envision myself mimicking the movement, and for the first time in my life I began to doubt. Hindsight tells me that those doubts started because I could no longer locate my center of gravity, which had abruptly shifted due to my sudden pubescent growth spurt (for context, I measure 1.83 meters in height), but I didn’t know it at the time because I was literally in the midst of my physical body’s changes. It was like I no longer had control over myself. I spent more and more time frustrated in the bleachers—not quite understanding why—when I should’ve been on the ice, and it was during such an episode that one of my parents walked in on me and forced me to quit so as to stop wasting their money.

That the end of my athletic dreams occurred within the very rink where I finally managed to obtain Michelle Kwan’s autograph in person, although I was too shy to approach her myself and had to enlist my coach for assistance—it shattered me. I had been so close to my idol, I had wanted to prove that I could be just as accomplished. It all fell apart. I was an unequivocal failure.

This is the full emotional spectrum that I undergo in milliseconds anytime I’m confronted by the Olympics, even in passing. It is my own personalized five stages of grief.

After quitting the sport, I steadfastly avoided ice rinks for the next decade. The borders of my life expanded, I met new people and went on new adventures, but the vestiges of figure skating were still ever-present. Learning to ski necessitated that my body recollect the art of balance, shifting my weight between hips as I cut grooves into slopes; landing my first job out of college evoked my latent athletic spirit, wherein I was my only true competitor and I had to prove my diligence as I worked towards demonstrating my worth to my employers. I went from medaling on a podium to being seated onstage with plaques and sashes at my college graduation ceremony to winning company-wide accolades in an auditorium full of enterprise colleagues. Career replaced sport as the source of my self-worth—I had new accomplishments to which I could point in validating my value, in defining myself. In my twenties, I was somebody.

It’s beyond obvious in retrospect that a very uncomfortable truth lurked beneath this high-achieving veneer: the so-called accomplishments of my twenties were extremely superficial and therefore unsustainable in the long run as a replacement source of my self-worth. At the same time that I was graduating from NYU with a special service award from my dean, I was in my tiny apartment on Orchard St making anxiety pies because I was full of nervous energy resultant of not knowing how to find employment post-graduation, and all that energy found an outlet in a sudden extreme fixation on banana cream pies. At the banking job I eventually secured, I was underpaid in comparison to all my friends who’d gone on to join the consultant or lawyer class, and my per-hour rate was not at all commensurate with the hours I devoted to the returns I regularly generated for my employers and my clients. Enter my thirties, and my self-worth predictably cratered.

It was as though I was putting myself through all these motions of farcical productivity to stave off impending doom. I could feel it in my bones, it was so clear that a reckoning would soon come and a disaster would be left in its wake, and all I could do was hope to the heavens that the universe would spare me. That reckoning arrived in the form of my most consequential ex-boyfriend and laid bare every contradiction in my life.

As I sought to define myself, I determined that my life would be upheld by two pillars: achievement in both career and love. Success at both meant living a worthy existence. Going the distance in my professional life would enable me to find a partner who would consent to be with me, who would want to be with me because we could afford each other. A dual-male income household could actually maintain the exorbitantly high cost of living in New York City, where I wanted to nest because of its sheer cultural diversity despite the atrocious associations of being situated within the United States. I dedicated my twenties to serial monogamy and searched for that perfect partner in synchrony with advancing my career. I had meticulous ideas about how and why things should be—I wanted to have the perfect body, the perfect job, the perfect husband, the perfect life.

My ex-boyfriend was a consultant who aspired to leave the industry for a cushy job in finance. He was kind, gentle, caring, all of the character traits that make a person look good on paper. More than that, he thought he loved me. So, when I separated from both him and my job in the very same year, I was forced to confront that I was not who I wanted to be. The life I had so desperately prescribed myself had instead decided to proscribe me. Once more, I was a failure.

It felt like I had squandered everything. I had exhausted every avenue; I had nowhere left to go, nothing in my life that I could hold onto as proof that I was worth the water it cost to sustain me. Days bled into weeks into months into years and time slipped between my fingers and I couldn’t stop it—I couldn’t even slow it down, just a little bit—and I watched my youth disappear before my very eyes, helpless as all my wasted potential circled the drain. I was totally aimless, and I sank myself even deeper into dating to cope with the crushing existential crisis of being a washout.

So went my Saturn return. I was back at square one. I had no more external validation to carry me, to propel me forward, and I looked for new connections everywhere like a drifting seedling searching for a place to anchor. I sprained my ankle at a birthday party in Greenpoint, after which a fellow attendee advised that I take up Pilates so as to reacquaint myself with my center of gravity. I briefly dated a drag queen, who read between the lines as I explained myself to them and all but commanded me to buy a pair of figure skates because it was clearly still important to me. Above all, I was most afraid of wasting away my precious few remaining days.

I listened to all these well-meaning individuals…sort of. I never attended a single Pilates class, but I did get into Barry’s and SoulCycle. And, most importantly, I rode trains to ice rinks all over New York City until I finally found a shop near Sunnyside (shout-out to City Ice Pavilion) to sell me a custom-sized pair of skates. I took my new blades with me to my favorite outdoor rink and confirmed, as I’d expected, that I’m still carrying the weight of all my experiences with me. My body still remembers how it feels to twist, to turn, to rotate. I can’t yet accomplish all the great feats of my past because I haven’t acquainted myself with my adult strengths (and weaknesses), but I feel like I’m on the right track.

As I’m watching the Winter Olympics through highlights and reels, I’m also confronting the truth that I wasn’t committed enough to stick with figure skating when my mother demanded that I quit. Even though that instance was but one in a long list of examples of her unpredictable fury that rears itself and leaves destruction in its wake, I’m admitting in hindsight that I agreed to quit not because I was terrified of her but because I was tired of being so easily puppeteered. I wanted one less aspect of my life that was under her control; I couldn’t get away from her fast enough. Yet I still harbor a lot of guilt and shame for having left the sport under such duress, duress that I couldn’t endure because I didn’t care enough to keep trying at the sport, and for not being as successful as I had imagined I one day would be. It compounds my feelings of worthlessness—I am worse than mediocre—because I am an abject failure who can’t dig himself out of his own hole.

It isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate all the good things that have happened in my life nor all the people who have extended me great kindness [since], but rather that I am wholly undeserving of it all because I have not achieved everything that I’ve set out to do—and perhaps accomplishments ought not to constitute the entire makeup of my self-worth, perhaps pride is a sin, but it is also factual that they mean something to me, even just a teeny tiny bit, because I want to be more. I want to be more than I am and I can’t seem to do it and I hate myself for it. And so I pour myself into my little written project here because words are easy, they come to me and they’re agreeably malleable, they go where I place them and I can shift them and sculpt them into something meaningful. This is where I can exercise what uncomplex agency I have, where nothing is a hassle or a burden and I can relieve myself of this invisible weight that I otherwise can’t seem to shed.

I think what I’m struggling with, at its crux, is no longer having something in my life at which I can excel. There is nothing at which I am the best, the expert, the prodigy—and, right now, I’m not even an amateur. As a result, it feels like everything I do is subpar. That I wanted to be great as a direct consequence of my own efforts and persistence, that it feels fruitless and immaterial because I have since lived countless professional lives and watched mediocrity fail upwards while I languished because I either look or act a certain way or because I wasn’t connected to the right individuals, that insofar as being a person capable of conscious thought and theoretical freedom of will, freedom of choice, I struggle with my executive dysfunction and I can’t seem to just turn it off, I am well aware that it is a luxurious endeavor. Fearing my own mediocrity, lamenting my own uselessness, is an exercise few can afford. Still, it persists. I will never be an Olympic figure skating champion.

I recently begged my father to unearth my childhood trophies and medals from the storage recesses of his ex-wife and to mail them across the country to me. I have them set up in my kitchen, in a quiet corner easily overlooked, because I’m not trying to be ostentatious or flashy with them—they’re there for my eyes only. My inner blaze is now petering out into smoldering ashes, and maybe I relive my glory days of old when I look at them, relics of the bygone era during which I peaked in my pre-teens because I have nothing going for me anymore, but it means something to me that I used to be someone. It’s proof to me that I once was, that I was here. I existed. Possibly, one day, I’ll be someone, anyone, again.

I like to use Goodreads as my literary Last.fm, and I reflexively assigned five stars to Flux before amending it to four; five was an impulsive decision engendered within my fugue caused by the novel's emotional denouement, from which I emerged to immediately venture over to Goodreads, whereas four is, I think, much more measured and fair.

Flux is a constrained tour de force that also capably uses itself as a vehicle for social commentary, so I was a bit surprised as I scrolled through the Goodreads reader reviews to see dissent from those who I assumed would have been among its most ardent supporters, chiefly fans of Asian American literature, LGBTQ representation, and so on. My statistically insignificant sample size criticized Flux's narrative structure for being disorienting or labyrinthine, but I found it to be no more complex than N. K. Jemisin's excellent The Fifth Season. I must have forgotten that some prefer to have everything cleanly and plainly laid bare.

I'm in the final stretches of time before 2026 becomes too real to deny. The first few weeks of the year are forgiving all the way through Chinese New Year, after which I can no longer hide behind my flimsy excuse of holiday stupor to explain away my lack of productivity. I have a screenplay to draft and essays to write and secret books to self-publish, yet I've been dragging my feet. There's too much to do and not enough structure to make it happen, but it's all my fault, of course. I can admit that with ease.

I love to feel prolific. I relish the sensation of words pouring out of me through my fingertips into a digital document like an unstoppable torrent—flow state. There's an acute satisfaction that I derive quite keenly from the process of relieving myself of sentences and piecing them into paragraphs with narrative logic, with such deliberation that I lose track of time. In this way, I disassemble and reconfigure myself. Honestly, its completion feels almost as good as…well, you can probably guess. When I've unstoppered myself, when everything tumbles out of me easily, that's when I feel like I'm at the apex of my abilities. Powerful.

In the past, I've mentioned my sudden inability to immerse myself into new stories, to read, and consequently to write. It's been like this for the past few months, but Flux (and Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage, which laid the groundwork last year) intrigued my brain enough to jolt it back into action. For that, I'm thankful.

I was recently in Los Angeles, where I was born, for the second time in two months. The frequency was unplanned, owed to successive birthday celebrations for which my presence was very kindly requested, which is meaningful to me because I typically don't like to be in that city. Since I have a lot of difficulty with my immediate relatives, Los Angeles is far too close to home.

So, there I was one evening, at The Grove. It's a nightmarishly lurid outdoor mini-mall, populated with name brands and the likes of the Cheesecake Factory, and it's where my friend chose to host his birthday dinner. I sat at one end of the table, arduously reaching for any and every topic to make conversation with people I didn't know. Maybe half an hour passed at a snail's pace before I realized I was sitting down for a meal I didn't intend to eat. I had no real issue with the people seated by me—the awkwardness was simply due to the fact that we were extremely peripheral acquaintances, united by our one mutual friend—but I just couldn't get myself into the mood. I was a bit jet lagged and bloated and feeling insecure about my physical being, and I also wanted to preserve my energy for the big party I knew I'd be attending the following night. As such, I begged off from the dinner table, pretending to need to find the restroom. (To be fair, I did intend to at least look for it. I'm a habitual hand-washer, almost to the point of drying out the skin of my fingers, but I couldn't stay in that restaurant for a single minute longer.) I needed to get out.

When I stepped outside, I felt a bit better. Nobody was looking at or for me, and there was solitude as well as solace within the jostling crowds of shoppers. I decided to savor the bit of private free time that I'd created for myself and to do a cursory loop around the promenade. Since I've only ever been to The Grove less than a handful of instances throughout my entire life, I thought it would be reasonable.

That’s how I ended up at Barnes & Noble. I’ve always had an affinity for bookstores, big or small, because a lot of my childhood was spent at them and libraries. I liked to get lost among the bookcases, discovering the contents within. As I moved through the crowds, I was torn between directly entering Barnes & Noble and walking down what looked to be an alleyway of candy shops; I knew that I’d eventually go into the bookstore, but it was a question of how long I’d delay the inevitable. After a split second of hesitation, I decided to cut out the middleman.

The staff at Barnes & Noble had laid out some books across the arrays of tables stationed in the foyer, and I slowly made my way through them, glancing at each title in passing. I remember wryly and silently acknowledging the authors in the rows of new memoir arrivals, thinking to myself: war criminals. Here and there were career retrospectives written by people who'd wrought havoc across the globe in fawning, self-fellating prose. Punctured between the shelves were windows that looked out at The Grove and I caught sight of my reflection multiple times in the uncovered glass, ruminating on how the shape of my face has mutated over these past few years as I’ve aged. I felt sick.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about the genre in which I've chosen to make my home (creative nonfiction). I enjoy the freedoms it allows me, but its chief contradiction is that I absolutely loathe myself. I abhor talking about myself over and over again, but it's myself with whom I'm in conversation, and so the voices in my head are incessant. They do not stop. I am annoying, irritating, unreliable, lazy, rude, and selfish, and yet I cannot extract myself from my own thesis. If it's a double-edged sword, the blade edge facing me is the sharper side, and I cut myself, wound myself, innumerably so. I'm no better off than I was before I ever began, yet still I continue, still I cannot stop. I am Narcissus, drowning in my own reflection.

Books have always been a respite for my brain, but I couldn't remember the one(s) I'd most recently purchased for myself. I was perusing the selection at Barnes & Noble because I had time to spare, but it was also because there was something comforting about being surrounded by all the literature, war criminals notwithstanding. I rode the escalator and went upstairs, stopping to pick through more familiar territory: Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Isherwood. Goodbye to Berlin caught my eye and I picked it up, unable to properly recall whether I'd read it decades ago or if that was merely a false memory. I flipped through it, stopping to read first at the end of "A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-33)" and next at the start of Alan Cumming's foreword.

It’s no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.
—Christopher Isherwood, “A Berlin Diary”

I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have been there to feel the turn in the public conscience, to actually see the beginning of the violence and the acceptance of Nazism as a mainstream political alternative and finally a national edict. But I don’t need to.
—Alan Cumming, foreword to Goodbye to Berlin

Of course, I've cherry-picked these two passages because they're what caught my eye during the scant minutes I spent with the book, and it's a very surface-level analysis because I'm not actually engaging with the meat of its contents, but I was stricken by the cyclical nature of human history. Absent the German, Isherwood's paragraph describes exactly what's been taking place this month in Minneapolis, while Cumming's musings reflect verbatim the contemporary mainstream liberal voices that were silent until they themselves were threatened.

I can't, in good conscience, not mention what has been happening. It is my position that Americans must bear witness to the atrocities, both abroad and at home, that our tax dollars fund and shoulder our fair share of the blame. People are being abducted by our secret police, and they are being executed point blank. Minneapolis is a city rich in cultural diversity, spanning communities including Somali, Hmong, and myriad other ethnic identities, yet it's precisely within these neighborhoods where U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) operatives have set up camp, where they detain, pepper-spray, shoot, kidnap, and disappear. More eloquent writers will find ways to incorporate here mention of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), which in essence affirmed that the police do not have a legal responsibility to protect the public, the continued enshrinement of qualified immunity within American legal doctrine, and the chain of logic that demonstrates the practical nonexistence of First, Second, or any Amendment rights if the state can commit murder without recourse, as it has been, as it continues to do.

Isherwood’s book is in my hands and I’m thinking of what I cited in Nineteen:

Over 20% of Americans are illiterate. Not only do their mental facilities not include critical reasoning skills, one in five Americans cannot adequately parse written words. Over half of American adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level.

This is how we got here. This is what has sustained the far right’s march towards power; this is the natural result of a profoundly incurious society whose citizens are functionally illiterate. There is no parsing of information, no critical thought. There is only reactionary violence, easily-stoked division, and those who would foment these conditions for their own gain. This is the outcome of the United States’s decades-long slog towards idiocracy.

People can’t handle the reality that we have such broken institutions that an idiot boy-king that is dumber than every one of the most deformed Habsburgs can rule without challenge because he serves the interests of a political party that has control of every institution that is supposed to check his power… None of it matters. It’s a machine that carries forth of its own momentum with no actual civic will behind it. The spirit has totally deserted it. You people thought these institutions work because they have inherent legitimacy and were good institutions, tried and true. No. They work because they serve people in power. And if the dumbest man in the history of the world can just get into the cockpit and start moving the gears around, and if the plane keeps going in the same direction, maybe they’re not actually hooked up to anything.
—Matt Christman (Chapo Trap House)

Federal agency operatives have been given de facto blanket immunity because they know they won't be prosecuted, whether due to legal loopholes or (a lack of) political will. This is how it happens, and this is what I meant when I commented in previous writings that we don't have a true opposition party.

Nobody is coming to save us—certainly, not the Democratic Party, whose cast of rotating villains always seems to muster just enough votes to push key funding packages over the line, ensuring that the never-ending nightmare that is the United States Department of Homeland Security has the financing to keep going. Similarly, just 3% of Democratic voters support increases to military spending, yet 70% of House Democrats voted for that increase. Schumer and Jeffries, vaunted leaders of the Democrats, are indeed whipping votes, but it's being done to guarantee passage, not blockage.

What does it mean to be right wing? What does it mean to be left and right? Are these just two global cults and you kind of just join one or the other, is that it? I say maybe I’ll join the left because I’m left-handed or—what is it? What are they? What does it mean to be left? To be left means that you want to affect changes in the economic structure of a country, in the class structure of that country. To be right means you want to keep the existing status quo where 80% of the country is owned and controlled by 2% of the population (plus foreign investors).
—Michael Parenti, “Images of Imperialism: Media, Myths, and Reality” lecture at the University of Colorado Denver

We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy…and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, in conversation with Angela Davis at the University of Michigan

I'm not feeling exultant, standing there in Barnes & Noble. Those of us who didn't turn a blind eye to the (renewed) horrors of these past two years aren't surprised that this has come to pass, but having accumulated that knowledge doesn't make it any less miserable to witness its continuation.

I make no oblique references—I am explicitly reflecting upon what the United States has done to Palestine, to Venezuela, to all the sovereign nations and peoples who have borne the brunt of our brutality, done in service of capital. There is no vindication in watching the imperial boomerang coming home to roost and hearing the upset furor of a public that was silent as we committed our barbarism abroad.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

I returned Goodbye to Berlin back to its designated shelving spot and moved on, walking with no intention of purchasing anything until I was suddenly confronted by a table populated with books that I've been wanting to read as well as those that I've already read and loved. I came face-to-face with Bliss Montage, whose opening short story captivated me, a book lent to me by someone else. I'd since given the borrowed copy back to its owner, but here it was again, poised to re-enter my life with a buy-one-get-one-50%-off sticker affixed to its cover. It was as if the universe was screaming at me to take it home. However, adjacent to Bliss Montage were two other books that I felt compelled to read, to own, each proudly sporting the same discount tag. I thus found myself trapped in a love triangle of my own design, struggling with the agony of having to release a guaranteed comfort in exchange for an unknown wildcard. Both books were short story collections composed by authors of East Asian descent, of whom I'd seen mention in passing over the years but never had the direct opportunity to read. Yet here I was, presented with that very opportunity and a decision. I'd arrived there purely by wandering.

It’s that weird time of year when nothing especially seems to matter—a veritable liminal space—and I’ve fallen into a pitfall of non-productivity caused by three pieces of media: Heated Rivalry, The Real Housewives of Potomac, and Dave the Diver. The former two are television series, and the latter is a “cozy” video game first published in 2023; I’ve alternately been swept up by a torrid interracial gay love affair stretching across a decade, by petty squabbles between dueling social scene queens (Karen Huger and Gizelle Bryant), and by diving for sea creatures to turn into sushi.

On the subject of television shows and films prominently featuring non-heterosexual characters, I remember it becoming somewhat controversial in the 2010s for such characters to be played by heterosexual actors. The logic was that queer actors should be given the opportunity to authoritatively portray their own narratives, not too dissimilar from people of color acting in roles specific to their own heritages, because marginalized people by definition face various structural socioeconomic disadvantages that hamper their ability to, put simply, equally exist and succeed. Therefore, agitating for queer characters to be played by queer actors was an attempt to right some historical (and ongoing) wrongs.

Yet sexual orientation is not a phenotype, which is to say that it’s not readily discernible of people who wish to keep theirs discreet, as is their prerogative. This is where the stickiness arises: the labels of invented racial categorization that are clumsily applied to humans by other humans upon first impression are even less capable when it comes to queerness. Thus, the similarities between sexuality and ethnicity end in divergence.

Some proponents argue that the actors who portray queer characters should confirm their own non-heterosexuality under the banner of queer visibility. They proffer that efforts to achieve social equality benefit from there being more people who are loud and proud. This in and of itself isn’t inaccurate; visibility is important insofar as culture is something that is actively shaped, and queer people must be shown to be extant so that our existence isn’t attributed to aberrancy. For this reason, I choose to believe that these agitators are operating in good faith. Their intent is to champion a world wherein queer people are treated as equal. However, pressuring an individual to publicly come out is a violation of their personal agency. For a plethora of reasons, one might want to keep one’s private life, well, private. The ultimate questions to be answered, ergo, are whether 1) the output is good, genuine, accurate, and honest, and 2) the creatives involved will, plainly, support equality.

It’s no big secret that the arts are very, very gay. Still, there’s a (nonsensical) stigma imposed upon queer creatives that preempts or prevents them from coming out, so as to preserve their mass-market appeal. Sex sells, so goes the common refrain, and marketability rests itself upon desire, but it’s about to be 2026 and I’d like to believe that an actor’s sexual orientation wouldn’t affect their commercial ceiling because—let’s face it—laypeople have zero chance with celebrity figures, anyways. Besides, nothing in the world needs to generate billions of dollars in profit. Just admire the art and move on.

I never really felt the desire to come out. It wasn’t something that I needed to be known at work because my personal life had no impact on my career, and also because I feared employment discrimination. Luckily, I’ve never been outed, and anyone who ever learned about it without my involvement wasn’t someone who could or would materially affect my life. Similarly, I didn’t trust my family to not disown me and whatnot upon finding out, and especially regarding them I could control that level of knowledge. The only people who I wanted to know were my closest friends, but I never felt that anybody had a right to know. So, I have some sympathy for those wanting to keep their business to themselves.

When I did finally come out to my parents, it was of my own volition. I chose to wait until I felt that I could afford the gamble, when I knew beyond a doubt that I would be safe and secure regardless of their reactions. Even though I had primed myself for the worst and despite how much I attempted to minimize the effect my parents’ opinions would have on my life, keeping an integral part of myself hidden from my makers was still a mental burden. Thankfully, for the most part, it wasn’t a big affair.

Anyways, I digress. I recently watched The Materialists on a flight to Los Angeles and it’s cuffing season in New York and I resent love propaganda, which is the term I’m employing herein to refer to media about romantic relationships, because I am not in love. My cuticles are peeling and a friend recently told me about being invited to the Fire Island parties where youthful men of East Asian descent are amassed for the fetishistic entertainment of lecherous older White men, and I remember wondering whether I should play that role when I was qualified. Although those doors might lead to a shortcut to other pastures (possibly greener, possibly not), I’m glad that I never did. The politics of desire always weighed too heavily upon me.

I considered re-downloading all of the dating apps until I remembered the last time that I did and ended up trauma dumping onto would-be suitors, all of whom very kindly listened as I explained that I wasn’t likely to be in a serious mood to date because I was trying very hard not to fall apart. I wanted to feel a connection, but I wasn’t ready to be perceived. Love propaganda stirs up memories of spending the holidays with my exes, and it’s not that I want them back but rather that it was nice to have them around.

I think about my mortality all the time. If I died tomorrow, I would feel regret, sure. Regret is a given because there’s so much out there that I want to see and do, but I’m aware of how far I’ve already gone at least in the context of my own narrative. I’ve swum with turtles in Laniakea Beach, hobbled up the steps of Potala Palace, stood on the banks of the Danube, and kissed boys in Central Park. I’ve lived a good life and, for now, I’m still here. So, maybe what’s actually happening is that I’ve been coming to terms with my own mediocrity, that I’m never going to be somebody and leave my mark on the world, that it’s going to have to be enough to be just me, and all of this is said beneath the veneer of insignificance because I don’t think my problems really are that bad at all in the grand scheme of things. Whatever.

Here’s to another year of this, of all of this. My goal for the next twelve months is to finish drafting the screenplay that’s been in my head all year. Happy fucking New Year.

It’s snowing in Brooklyn.

I catch myself and I look away, hoping that nobody has noticed me. It would be kind of awkward, wouldn’t it, to be in such proximity to him? Awkward for me, at least—I sincerely doubt he remembers me, if it’s him at all. It would distract me throughout my workout. I’m here because I planned to kick-start my metabolism after a few weeks of rest since spraining my ankle, and I don’t want to make it weird. I just want to be done with it.

I try to shake it off. It’s not a perfect match, this man’s face and the one that I picture in my mind, and I’m doing my best to not jump to conclusions despite recalling that he had lived just down the street from this SoulCycle spot. Our one-night stand had taken place months before I began dating the man who would be my next ex-boyfriend, and I remember his apartment being furnished with the idiosyncratic kitsch of a gay man who possessed the aesthetic tastes of an eccentric great-aunt. Post-coitus, he’d explained to me that he was a Korean adoptee into a White family residing somewhere on the southern East Coast, and that he worked as an interior designer. Fitting, I’d thought as I examined his home decor. Then, I had bidden him farewell with all the customary invitations to see each other again for a repeat experience and stepped out of his building into a light drizzle.

Of course, years have since wedged themselves between our hookup and this moment in time, and I have no way of knowing whether he still lives in that apartment. I find myself realizing that there’s a part of me that wants it to be him, simply out of morbid curiosity. We had texted on and off over the subsequent months with no real intent of, well, anything, but it was one of those errant texts that my then-boyfriend had seen and caused him to doubt.

Most of the class passes without incident. In the darkened cycling room, I catch glimpses of his face in the mirror that spans the entirety of the wall in front of us, but by this point I’ve almost convinced myself that it’s not him. Adrenaline and exhaustion alike race through me like lightning across clouds and I also just don’t have the spare energy to care. I’m focused on the sweat dripping down my face, trying to establish an optimal cadence of allowing enough to accumulate before I absolutely have to interrupt myself to grab my towel and wipe it all away.

As the session finishes, our instructor makes her customary shout-outs to attendees for reaching certain milestones. Some of them are here at SoulCycle for their very first time; others have hit three-digits. She goes down a row of cycles and pauses in front of his, congratulating him for having just completed his two-hundredth ride. In the process, she names him, and I’m struck with mental whiplash. It’s him.

During the final conversation I had with my fourth boyfriend as we broke up—although in that moment I was hoping against all odds that our talk was a step towards reconciliation—I asked him to be honest. I needed to know why I’d felt for the preceding few months that he had withdrawn from me and removed his half of the intimacy that had grounded our relationship. There were no more stakes, there was nothing left to lose and everything to gain from being forthright, and I just needed him to tell me why. It was the text message, he said, and he asked if I remembered receiving it as our flight touched down in Maui for our Christmas holiday. Of course I did, I answered, because I’d made no effort to conceal it from him. He had been sitting right next to me and I had nothing to hide. From that moment on, he assumed I was being unfaithful.

At the end of every SoulCycle ride, instructors talk participants through a series of post-workout stretches. I was trained as an athlete growing up, so I’m quite accustomed to doing it, but I hurriedly detach myself from my cycle after following through the first couple exercises and rush out of the room, determinedly not looking his way. I get to my locker, change into some clothes, and hasten outside as the other attendees begin to head towards the locker rooms. If he and I pass by each other in all the commotion, I don’t notice. As soon as I step outside, I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

It wasn’t his fault. My breakup, I mean. It was an awkward situation that bloomed into a terrible circumstance on the basis of an erroneous assumption by an insecure man. I spent years self-flagellating in penance, as if it would rewind time, to no avail. On the flip side of those sad events, if there’s any blame to be assigned, I’m finally ready to place it squarely upon the shoulders of my ex-boyfriend.

Coincidentally like that night all those months ago, it’s raining again in downtown Brooklyn and I trudge through the dampness to get home. I’ve been working on becoming better acquainted with my dishwasher, after a lifetime of using it as a drying rack, because my depression has manifested in an endless stack of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink and I want to combat it however I can. It’s not only that my parents (perhaps incorrectly) taught me that dishwashers waste water and electricity; it’s also that I’m a control freak who doesn’t trust the machinery to scrub away every bit of grime. But I’ve been learning that that can be mitigated simply by manually scrubbing my dishes before placing them inside for a wash, that dishwashers are supposedly more energy- and water-efficient than washing by hand, and that the cleaning technology includes anti-bacterial heating. I’m hoping to enlist it in my crusade against executive dysfunction, especially because I’ve been living in my own mire resultant of my stalwart robot vacuum recently dying a sudden, unexpected, and extremely inconvenient death.

I don’t mean to be judgmental when I point out that my ex-boyfriend was insecure. It’s not intended as an indictment of his character. Rather, it’s a somber reflection on the challenges we had faced as a couple as well as the reason why our shared endeavor failed. He began to lose faith in me but he wasn’t forthcoming enough to surface his doubts to me, so instead our love slowly asphyxiated over the course of months. He should have told me; he did not, and could not even if I had asked. How could I have fixed it if he wouldn’t let me?

I’m scrolling through Instagram and the algorithmic feed has decided to serve up Rama Duwaji’s account, so I decide to click into her profile and riffle through the content that she has publicly posted. An illustrator in her own right, her account populates image after image of her drawings, and I find myself feeling equally charmed and wistful. Her husband has only just emerged victorious from New York’s mayoral election and I’m a stranger, twice- or thrice-removed from them through my own political peers, looking at a picture of a photo strip featuring the two of them together on Eid and there’s a vague pang in my chest. What they have, I know that I don’t.

The night that Zohran won, I sat on the open kitchen-side bar stools of Ayat, a local chain of Palestinian restaurants that had just opened an outpost in Astoria, and wolfed down a simple meal of chicken over rice. Eating her own portion next to me was a woman who complimented me on the Mamdani campaign apparel that I had chosen to don in anticipation of the election results, gained through my own canvassing shifts. She expressed her regrets at not having been able to join us in volunteering, but it’s because she had busied herself with protesting against ethnic cleansing at the United Nations buildings near Tudor City. We exchanged admiring words, although in truth I did (and do) believe that her work has been much more seminal and consequential than my own.

When love is in the process of dying a slow death, when it turns to dread—I’ve felt that too many times to be unable to recognize its reappearance. It’s a sort of numbness made poignant if only for the knowledge that it occupies the same space within me where warmth once resided, where fire has become a void. It’s birthed from the same mistake that I’ve been making over and over again, taking men for who they could be and not for who they are. I’ve been placing undue expectations upon them without conclusively knowing whether they could ever meet their own potential, and suddenly my life has completed yet another circle three years in the making. Breaking my own heart is a sort of annual tradition, at this point. Idly, I wonder if I should make a new account on Hinge. I haven’t used it in over a year, but it’s where Rama met Zohran. Are they a proof of concept or an exception to the rule?

It’s the week before Thanksgiving and I feel like I’m back to where I used to be.

When the fallout first began, I sent my ex-boyfriend flowers over and over because I was sincere about wanting to make amends. My friends eventually stopped me, thankfully. They told me I was wasting my efforts, that I should redirect them to myself because I was the one most in need of my own tenderness. Nowadays, I buy them when I want to have hope. Sometimes, they even come to me as a gift from my chosen family. Each bouquet is a pop of color and freshness with all of life’s vibrancy, and the brightness they lend my home leads me to believe that things aren’t so bad, that circumstances will improve. One by one, I’ve been watching them wilt.

I’m a few days late to posting this because of that lack of good news. I don’t feel like my voice has anything worth speaking. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking about switching my line of work, making a career shift, yet it’s been slow going. I’m trying to strike a balance between affording the necessities that keep me alive and having some wiggle room for the extraneous stuff that make life worth living. I keep getting close, but I’ve been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I might seriously need the services of an Etsy witch or ten.

All rejections are not equal, which is to say that some sting more than others. I’ll sink months into preparation just to be told that it wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t good enough—and I know it’s not always personal, but sometimes it is, and that’s the most frustrating part.

A couple of years ago, when I was living elsewhere and going through a romantic breakup, my doorman was one of the first people I told. That guy who’d stay over for days at a time, who usually accompanied me home at 2 in the morning with a box from the Joe’s Pizza around the corner—yeah, him, he’s gone. He won’t come back. I’d known my doorman for three years by then; he was working through a rough patch with his girlfriend, and he might have sympathized with me. Maybe he was already aware of my separation since, by virtue of his role, he was privy to certain insight into my personal life.

“Keep going” is what they say. Persevere. Something my way comes from just around the corner. Everything happens for a reason, and you could do everything right and they still won’t want you and it’s not your fault but it is but it isn’t but, really, it is. My anxieties worsen by the day; melancholia is an old friend returned, camping out in my apartment.

Beyond merely being a little bit of social interaction to sustain the human creature I am, my inside joke also serves to keep me accountable. I hate having no good news for him. I want to be able to tell him about the wonderful and amazing happenstances in my life. I can’t let him down too.

I have these recurring fantasies where I sell all my belongings and use the proceeds to fund my escape from the United States. I’d rent a tiny apartment in some city with enough diversity of cultures (Hong Kong? Paris?) to mimic the experience of living in New York, albeit realistically with a much better quality of life. But—even in my dreams—I can’t imagine easily finding employment elsewhere because I’m a skeptic, and that puts an end to the idea.

As a seventh- or eighth-grade student, I had a mathematics teacher who once presided over a philosophical discussion, more or less, during class about the United States being a sinking ship. She was rather aghast at hearing a few of us talking about leaving the country should things deteriorate to the point of emigration being a serious consideration; she reasoned that we citizens should stay and fix the issues that plague them to improve the nation since, after all, it’s our home. I surmised that she spoke from the perspective of a voting adult during the final years of the Bush Administration, but I remember disagreeing with her. I might have been a kid, but I already knew nobody in power would listen to a gay Chinese boy. Whatever “patriotic” dissent I might have was immaterial.

I want to say that this is an arbitrary rule that I’ve invented, contrary to reality, because it’s not palatable. I want to believe that society can improve. New York is on the precipice of electing its first South Asian and Muslim mayor. (Early voting has already begun—please vote for him on the Working Families Party ballot line.) I guess I’m just not in a good headspace. Toni Morrison famously pointed out that the function of racism is distraction, and she also extolled us to never lose our sense of shock at such depravity. I can’t help that the choices I’ve been making are informed by, tethered to, a lifetime of experiences shaped by discrimination, I’m doing my best to stay focused and to operate with an open mind, but I’m afraid that I’m becoming extremely jaded. There are silver linings everywhere, yet I’d like for the clouds themselves to dissipate.

I should step outside for a bit. It’s not good for me to make a habit of being miserable; I’ve already done enough of that.

So, I took a break from writing this to go beyond my front door. I rode the 7 train into Queens and met up with some new friends at one of the year’s final instances of Queens Night Market, which is also New York’s largest night market in general but doesn’t hold up against the famous night markets of Taipei and elsewhere. Here, the food is somewhat middling and monotonous despite the cultural diversity on display, and I would attribute that simply to the constraints of doing such business in New York: lack of adequate space forces this to be held in a parking lot, costs of produce limit the variety of “affordable” options available to attendees, etc.

I don’t want to sound spoiled or unappreciative. I think it’s undervalued that Queens, famously “The World’s Borough,” is home to such a dizzyingly wide array of people and cultures, and equally appropriate that Queens Night Market makes some of the resultant food easily accessible. My friends and I wandered each row, meandering without urgency, and picked out options from Trinidadian, Guyanese, Native American (the nation/tribe wasn’t indicated; make of that what you will), Jamaican, Chinese, Mexican, Burmese, and Uzbek vendors, all in one night. Then, instead of returning to write and meeting my self-imposed deadline, I encouraged them to follow me back to my neighborhood, where we split a pair of ice cream sundaes and played some video games (Overcooked 2) together.

It’s been difficult and not, simultaneously, to exist in this weird limbo. I have all the time in the world to do what I want, despite being limited by the little numbers displayed to me by banks and credit card companies. There’s much that I strive to accomplish, but I recently rolled my ankle as I traipsed down some stairs and so I’ve been trying not to put much weight onto it for the time being. I’m balancing tension in many different ways, chief of which is the struggle between who I want to be and who I need to be.

“No good news yet.” I’ve taken to avoiding the lobby of my apartment complex, preferring instead to sneak out through the back exit. November approaches with as much certainty as the Sun sets and I’m sick of myself. I hate feeling like a disappointment, like I’ve disappointed myself, because the only voice in my head with which I’ll forever have to live is my own, because the only person who has to live the life I’ve fashioned is myself. Every decision at every juncture leads me to the only road I will walk.

I’m at another wedding somewhere in Pennsylvania and I’m thinking of him, again, as I’ve become accustomed to doing whenever I’m confronted by ceremonial matrimony. As I wrote in Fifty:

Henry was supposed to be my plus-one to Nancy’s wedding and all the other weddings I’d attend throughout my lifetime because I wanted to be his. I was supposed to meet him at the altar with the most heartfelt speech I would ever prepare, but the realist in me just couldn’t imagine him being prepared with vows of his own. I didn’t think he could do it. The realization that he was incapable of doing the same because he just wasn’t right for me was crushing. It wasn’t going to be him. Seated somewhere amongst the crowd and watching the groom kiss the bride, I silently cried.

It’s a bit trite, I do admit, to be harping on the same subject over and over and over. Yet I recognize that the continued impulse to revisit it is a manifestation of something else, namely the subconscious thoughts I’ve been having about my current state of affairs.

Nancy’s wedding was supposed to be the big event. I would fly all the way back to California, the place of my birth, with him in tow. I would bring him as my plus-one, the singular man at the end of my long line of men who’d loved me until they didn’t, the one who represented that all my failures had eventually, finally, led me to that one moment on the nuptial dance floor where I, surrounded by a crowd of partygoers, would look into his eyes and cement in my mind that he, ever dependable, would be the one to last forever. Then, I would take him home to meet my parents and begin the next chapter of the rest of my life.

That that next chapter never arrived, that an entirely divergent narrative began to weave itself instead—I can’t help wishing that things had ended differently. The me that he knew wasn’t the me I became after he left. He knew me as I had been, perennially frustrated and in a bad mood and wanting to evolve into a better version of myself but not quite committing to all the necessary steps required to get me there, and—bless him—he tried, he really did, he tried to help me out. I suppose that, in the end, he felt spurned.

I can’t come to terms with the knowledge that it was his absence that forced me into character development, that I might never have matured in the way that I did had he chosen to stick around. I can’t help wanting him to have experienced the me that is objectively better than the me that I was when I was his. I resent that the me in his memory is the me who made such avoidable mistakes. I hate that it’s that version of me who will forever scare him away.

I can’t help it.

I don’t mean to lionize him, but I think I’m being honest about who he was when I remember his kindness. The him that he was when he loved me, it wasn’t like the sun shining at me with the full force of its radiance—that’s me, actually, when I’m at my brightest, because I’m exuberant when in love—but rather like the moon, full in phase, reflecting back to me all the brilliance that became shared between us two because that’s who he was and that’s how he loved: quietly, steadfast. Reliable.

The me that I became in the aftermath is the me I wish he had had. All the imaginary rules I’d created for myself, built up and ossified within my head, all the norms for how I ought to behave or the self I should outwardly project, they had shattered. I finally had a reason to become better, to be better, as if doing so would bring him back to me. I looked for him in every man thereafter.

It was futile, of course. He never came back.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t acknowledge all the tropes and projection and assumptions that underlie my emotions—emotions aren’t entirely rational, we know—and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t comment and analyze, but I’d like to just sit with these feelings because over-intellectualizing what I feel is also me trying to do away with the discomfort, to sanitize and wipe clean the unsavory parts of me so that I needn’t fear judgmental eyes. Maybe the sadness lingers because I’m doing this to myself; I’m making myself miserable because I hate how things ended between us, and I’m a broken record repeating the same words ad nauseam, but I can’t help it. The regret is there. It exists. It screams at me for acknowledgement from some dusty corner where it sits, staring at me, glowering. Regardless of the many steps I take away from who I was towards who I want to be, I always return to feed it. Regret is my sullen pet.

It would hurt less if I stopped seeing him everywhere. I saw him at Port Authority, taking the stairs up from the A train platform to bustling 8th Ave. I saw him through the nightclub haze in a Hell’s Kitchen venue, forcibly coming face to face with him after a drag queen’s performance. I saw him in the lobby at Fiumicino Airport’s railway station, as if he’d followed me through customs on my way to Tuscany. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t actually him. The fantasy I had had, a domestic bliss I had once assumed was just within reach, had slipped through my fingers. When I read [Ling Ma’s] Bliss Montage, he was all that I could think about.

This is what surfaces when I stop to consider my current trajectory. I’m many eons removed, proscribed, from the life I had prescribed myself. I don’t have the husband. I don’t have the dual male household income. I don’t have the fulfilling career. I had a taste of having it all and I failed to secure it, and its specter continues to haunt me because I have yet to achieve it.

I’m somewhere in downtown Toronto, walking, when I finally experience a fraction of the mental slap to the face I had been hoping to get by forcing myself out of my natural environment. It’s not the whole thing, not the total all-encompassing catharsis that I need, but the feeling rocks my brain, shakes me, demands to know how I’ve become—or, rather, reverted to—this mopey version of me, and all but commands me to return to my confident self. It’s baffled at my inertia, and it wants to know why. Why am I still like this? For all that I know I’ve accomplished, why am I this specific iteration of me and not my exultant, shining self? I’m eating Irish soda bread and a soufflé and lobsters and french fries and Peking duck and poutine and why am I still like this?

I suppose that I need, in so many ways, someone to take a chance on me. Someone to see something within me. Someone to validate that what I’ve done is worth it, who I am is worth it, what I can and will do is worth it. It’s happened before. I need it to happen again.

Someone has to help you. Someone has to birth you, feed you, raise you, clothe you, teach you, hire you, trust you, choose you. There’s no such thing as independence, and it fucking frustrates me because so much of my life is dependent upon the whims of an infinite others, and I can’t break free. I’m fucking stuck. I want so badly to be independent and I just haven’t gotten there. I don’t want to be reliant upon others, I want to give myself the security I so badly need. Macroeconomic and social factors are conspiring against me but I just need a win. One, singular win. I’m good for it, I promise.

And I fold into myself.

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Robyn. Some of her Body Talk trilogy songs were recently resurfaced by way of having my audio library on shuffle, evoking long-dormant memories of dancing in the woods at a camp retreat with my first boyfriend over a decade ago, but it's “Send To Robin Immediately” that has ultimately had me playing her album Honey on repeat for about a week now. It's an album track of which I took little notice upon release back in 2018, but seven years transform a person and my tastes have changed. The record runs relentlessly on a thrumming, pulsating electricity that throbs and makes me think about desire; I made sure to add the song to my most intimate playlist.

Before Honey, the albums I had on repeat were, respectively, Mayhem by Lady Gaga and Eusexua by FKA twigs. Aside from new, major releases in the music world for me to dissect and digest, I typically default to having my full collection played at random. I find this to be a bit of a feel-good guarantee, because it immerses me in music that I've reliably loved or enjoyed at some point in my life. In that way, it's also a tool for rediscovering old friends.

Céline Dion's Let's Talk About Love was technically the first album I ever bought. I was between the ages of 4 and 6, deeply impressed for some inexplicable reason with the blockbuster film Titanic, for which Céline's rendition of the theme song "My Heart Will Go On" was my absolute favorite. At an electronics shop somewhere in China, I saw her CD and begged my family to buy it for me.

I confess, I don't know what to do with myself nowadays. Executive dysfunction feels like a paralysis of and from the mind, its inertia slowly creeping southward until my entire body has become a statue. Beneath that cemented exterior, internally, I scream and scream and scream.

I've lost a lot of faith in this world. I'm not suicidal anymore, at least not as much as I once was many years ago because I enjoy being alive, but I do emphatically resent living here. It feels like everyone's lost their mind—or, maybe I'm the one who's no longer sane? Atlas has abdicated and the sky is falling and everything that can go wrong, well, is.

Below is a piece titled "there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop" by Vinay Krishnan.

I want to make it abundantly clear that I'm aware of the well-intentioned few who do their best to keep things moving—the volunteers I meet in our community advocacy and mutual aid groups, the subway employees who I witness looking the other direction when people who can't afford the fare hop the turnstiles, the citizen activists aboard the various Freedom Flotillas, etc.—I know these people are out there, and they show us how to keep each other safe. I have seen the hundreds of thousands of individuals in countries around the world who march in the streets for an end to the merciless slaughtering of the Palestinian people, for what is right. Yet, evil persists. Power does not concede, nor can it be expected to do so; that it does not is a feature, inherent to itself. We don't live in a democracy.

Everything feels futile. There is one singular thought, pervasive, that I cannot get out of my head: how dare I live a comfortable life when so many are right now having their lives stolen from them? The amount of water I use when I brush my teeth or filter for drinking, the electricity I consume for the screens into which I leisurely stare, the air conditioner I run only sparingly because we're all interconnected and I don't want to overload the power grid, the relatively clean air that I can breathe and the plants that are permitted to grow on my windowsill, free from threats or missiles or upheaval. My mind isn't at peace. I can't fucking stand it.

I should be writing. I should be exercising. I should be shopping for groceries and cooking so that I don't spend all my money on eating out. I should be reaching out to people, networking, and socializing with the individuals who care about me so that they know I'm not neglecting them. My refrigerator broke down and everything is falling apart. I should be working harder. I can't.

This morning, I woke up and decided to try breaking my downward spiral. I washed up and ate a banana. I drank some water. I made it to the gym before 11 a.m., and I actually managed to get in a proper morning workout for the first time in over a year. I showered. I put in my contact lenses, forced myself into a clandestine encounter, partially regretted my decision to do so, and went back home. I showered again. I layered sliced cabbage and beef over dried noodles in a pot and brought it to a boil and ate my lunch. I sent some work-related emails, felt productive, and sat down to write this. It's hardly 3 o'clock. New York City added a ludicrous one thousand new jobs (net) in the first half of this year and I don't know if I'm any different. I miss my therapist.

Cornelius texts me that she's going to visit Toronto in a few weeks and I want to get out of my apartment to get out of my city to get out of my funk. I'm interviewing for a board position on Friday and I've figured out how to use TikTok and I miss the feeling of falling in love. I finish season one of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip and have banana ice cream for dinner. I tell Harris that I'd like to impose myself onto his couch for two nights. Canada, here I come.

I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn't even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn't talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.
—Yiwei Chai

Is this it? Is this just how it's going to be? Achebe wrote that Things Fall Apart and I'm slouching towards Bethlehem and everything is unraveling and nothing is as it should be and everyone is miserable. And Just Like That…'s writers were handed and pissed away a multi-million dollar franchise—an opportunity that much more skilled writers will never get—because mediocrity fails upwards and what the fuck is wrong with me and what have I done wrong because I don't even get callbacks for jobs I've done for years and should I exit all of my positions in my 401(k) because regressive geriatrics are hellbent on their murder-suicide pact with crashing the economy? Everything in my freezer melted away when my refrigerator died, including the Hunan-style smoked fish I loved and couldn't bear to eat because it's rare and delicious and sentimental and I was trying to savor it and all of a sudden it's gone. It's all gone.

Every little problem snowballs into a bigger problem and turns me into a manic depressive and I'm doing what I can but it's so goddamned difficult and I guess this is just what it is to be alive. I wish it were, at the very least, profound.

Here are the opening lines of “To Cage A Yellowbird,” and the rest is available at Qstack. I hope you like it as much as I do.

I remember how I locked Jim into his very first chastity cage.

It was a small thing shoddily made out of metal, sold to me on a cheery spring day by one of the innumerable adult toy stores in the heart of New York's West Village. I had told him to wait for me there outside of the shop before our second hookup.

We had met just the week prior via Grindr, on which I was looking to move past a recent breakup that had too quickly followed an even bigger breakup. I wanted to find someone new to fill the vacancy in my life, and my clandestine introduction to Jim had hinted at our potential compatibility: he was intimately submissive where I preferred to be dominant. Instructing him to meet me at the shop was, therefore, also a test of his submission and how far he was willing to go. When I arrived at the shop and saw him standing there next to its entrance, I considered him to have passed with flying colors.

Qstack provides directory listings of LGBTQIA+ writers, serving as a navigable, living library of our works. In effect, it also functions as a community space where our stories, our lives, can have some breathing room. I’m thankful that A YEAR WITHOUT WATER has been included within because it’s an honor to exist and thrive alongside my tribe.

I’m so pleased to share that “To Cage A Yellowbird” has also been featured in Memoir Land’s Memoir Monday. It means the world to me to have my writing shared anywhere and especially here among all the standout pieces from other writers as well.

Below, I’ll discuss the essay with some spoilers, so I suggest pausing here to read it before moving on.

Well, there’s no hiding the truth, so I may as well say it outright: this essay is sexy. I don’t mean to imply that it’s a work of erotica, because it’s not intended to fulfill that function, but it does examine a very physical activity between two consenting adults. To that end, it’s a little bit salacious, a little bit emotional, and a whole lot of fun.

The idea for “To Cage A Yellowbird” came to me either very late last year or very early this year, I no longer recall with exactitude (and I don’t think it matters enough to go digging through my files to confirm). I had been thinking about a—for lack of a better word—relationship between someone and myself that had recently ended, and I wanted to explore how I felt about the situation.

The essay is supposed to feel like a confessional, an open secret of sorts. Although I have already undergone my own coming of age with respect to my sexuality and orientation, such that I really don’t feel any shame about my personal life, I imagined the conversational tone of the piece as one of shy questions and whispered, snickered answers. Intercourse is a fact of humanity, and I don’t believe that obfuscating its occurrence or practice does anyone any good, yet I also understand that it’s a topic with which some people are still coming to terms. Thus, couching it as a confessional essay with pops of informational context serves to ease readers into the subject matter, told through the framing of my (a stranger’s) memory for the purpose of giving my words a proper narrative structure.

Without going on too long of a tangent, it’s important for me to mention that history has proven that demystifying sex is paramount to improving our collective health. Understanding how sex happens is precursory to establishing safe practices, because abstinence-only “education” is an unrealistic [Christofascist] fantasy. From the right to abortion to STI prevention and everything in between or beyond, personal health is also community health because we interact with each other. Our lives affect one another’s. Therefore, we are obligated to keep one another safe, and that is improved by an equitable, fair dissemination of crucial information; lacking that information makes one susceptible to exploitation and control. (PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis, a preventative against contracting HIV] and Doxy PEP [doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis, a preventative against bacterial infections such as syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea] should be made commonly available, sexually active adults should regularly test for infections at least every three months, etc.)

I directly referenced the so-called gay-famous micro-celebrities of (East) Asian descent named within. The role of representation in media, even niche adult media, is to reflect the realities of our existence, and I do think their presence has at least somewhat spotlighted our experiences within the gay community. Insofar as I am a gay, cisgender, Chinese American man writing about my own circumstances, there are some parallel aims in depicting our lives as they are lived. Moreover, because Jim was experimenting with the archetype that they so readily embody, it’s also to give readers aid in visualizing the person about whom the essay was written.

Over time, I’ve given a lot of thought to how my writing should and would be perceived. It’s seldom that I go out of my way to ensure that my work is firmly and boldly queer or Asian American, but I also know that I’ll be inevitably placed in those categories—regardless of any efforts to the contrary—because that is who I am. So, I endeavored for “To Cage A Yellowbird” to achieve a balance of providing background info wherever necessary while still being straightforward about my story. It’s true that I don’t exclusively look to be with men of my race (in lieu of a full-on digression, please allow this parenthetical remark to serve as my acknowledgement of race being a social construct and a legacy of scientific racism), just as it’s also true that I’ve felt the most seen by men who had cultures and upbringings similar to mine. Perhaps (in)famously, I’ve already written about many such men within A YEAR WITHOUT WATER; indeed, the essay opens with a reference to my breakup after another breakup.

Word limits and my fear of going on for too long resulted in a decision against fleshing out too many memories of the time I shared with Jim, and I relied instead on the insertion of more colorful sentences to illustrate the tiny world in which we had cohabited:

• “With him, I would be someone new; for him, I could be someone else.”

• “I had just started a new job at which I strove to excel, and he had received a promotion to a demanding position that required him to work unsustainably long hours; suffice it to say that I needed release, and so did he.”

• “He introduced me to Fred again.., California burritos, and the infamous TikToker Pinkydoll; I planned visits to Michelin-starred restaurants and even met up with him on the other side of the country.”

• “Our interactions felt kind of lacking, like a prescriptive, dispassionate sort of blandness. He had few interests besides exercise and electronic dance music—and, given his workaholic tendencies, he didn't have much free time to do anything but his job anyways. Dating him felt perfunctory.”

On the one hand, I could claim that we didn’t do much together. On the other, I could reflect upon the experiences we did share, like running down Tenth Avenue to our favorite pizza joint every other week or attending a Boiler Room set on a boat jaunt around Manhattan. But, if there’s any habit I should divest to prove my maturity (I mention within the essay that I struggled with reconciling my own behavior with what I expect from adults, and I continue to reckon with myself to this day), I think it’s that I shouldn’t constantly measure one relationship against others. What we had was what it was.

Of course, that all came to an end, influenced in part by the pivotal event chronicled within “My Grandmother’s Daughter,” another essay of mine about how I became “darkly estranged from my mother” and within which I “had a complete breakdown, choking back tears” partially because my hypnotherapy was happening at the same time of my separation from Jim. There I was, at the juncture of yet another breakup—yet this one didn’t sting as much as my priors. Jim had never told me he loved me, nor did I ever say that to or expect it of him. I hadn’t allowed myself to become fully invested in our situationship, as a reactive defense mechanism that had been engendered by the Henry and Beau relationships.

“To Cage A Yellowbird” also serves to journal my attempts at reconnecting with intimacy and self-confidence. The aforesaid big breakup had really shattered my sense of self, and I was left feeling fundamentally undesirable. Additionally, being socialized as a gay man has often resulted in me feeling pressured to hook up, to prove my worth, the predictable outcome of that being situations in which nobody has any satisfactory fun. Ergo, for me, the “reliable consistency” Jim and I provided each other was about more than just release. I was chasing the sensation of being desired, even needed. Ultimately, it’s not about the cage itself but rather what it represented: fidelity, power, commitment, and yearning. It wasn’t that I owned him—it was that he wanted to belong to me.

My original working title for the essay was “The Birdcage” (pun fully intentional), which I later relegated to subtitle status after I settled upon its formal name. It is a time capsule of the person I once was and a boy I once knew, self-contained such that I can let myself move on from the associated recollections with the assurance that it’s still somewhere out there, to which I can return if ever I so desire. Should it be of any interest to anyone else, I’m happy to have been able to share.

Science fiction writers, from Isaac Asimov to Liu Cixin, have incorporated heat death into their works, and others like Ursula K. Le Guin explored it as a social metaphor: the dynamism of excitement, of fervor and spontaneity, in a new beginning losing its initial vitality and eventually giving way to social decline and ossification. In such a future, life itself can no longer be sustained.

I believe that we each have our own gravity. More than just seriousness, there is something about each of us that draws people or things into our personal orbits. Some are born with luck, and opportunities breeze into their lives. Others possess unparalleled diligence, and their ability to march ever-onward leads them beyond failures to the promised land of self-fulfillment.

I want to say that I don’t know what I have, but I think that’s untrue. A more accurate statement would be that I am afraid of what I [do not] have, because I am afraid of confronting myself. I am afraid of the truths that I steadfastly avoid, chief of which is the honest assessment that I do not work hard enough. If within each of us exists a universe, I am afraid that mine is trending towards stagnation. I am afraid of falling behind.

Decades from now, when I look back at my life, I think I’ll point to this past year as the year I began to claim to be a writer. It is the year wherein I started publicly sharing my stories and ideas in long-form, cracking open all my accumulated journals and diaries and laying my soul bare for the world to see. For fifty-two consecutive weeks, I have given myself to the void.

I have died innumerous deaths, each of them a death by a thousand cuts, but it is I who cuts myself open a thousand times first and then a thousand times more. Each time I revisit the memories of my past, as I mine myself for content, I re-open those thousand upon thousand wounds. I am a million unhealed scars leaving blood-red stains on everything I touch, a grotesque abominable Midas, whose name comprises mine and my id, not ego. I am Atlas; the weight of what I did to the man I loved rests heavily upon my shoulders, a burden I chose to bear because I hadn’t forgiven myself for my sins. In this way, I’ve been fucking up my own spine as I atoned for three hundred and sixty-five days. I am a pool of regret.

But the joy of art lies in its creation, and I’d like to continue as long as I can. So—

This week technically marks the fifty-third week since I first began A YEAR WITHOUT WATER, and tomorrow (June 25) is its anniversary date proper. I challenged myself to publish every week, and I did it. Now, I’d like to evolve, at least a little bit. Just as I dared to love with everything I’ve got, I’m going to write more for the foreseeable future, because one day my reserves might be exhausted, my star might collapse in on itself, but I will leave behind all my stellar dust for the world to behold that, once upon a time, there existed a universe.

Therefore, this week also marks a rebirth. The topical boundaries will expand, as I think I’ve wrung out all the emotional output possible from the original event. I will publish with a new frequency, not weekly, because I want to give my words some room to breathe. I’d like for my writing to linger a little bit longer.

Below, I’ve collated a retrospective of all my entries so far, each with the section that I like best and/or that means the most to me. I’m grateful that you’ve followed along thus far.

Welcome to A(NOTHER) YEAR WITHOUT WATER.

P.S.—Today is the date of primary elections here in New York, and there is a heat wave outside. Please rank Zohran Mamdani first on your ballot for Mayor. Thank you, and stay hydrated.

1: Who was I before you? Who am I without you? The answer, of course, is: Everything.

2: The hopeless romantic within me could see a future where he and I looked back at volleyball as being the activity that brought us together; the realist within me knew that this was a future that would never come to pass, simply because I wasn’t really into him and because I knew he—despite the kissy and heart emojis that he’d texted me once or twice—wasn’t really into me.

3: I don’t know if I can forgive myself for what I did to him, and perhaps he has already moved on—and, for the most part, I think I have too, yet I’ve come to learn, from Henry, from Beau, from all the men that loved me until they didn’t, that regret is something my emotional self will carry for the rest of my life; a million regrets, a million unspoken apologies—but I’m sorry.

4: So, in the wake of my own, in the aftermath of the ending to the one relationship I wanted so badly to go on forever, I took stock. I reached out to all the men who’d ever dated (and still maintained an open connection with) me to talk. And, then, as I excavated my belongings, so too did I excavate myself.

5: It was the pair of round frame glasses that he only ever wore in his most private moments, it was the sharp jawline that beautifully structured his face, it was the tender smile that he reserved only for me. It was the way he had looked at me on our most fateful day that I could never, will never, forget. Those dreams were the worst. I would wake up from them slightly disoriented with my pillows stained wet from tears that I didn’t even know I was crying whilst asleep. Every morning, my heart broke all over again.

6: I came across a recent video he’d uploaded of himself sitting at an upright piano in his parents’ home, playing his way through and singing “Love Again.” Partway through watching the video, it struck me that he was singing about me. I have to admit, I was charmed.

7: I’m back in Montmartre, my last day in Paris echoing my last day from when I was here in February. I look up at the steps I’d take to get up to a height with a city view worth beholding. It’s a bit of a trek, and I know every step I take will be just another step I’ll have to take back. I decide to ascend, regardless.

8: My relationship with him has become my North Star, the guiding light and standard against which I’ve come to measure my relationships with anyone else, because it’s someone like him with whom I want to be, because it’s him like whom I strive to be.

9: It was as if kissing him unlocked from deep within me a torrent of truths that I had never given the space or effort to confront: that he was ridiculously handsome from the shape of his eyes to the sharpness of his jawline, that I was immeasurably attracted to him but never realized it because I'd locked away in the recesses of my psyche even the tiniest inkling of attraction to anyone else because I already had a partner. It wasn't just that he was smart—it was also that he was unbelievably beautiful.

10: I mourned the love I’d lost, but love never comes when one wants in the way one wants it to. Accepting the love that offers itself, the love that exists, the love that I have and nothing more, is all that I can do; the alternative is a lifetime of misery, self-imposed. Ursula K. Le Guin says "the essential quality of [the entire human condition] is Change"—so be it. I am ever-mutable, done and undone by the people who have chosen to be in my life, and I am all the better off for it.

11: But, my conceit refused to concede anything to the man who’d broken my heart—much less to a man who never ventured into even Brooklyn—and I wasn’t about to let him wrest my favorite city away from me, too.

12: I stopped counting calories and ate gelato every day. I let myself do all the things that I would’ve previously deemed reckless and irresponsible because I just wanted to feel something. I just wanted to feel like myself again.

13: The simultaneous sensations of him in my mind and him in my arms, the collision of psychodramatic desire with physical possession, make me almost giddy with lightheadedness. I didn’t realize it, but I’d been thinking of him all day, anticipating this very moment. Is this what they call love?

14: Afterwards, I asked whether he wanted me to sleep over, feeling ambivalent about either possibility because I’d just spent the entire night being passive. He said no and I went home, resigned to the very likely possibility that singlehood, on the flip side of my very first relationship ever, would never amount to anything more than a struggle with abject mediocrity. Moving on looked like it was going to be supremely boring.

15: There was a time in my life when I thought I had hazel eyes.

16: "LGBT" emerged, like "Asian American," out of political necessity: public identities and coalitions were forged for the purpose of civil rights advocacy. As inheritors of double political identities, then, it’s incumbent upon us LGBT Asian Americans to recognize and dismantle the structural barriers to social equity.

17: Genzaburo Yoshino asks us: "How do you live?" Annie Dillard has a suggestion: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

18: I was a gay boy from Los Angeles; she was a lesbian from Hong Kong. […] Where she was laconic, I was loquacious, and every Thursday evening after class I invited myself over just to invite her outside. She would say that she wanted to stay in, but within the hour we’d find ourselves doing pickleback shots until we had enough liquid courage to venture out to the West Village.

19: I wrote, in 250 words, about becoming the incidental progenitor of an anti-capitalist meme genre as an extended metaphor for deliberate and political misinformation in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election; I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I was accused, on multiple occasions, of being a Russian agent of psychological operations.

20: Thus, when my year without water came to a close, I found myself in a roundabout way starting back at square one: at a gay club watching Nymphia Wind perform, and catching a glimpse of Henry amongst the crowd of gay Asian men. If he saw me, I never knew—I pretended not to see him.

21: Politics is not an inscrutable puzzle; people want to be heard, and building community preempts division. My love life, however, is a different beast altogether.

22: Above all, I was terrified of rejection. I didn’t think my heart, slowly doing its best to heal, could handle it. I was afraid that he just meant that I could spend the night on his couch when what I really needed was to feel a heartbeat against my own. I felt orphaned, searching desperately for a home.

23: I remember that existence being torturous, wrought. I remember holding onto the shred of self-worth I had left, the gentle voice in my head that was patient with me as I sobbed, telling me that this, too, would pass, and that, no matter what, I would always be here for myself. I would always, always, want to be here for myself.

24: My most prominent emotional baggage was a giant piece of luggage that screamed hesitancy, and I vacillated.

25: I wanted to be important to someone. I wanted someone to see something at the mall and think of me. I wanted to be surprised.

26: I told my therapist that Henry was a shadow of me, searching for—yet, unwilling to accept—its source, but it was I who was unwilling to accept reality, that he had left my life and returned it to the bog of listlessness in which I was lost before I ever met him.

27: Later, after Henry and I had broken up, I confessed to Wayne my guilt, for what felt like a desecration of the memories we two had shared by bringing Henry to those very same places, someone who ultimately didn’t deserve to be initiated into that magic because he was a failed lover.

28: In the end, I never gave him the candle. I cradled it in my palm, reminiscing about him blowing it out over our panna cotta dessert; it had been a sweet-but-not-too-sweet finish to a meal I’d anticipated for years, at a restaurant I’d finally had a reason to visit.

29: I wonder what he would think of me, that child version of me, my self from over two decades ago. He’s a construct I’ve created in my mind, I know, but I’m afraid of letting him down. I keep telling myself that I can’t waste any more time, I can’t fail myself any more, because I’ve already burned through three decades and I don’t know what I have to show for it. I’d like to live the rest of my life to the fullest. I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.

30: New York, seen lit up at night through slightly drunk eyes next to a prospective suitor, embodies the romanticism of every stereotypical rom-com set in the city, and adrenaline rushed through me. I’d like to think that he felt the same: we stopped to make out next to Park Row, his arms around me and me lifting him up from below his waist. There’s no better word for it—I was totally intoxicated.

31: Our eyes lingered on each other’s, our faces were always an inch too close, our hands roved the salacious parts of our bodies. He was a natural flirt, but in those moments he was flirting with me, and I’m not one to back down from a game of chicken, especially when I remembered how his skin had felt against mine. When we were at a gay bar in Chelsea, drinking while sketching the nude male models, the other men noticed our dynamic and asked if we were together. We didn’t give a very good answer but, in the crowd, surrounded by—or, protected within—all those gay men, my lips found his. Tom and Jerry were so back.

32: I stared at the Han Kang novels on display, imagining mine next to hers and thinking I’d be in good company…until I realized that I hadn’t looked at the shelves properly. So, I checked again and found that I would adjoin Colleen Hoover, another icon. All things considered, I was pretty happy with my would-be companions.

33: How I loved that tree! To me, a child, it was a benevolent, supermassive being that just so happened to have taken root on the frontmost lawn of our home. The fruits it bore were innumerous, so my mother tried selling them to nearby corner stores. That tree, my very own Giving Tree, watched over me for the first few years of my life.

34: Valentine’s Day approaches with inevitable certainty and I can’t help but remember all the men who loved me until they didn’t.

35: And so we aren’t quite stars but perhaps instead passing comets, or better yet a comet and a planet, momentarily bound until the comet is drawn elsewhere. I’d like to be the comet, but I suspect, deep down, otherwise.

36: In Membasoh Kain di Tepi Sungai, I see—in addition to the labor of the women in the humid landscape—a life I never lived. In Patrick’s self-insert and his male Malay counterpart, I see myself and Henry. I am forced to confront, am confronted by, my history and my mistakes and the future I had envisioned and my helplessness at changing the fact of circumstance that what I had wanted will never come to pass.

37: I wanted to be attractive. I wasn’t—I was anorexic.

38: I think I’m too much, I think I’m too intense. I don’t think I’m too fragile. I come in like a tempest.

39: It is kind of ridiculous to be discussing this from my ivory tower, but I suppose any exercise in personal narratives inherently contains an element of vanity. Let it be known, then, that me airing out all my dirty laundry so publicly is also an attempt at atoning for sins of my own.

40: Between the hitches in his spoken words and breathing made arrhythmic (by my ministrations), I was simply relieved that we were no longer talking about me.

41: I may be a narcissist, but I’m also a plant dad and an April Fool, too.

42: It’s my birthday this week and I confess—everything that I’m writing feels inadequate in the face of reality. All my words have become sour.

43: So, I began to avert my gaze when I held him, I laid him down prone when I mounted him, because I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes and see the life we wouldn’t have together, and I smothered our flame.

44: I’m not delusional: I don’t mean to conflate and equate well-mannered hospitality with actual parenting, but I think I’ve spent a lifetime mourning a nuclear family that I never had. I had one mother who spurned me, but then again I had surrogate mothers everywhere as I invented mothers out of everyone who extended me grace, from my aunts to my friends’ mothers to even Erika Jayne.

45: So, I suppose that the words are for me, too. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

46: It’s the only life I have; I’d like to spend it with the people who are just as understanding and forgiving of the human condition.

47: But, I would qualify this as yet another somber reflection on the sad state of the West’s multicultural experiment, particularly that of the United States, flawed from the onset for its original sins. I’m not despondent, but still I grieve in my own way, silently.

48: I felt that the crowd was similar to that of Bubble T and Papi Juice and all the other social circles in that the cultural element seemed to be performative, not natural, and I’ve been a bit frustrated with the political ignorance and/or apathy expressed by the people who look like me.

49: Wayne changed the way I saw the world. Alberto had done that too three years prior by forcing me to confront my ego and become a gentler spirit, but Wayne taught me to literally see things differently. With respect to art, he instructed me to pay attention to the brushstrokes of paintings and to imagine mixing the paints myself in creating the colors on display, exercising my brain in re-imagining intent. In effect, he re-conceptualized empathy for me.

50: That comprehension, I think, undergirds my ability to empathize. It makes me more open-minded, it makes me a better person and more willing to love, because I know that my love isn’t uninformed. My love is a deliberate choice.

51: But, I don’t think I can atone for a lifetime. I don’t think it would do anybody any good.

52: I loathed him. I loved him.

My Grandmother’s Daughter (& my author’s notes): The dark circles underneath my eyes are hers. The contours of my lips and the shape of my eyes are hers. My love for music, for travel and adventure, is hers. My disarming charm and natural curiosity, my instinct for self-preservation, my refusal to accept unfairness, my drive to go after what I want despite the countervailing odds, the voice in my head telling me that it’s not enough, that I will never be good enough, they are all hers—and yet they have become mine as well. The more I describe her, the more I describe myself.

Kelly Ever After (& my author’s notes): I didn’t have any interest in being patriotic—I was busy listening to Kelly Clarkson.

Is this taboo to admit? Mormons are using it on national television via a Hulu docuseries and Williamsburg blocks are plastered with advertisements for its unprescribed therapeutic usage. Moreover, White House chunguses are openly high off of it as they “work.” So, I think my own use is comparatively uncontroversial.

Throughout the life I've lived thus far, I've never been much of a circuit queen. Part of that was, of course, due to my own insecurities: I felt like I didn't have the right physique to attend each Pride season's customary parties, and I was afraid of being present because I was afraid of being seen. It's not just that I had the wrong body—I had the wrong face, the wrong haircut, the wrong clothing, the wrong style, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong look. This also extended to formal events like queer networking series within the city. I wasn't presentable, I wasn't attractive. I wasn't desirable.

Why did I want to be desired? I thought back to my high school years, where I was attracted to other boys who were undoubtedly heterosexual. Since I knew (read: aggressively assumed, so as to preempt any nascent possibility to the contrary, because I wasn't ready to publicly come out) they were straight, I neither acted upon my crushes nor expected them to be reciprocated, preferring instead to wait it out until my attraction to them would diminish and, ultimately, fade into nothingness. In the end, the boys would be far less than a fantasy: just a pretty face, eye candy momentarily dilating my pupils until I looked away. As I began to come into myself, I grew accustomed to flying under the radar.

College, especially in New York City, was a turning point. The night I arrived, now fifteen years ago, I saw two young men holding hands, walking down an East Village avenue as I exited Veselka, a storied local hangout. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, so I made no remark about them to my friends while we made our way south, but that moment changed me. The theoretical progressive future about which I had long read had suddenly accosted me in person, and it was monumentally unspectacular. It was a tiny gesture, insignificant, a fleeting glimpse into two strangers' private lives, but it meant something to me: that which was possible was very, very real.

My first kiss was, ironically, with a straight man, and freshman year gave me the gift of experiencing a briefly requited crush, but inexperience dictated that I remained insecure. I was overly nervous as I interacted with other gay men on campus because I wasn't ready to be perceived. Instead, I projected onto them a confidence that I admired. I wanted to be able to go about life as freely as I imagined they did.

Every year, I attended the annual New York City Pride March, which famously commemorates the June 1969 Stonewall riots in the West Village. For the most part, I was happy to be one of many and fade into the crowd, although there have been times when my friends and I slipped past the metal barricades to join a random delegation in stomping down 5th Avenue. Sometimes, I'd pick up free giveaways like branded tote bags or Chipotle gift cards. Always, I tried to make a point of showing up in person. It was less about my own sexual orientation than it was about adding my body to the number of attendees: the entire point of visibility is to show the world that we more than exist—we are defiantly ourselves.

Back then, I didn't have the cash to spend on the innumerous Pride concerts and parties, which charge up to hundreds of dollars for admission because they’re headlined by the likes of Madonna. I also couldn't fathom pushing my way past thousands upon thousands of people to watch Ariana Grande cover Whitney Houston at Dance on the Pier. Instead, I hung out with my friends in their apartments or ducked into local bars with them to people-watch. It was enough to be in community.

My first boyfriend, bless him, was a reliable lover and showed me what a secure relationship is. Being with him during those early years greatly catalyzed my coming of age, but I was still shy after that relationship came and went. Successive boyfriends built upon his foundation, and I slowly grew into my confidence and sense of self. By the time I met Henry, I had come to know how it felt to make men fall at my feet. I spent one Pride season with him frequenting Hell's Kitchen and its plethora of gay clubs, allowing him to pull me in close for a kiss while the surrounding crowd danced. I had liked him more than I was willing to admit.

Then, Henry and I broke up, and I was suddenly at the world's feet. Anxiety that I hadn't felt for decades returned with a great vengeance.

The worst breakup of my life happened in April. Our anniversary would have been the following May. I spent the next June's Pride season trying to get over him, breaking my own personal taboo on using recreational substances in the hopes that that would accelerate my doing so.

It should be understood that I grew up with D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) programs featuring heavily in my childhood schooling. While I could still count my age on my fingers, I was instructed to watch somber black-and-white video testimonials from wizened elders with cancer(s) or holes in their throat. More than terrifying, it instilled in me my predisposition towards caution. To this day, I still won't smoke or vape.

For the same reasons, I steadfastly avoided marijuana and harder substances. I feared becoming addicted and spiraling out of control. I didn't even have my first drink of alcohol until I was almost twenty (for legal purposes, I will point out that I was in Germany, where the drinking age permissible by law is below twenty-one).

All these safeguards had been put into place by me, for me, with the express intent of preserving my health, but my health had then precipitously cratered following my breakup via its ensuing depression. I lost over one stone because I stopped eating. Absent anti-depression medication, my brain would not, could not produce the happy chemicals that made life seem worth living. I didn't turn to substance abuse, but it is within this context that I allowed myself to make some relatively radical changes.

The first was financial. I had a nest egg saved up for emergencies, and the possibility that I would die from my melancholia was so urgent that I decided to turn on the spigot all the way to its maximum. I blew a month's rent on an Hermès bag and purchased Aesop's hand wash. Beautiful things distracted me from sadness, and I needed to postpone my demise so that I could use them.

The next was communal. I suddenly had an abundance of free time, time that I had previously reserved for Henry, and I didn't know what to do with myself. So, I began to frequent local networking events and activities. I went on a couple of dates and plumbed my would-be suitors for ideas. I was a vampiric leech, taking them up on their offers to play volleyball or catch free film screenings at Lincoln Center just so that I could cosplay at being alive. I no longer cared if I would be perceived. What did I care if nobody found me attractive? I was a walking corpse.

The biggest change was experiential. The onset of Pride season meant another crop of parties would prostrate themselves for my picking, and my newfound singledom, financial freedom, and liberation from insecurity meant that I could participate. No longer did I have any excuse not to.

I bought some eyeliner and went to rooftop venues in Bushwick. I showed up at local queer Asian nights, befriending strangers who I would later realize were prominent micro-celebrities of the adult film world. (One of them, being of half-Cantonese descent, told me he's never been to Asia; I wrote in my journal that night that I hoped he could make it to Hong Kong sometime soon.) I swore that, in my haste as I made my way through the crowds, I'd rushed past ex-boyfriend number three, because I couldn't forget a face that had slept next to mine for three years, but I didn't let myself do a double-take—I was too busy trying to get over his successor. All the while, I let myself move to whatever godawful music the disc jockey put on, relying on my years of figure skater training to swivel my hips. I took expensive car rides back to my apartment at four in the morning.

Between appointments with my therapists, Pride parties, job interviews, games of volleyball, creative writing classes, and extensive phone calls with my loved ones, I cried and cried and cried. I ran into Henry at some of the finance networking events and my heart stopped—first with despondence because I still wanted to repair our relationship, and second with great indignation because he barely even worked in my industry. I loathed him. I loved him.

That is how I found myself accepting an inducement, shall we call it, during Pride weekend proper at a Brooklyn circuit party. I shattered my substance virginity with great abandon, front row against the barricade of an SG Lewis set. I had been deathly afraid of running into my most consequential ex-boyfriend in the crowd, despite knowing that he doesn't like attending such events, but my friends offered me something for my debilitating anxiety. I decided to accept.

Tranquility set in over me like the softest embrace. So this is what they mean by floating on cloud nine, I narrated in my head. I could feel myself pushing my worries to the side. I didn't have to think about them right then and there; I could postpone them for later. Kylie Minogue's “I Believe in You” came on, and I was so grateful that SG Lewis could read my mind. I did believe in me, I did believe that I would eventually make it through, and I did believe I could let myself have a good time. There was no pressure to be desired by the gay men walling me in—why should I want to be wanted by everyone when I myself don't want everyone? I was only there to let go.

In the years since, I've tried the substance less than a handful of times. It's nice to be, well, anesthetized, but I don't have very many use cases for it because I just don't care anymore. There are better things to do during Pride, during life. Pride is about thriving, after all.

Please vote for Zohran this week.

Ling Ma first came to my attention with the publication of her first novel, Severance, in 2018. At the time, I was on a mission to read as many works as possible by writers of Asian descent, and hers joined my ever-growing list that included Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie, Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees, and, of course, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem—I suppose I was looking for The Great Asian American Novel (not counting the latter, obviously). But Bliss Montage arrived a few years later when I could barely ingest food, much less an emotional tour de force of a story, and I put it on the back burner for when my future self would be ready.

In the months leading up to April of 2022, I was feeling rather disaffected. Mask and vaccine mandates had begun to be lifted, and with that came the so-called "re-opening" of the economy that resulted in hiring sprees across every major industry as companies struggled to replace not only the employees that had chosen to retire but also those that had lost their lives to the novel coronavirus. I had been fortunate enough to weather the worst of the pandemic by working from home, yet I worried that my career was going nowhere.

Henry, my then-boyfriend, was trying to land a new job, and I watched with some envy as he fielded interview requests from recruiters left and right. Being a consultant, he seemed to have ample exit opportunities because it was generally assumed that he had much to offer. In contrast, my expertise as a niche banker was rather narrow, and I had a hard time convincing recruiters that my skill set would be applicable to their open requisitions. Moreover, I was in a bit of a funk, and I procrastinated on my own job search process.

I’ve never been one to derive my sense of self-worth from my career, but it’s also true that I was questioning my place in the world at large. I feared that continuing down the same professional path would lead me to a dead end because I would appear overly specialized in that specific field. However, I didn’t know what I would do instead. I couldn’t return to the creative industries where I’d gotten my start because I’d been away for too long, meaning that I would either have to start from scratch or accept lower-paying positions that wouldn't help me to afford New York’s high cost of living. On the other hand, I didn’t want to stay at my existing company because I could foresee no real growth. I thought about targeting tech companies, but my preliminary conversations with their human resources personnel evidenced that they didn’t believe my skills were transferable. Beyond all of that, the ongoing viral pandemic outside had me thinking more broadly about life: what did I want to do with my limited lifespan?

I think my existential ennui defined my relationship with Henry. As we fell into an easy rhythm of being present in each other’s daily routines, I was reluctant to fully commit to him. Especially after my three-year-long relationship with Jun, it was difficult for me to allow myself to admit that Henry was my new boyfriend for the same reasons that caused my professional angst: I just didn’t know if it was right for me.

"You’re my little experiment," I’d joked to Henry over cocktails one summer night in 2021. We were seated with Luna, his best friend who shared a name with one of my closest friends, in the rooftop area of a Brooklyn food hall (read: a food court with better marketing), who had asked me point-blank about why I was dating him. I went on to explain that I wanted to do something different this time because he would be my fourth serious relationship within a decade. Whereas I wasn’t so consistent with my boyfriends before, I told them both that I planned to always say the same thing to him and his friends so as to leave no room for doubt—we would always be on the same page. Thus, I said that I honestly didn’t know if I wanted to jump into another relationship so soon after my last, but he seemed like a good guy and I was willing to find out. Being straightforward seemed to be the best and most logical policy; I didn’t realize that this one throwaway comment would hurt him, as he would later tell me.

As autumn gave way to winter, Henry began to suffer. His consulting job became unbearably tenable after his boutique firm was acquired and folded into a larger multinational company, and he started dedicating his spare time to finding a new job. Still, he made sure to be with me. He’d come down to my tiny Financial District apartment, sometimes taking it upon himself to wash my dishes or scrub my bathtub despite my protestations. (Why? Well, aside from him being much more of a neat freak than I was, there was an exceedingly simple and obvious truth: he loved me, and that was how he chose to express it.) He would spend four months recruiting before ultimately accepting an offer.

Over the Christmas holiday, I dragged him all the way to Hawai‘i because I wanted to get out of New York and back to a society where I felt more at home. I booked us an overpriced meal for two at a resort restaurant with a table by the windows overlooking the Pacific. We rented a car and drove all over O‘ahu, chasing my craving for lau lau (Hawai‘i’s most ‘ono dish) and taking great care not to drive over any errant chickens. We read books on the sand and failed to acquire Mariah Carey’s themed merchandise from her collaboration with McDonald’s. I got mad at him for something I can’t even remember and spent an afternoon alone, huffily shopping in Ala Moana, before returning to him, contrite. It was our first trip together.

In hindsight, coming back from that vacation was when things between us grew strained, but I didn’t know it then. Aside from our sex life deteriorating, which I chalked up to his work-related stress, everything seemed to be fine. He virtually lived in my apartment with me for a month until I got sick of hearing his irritating coworkers on their conference calls and kicked him out. I put together a Valentine’s Day date for us two, which he claimed was the first he’d ever truly experienced. He invited me to all his networking events, encouraging me to find a new job of my own. I organized another trip, this time to Puerto Rico, because New York was still cold and I wanted to be somewhere warm. I contracted COVID-19 from that trip, spending two weeks bedridden; he went to Trader Joe’s and dropped off at my front door all the groceries he knew I loved without me even telling him. April was fast approaching, and with it a reminder that another year would have passed without my having accomplished anything.

By the time of Bliss Montage’s publication just a few months later, I was a nervous wreck. I perused its synopsis and glowing reviews, concluding that it would be one of those seminal works I absolutely needed to read, but I just couldn’t bear to dive into its contents. So, when the novel finally made its way to me this past week, I had already forgotten its plot and effectively went into it blind. It’s the first book in I-don’t-know-how-many years that I began to read without any preconceptions.

Currently, I’m almost one-third of the way through. I’m fascinated by the narrator’s story as she attempts to parse a romantic relationship she once had—if I were to guess, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d surmise that this is a book about a pivotal breakup. I recognize all the familiar trappings of self-destruction and rancor, because that was how I behaved during my own separation, too.

The worst breakup of my life happened on my birthday. I had planned a weekend getaway to Napa with Henry because I’d never been there before, and it was only a quick flight from New York. Moreover, I was unfamiliar with San Francisco, and I wanted to explore it because I wondered if I should move there, intrigued by its history as the only other famously queer city in the country. Some of my close friends from college had moved there after graduating, and I looked forward to reconnecting with them.

Luna, my Luna, picked us up from our hotel, and we listened to Donna Summer as she drove us up in her car. I told her that Donna’s music made me want to fall in love, knowing that Henry was within earshot. I wanted him to pick up on my hint.

In Napa, we met up with Julie and tasted our way through a couple of vineyards. When we finished, Julie drove us back down. She and I sat in the front seats, catching up, and Henry listened from behind. She had been dating a man for a few years by then, and they were well on their way to getting engaged.

"How did you know that he’s the one?" I asked. I was on my fourth boyfriend, who was in that very same car, and I was thinking about how we were coming up on our first anniversary of dating. "Was there anything that made you certain?"

There were plenty of reasons, Julie explained, but, above all, her would-be fiancé was a kind-hearted soul who she knew she could trust.

"That’s how I think of you," I said, turning around to face Henry.

In response, he beamed. For the rest of my life, I will never forget that smile. It wasn’t triumphant or euphoric—it was tender and loving, a genuine, calm joy.

That night, Henry and I stepped into a nearby speakeasy for a nightcap. Over cocktails and candlelight, I mustered up the courage to ask him something that I’d been wondering for a while.

"Why do you like me so much?"

I can’t remember his response. I can only recall that it sounded clichéd to me, like generic platitudes.

The next day was busy. Early in the morning, he was off to submit his samples to be drug-tested for his new job, and I wanted to walk the entire city afterwards. In the early afternoon, he began to gripe, complaining that he was tired from all the hilly terrain and that he wanted to stop and rest. The grumbling irritated me, because we only had a few hours before our flight back to New York later that night, and there was still so much of the city to see.

"You’re ruining my birthday," I finally snapped. I was so annoyed at him. We found a park in Hayes Valley and sat down on a random bench.

He stepped away to have a look at the park’s snacks vendor, returning with a cold-pressed juice that he tried to hand to me. It was an olive branch, his attempt at making amends.

I don’t know what came over me. My mind swam with dark, intrusive thoughts and I was just angry. I think I told him to go back to the hotel and wait for me if he was so tired, but I probably said something worse than that. Then, I turned and walked away.

I remember wanting to be consoled. I remember wanting him to get up and chase me, to stop me from disappearing, but I refused to look back. I wanted him to know that I was upset.

Blocks later, I turned to sneak a peek behind me—and he wasn’t there. I didn’t know where he was.

Anger, guilt, fear, sadness, remorse, they all crashed within me. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have walked away. My brain was a jumbled mess. I should’ve texted him. I should’ve called him. I checked my phone—no missed calls, no new messages. Fuck. I really screwed up. Intuitively, I knew I’d hurt him by leaving him behind. I should’ve fixed things right then and there. I didn’t.

I checked Instagram; he hadn’t sent me any messages. Indignation and resentment surged within me. You know when you see yourself doing something horrible and you can’t stop it from happening? I felt like I was watching myself from above as I navigated to his profile and blocked him.

I was wrong. I was so, so wrong, and I knew it, but I wasn’t ready to face it. I walked all the way back to our hotel, and then I kept on walking. I was too proud. I wasn’t ready to apologize. Union Square was where I ended up and, in lieu of writing to my boyfriend, I wrote to myself. I walked and wrote; I wrote and walked.

I don’t feel like myself.

I’m sitting in Union Square, solitary by a green, round table, to where I walked from Mission Dolores Park. When I travel, I prefer to traverse the city by foot so that I can experience it all firsthand.

I feel the beginnings of that familiar cage, edging closer to trapping me once more.

I am buried beneath the weight accumulated from years of having let myself go. I stopped caring about my food intake and I stopped working out regularly, and now I reap what I’ve sown. My face is too round. I’ve got a second chin and I feel undesirable. Ugly.

A skateboarder just slipped from his board, which rolled straight to me; in one fluid motion that I saw play out in my head before actually doing it, I placed my left foot on it, stopping it, and kicked it back to its owner.

It’s becoming repetitive, it’s too repetitive, it’s all too familiar. He angers me and I flee. This isn’t what I want.

I fear that I’m coming to resent him for monopolizing my time; I resent myself for letting him. I’m not a wallflower, nor do I have any desire to be(come) one.

I don’t think I love San Francisco very much, and I’m uncertain how much of that has been influenced by my biases resulting from these past couple of days.

The ocean calls me. For whatever reason, I walk down Market Street and find myself at Embarcadero Plaza. I’m the same boy who took the train out to Coney Island on a weekday night, freshman year, for no reason other than to meander along the shore, lit mostly by starlight, and to indulge my inner angst.

I’m standing atop the hill where California meets Taylor; I had walked uphill just to prove to myself I could without losing much breath. The buildings (apartments?) are huge, imposing, and I walk past some church with a gothic facade. I feel the same weariness in the soles of my shoes that I last felt in rainy Kraków a decade ago.

I hate San Francisco, I realize.

When I walked off all of my anger, I headed back to our hotel. I felt hollow. I’d made a huge mistake, I knew it, and I was going to face the consequences. We’d already packed up our suitcases earlier that day and left them with the front desk. I figured he was probably waiting for me with them.

I held my breath as I stepped into the hotel’s lobby. I looked around; Henry wasn’t in any of the chairs. Trembling slightly, I approached the front desk and asked to retrieve our baggage. They returned only mine.

My mind spiraled. The only logical conclusion was that he had left me behind and gone off to the airport alone. He was probably seated at the gate, where we would have our inevitable confrontation.

I called for a taxi (Lyft, because I don’t use Uber) to the airport and jumped in. As we drove, I stewed. I can’t believe he just left me. Is this it? Does this mean it’s over? My temper reared its ugly head, and I was angry and sad and guilty and afraid all over again. I opened Instagram again and messaged his Luna a preemptive paragraph of contrition. To her, it must have seemed so sudden. Everything had been fine, and then everything was not.

Upon arriving at SFO, I headed for the JetBlue customer counter. I was about to make a fatal error. I asked the employees if they had any earlier flights onto which they could place me, separating myself from Henry’s. Then, for good measure, I swapped his aisle seat to a claustrophobic middle seat, knowing how much he disliked them. (Because I had booked our tickets, I had control over our itinerary.) I wanted him to know I was upset. I wanted him to be the one to apologize first.

I arrived in Newark the next morning, half-expecting Henry to contact me throughout the day. A bouquet of flowers was delivered to my apartment—overjoyed, ashamed, I read the enclosed card, hoping they were from him, assuming he’d finally decided to say he was sorry. They weren’t from him.

I didn’t hear from Henry for weeks. When I eventually did, it was too late. He had closed himself off to me forever.

For months afterwards, I replayed the events of San Francisco in my head like a bliss montage of my own. I pinpointed every instance, every mistake that added up to the massive implosion of my undoing, and I wished with every fiber of my being to be able to go back in time and stop myself. On one hand, it seemed ridiculous. It was just a changed flight. On the other, it was a massive blowout, a fight without a fight that still left us deeply scarred.

I want to be clear—I don’t equate the events of Bliss Montage with my own, of course, because those of the novel were engendered by an extremely abusive relationship, which my relationship was not. It’s just that my resulting emotional devastation was such that my brain chemistry was fundamentally reshaped.

Now, years removed from my past, I’m going to allow myself to try and let go of the guilt I’ve been carrying for three years. I know how badly I hurt him, because I know how badly I tried to fix it and still he wouldn’t let me. But, I don’t think I can atone for a lifetime. I don’t think it would do anybody any good. I need to release my regrets—I have a book I need to finish.

In the finale episode of Sex and the City's third season, Miranda accidentally meets Steve, her would-be on-again, off-again partner (after they had spent the entire season shacking up and then breaking up), at a local Chinese restaurant as she's getting dinner. Their separation was by and large due more to an unwillingness to compromise than any deep-seated philosophical differences, and they eventually go on to have a long marriage.

These past couple of weeks have been educational for me insofar as learning how to use TikTok. As a Millennial who grew up with social media, I've been trying to stay away from them in more recent years because I should be doing other things with my time. However, I errantly discovered that TikTok is better than YouTube when it comes to watching clips of my favorite media, and I've unfortunately become hooked.

Miranda's dinner date with Steve comes after she berates herself for the entirety of the episode following an argument with Carrie, who had spoken to Miranda of her intentions to get back together with Big. Miranda very obviously disapproves: as Carrie's closest friend and also the most cerebral of the women, Miranda can't stop herself from pointing out Carrie's self-destructive habit of continuously returning to a dysfunctional relationship. Clearly stung, Carrie retorts that she at least doesn't just “throw away” the men in her life like Miranda did to Steve, causing Miranda to spiral into self-doubt. By the time she runs into Steve, Miranda desperately wants to be forgiven and thus broaches the subject with him; he says the above quote to her in reassurance.

There's something about this scene and what Steve says to Miranda that, for lack of a better word, triggers me. As I began to process my breakup with Henry, I turned to all of my friends and family and situational acquaintances (and even strangers) for support, and they all had an opinion. Of course, since I was inviting everyone into conversation with me, that was to be expected. They offered their insights as to what events might have informed his choice to walk away from our relationship or where I went wrong, some denigrating him for cowardly disappearing and others praising him for firmly reinforcing his boundaries. I was either right to have caused our separation, thereby cutting my losses short, or I was wrong for having transgressed his limits.

No matter what they said, even though I was the one soliciting their thoughts, I felt misunderstood. I couldn't explain in totality to anyone what our relationship had been. Nothing that anyone proffered was an accurate assessment—I knew because I was there. It was my relationship, and I was in it for real. I had seen the way that he looked at me, and I had felt the love he'd had for me despite his great difficulty in expressing himself. I knew he'd loved me in his own way. It just wasn't enough to keep us together.

The summer of 2022 was a summer of weddings. On the flip side of the social distancing required by COVID-19 rules, venues around the world allowed themselves to re-open with updated procedures. With a two-year backlog of events that had been postponed, everything was suddenly back on track. It felt like someone I knew was scheduled to get married every other weekend.

My extraordinary friend, Nancy, was one of them. I had spent months looking forward to attending her nuptials, celebrating her union with a man who matched her worth, not least because I had meticulously planned my next steps with my plus-one. Henry, who I would have seriously dated for over a year by then, would attend her wedding with me. I would present him to my friends there, and then I'd take him to become the first man I would ever introduce to my exacting mother.

Just months before Nancy's ceremony, we broke up.

I was utterly shattered. After a year of dating, Henry and I had begun to discuss our visions for the future. We'd be a dual-male income household based in New York City, and we'd combine our finances to jointly afford a two-bedroom apartment. His new job offered subsidies for surrogacy, which would come in handy should we decide to become parents. All of that would be induced by slowly intertwining our lives, and that would start by acquainting him with my family. My careful plans were in disarray.

Nancy flew across the country to look after me during my breakup-imposed breakdown.

She slept on my tiny, uncomfortable couch and spent over a week handling life’s basics for me. She refilled my soap dispensers, bought me groceries, dragged me outside, made me interact with our friends, tangping’d with me, convinced me to stop sending him roses and to instead reserve them for myself, and fed me copious amounts of avocado toast. Slowly, stubbornly, at the most pivotal junction of my existence, she breathed vitality back into my being.

She saved my life.

By virtue of commanding me around—and I truly am not being hyperbolic when I say this—Nancy rescued me from the brink. For over a week, she ensured that I ate and exercised, putting me through all the requisite motions so that I would stay alive. Of all my wonderful friends, she deserves the utmost credit for my continued existence. I couldn't thank her enough, but she waved me off. She said I could repay her by returning back to myself and, besides, I couldn't die before attending her wedding. To do so would be rude.

Over a month later, I was on a beachfront property in Malibu. Another close friend of mine had consented to accompany me to Nancy's ceremony. We sat next to each other and watched Nancy take her place at the altar, resplendent in her wedding gown, framed by the setting California sun. (Indeed, my original favicon for A YEAR WITHOUT WATER had a backdrop taken from my pictures of the horizon on that day.)

As I watched Nancy and her husband exchange vows, as I listened to them speak their truths in front of all their loved ones, all I could think about was Henry. Nancy stood there explaining her trepidation from when she prepared to meet her would-be husband for the very first time, wishing as hard as she could that that would be her last first date ever; I imagined myself standing up there with Henry, facing each other with vows of our own, and I felt tears threatening to escape my eyes. I could envision myself reading off my vows because I knew that I had it in me to write them all right then and there if I really wanted to, but I also knew that he would be incapable of doing the same. I had loved him enough to make it to the end, but he hadn't loved me enough to work through our growing pains. My heart broke all over again.

There are some pundits among us who believe that gay marriage (and, more broadly, marriage equality) in the United States has been an assimilationist endeavor. They argue that mimicking our heterosexual counterparts is neoconservatism in action because we shouldn't be emulating relationship models that are fundamentally dissimilar to ours, with all their gender roles and politics thereof. I don't quite agree. I don't think that we inherently copy straight people and all their accompanying baggage when we search for a primary partner to wed. I believe that less separates us than connects us because loving is a deeply human experience—I don't think that we're quite so dissimilar at all.

Moreover, it was never just about weddings. It was always a proxy fight for something bigger. Just as how Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission was at its core about the right to discriminate, United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges were about the equal right to exist: if I am barred from marrying on the basis of gender, if my marriage to a consenting man is not legally required to be recognized as it would be had I married a woman, then I am in effect a second-tier citizen afforded unequal status.

Windsor and Obergefell established the right to marry and for that marriage to be protected, but it's no longer guaranteed to remain a settled matter. Conservatives have been agitating for years to turn LGBTQ rights into a hot topic, and they've by and large succeeded with the help of an impotent Democratic Party. Homophobia is on the rise, and legislatures across the country have introduced and passed laws curtailing our ability to coexist.

Facing an organized right that is openly dismantling our civil rights, the Democrats have failed to put up a unified front even on counter-messaging, many instead opting to follow the Republicans and parrot their anti-trans gender essentialism. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, it's no secret that they've set their sights on doing the same to Obergefell next. Thus, as I considered who I wanted to be my husband, I did so with full awareness of the gravity of such a relationship: he would be my partner in life notwithstanding all the adversity we would face.

Henry was supposed to be my plus-one to Nancy's wedding and all the other weddings I'd attend throughout my lifetime because I wanted to be his. I was supposed to meet him at the altar with the most heartfelt speech I would ever prepare, but the realist in me just couldn't imagine him being prepared with vows of his own. I didn't think he could do it. The realization that he was incapable of doing the same because he just wasn't right for me was crushing. It wasn't going to be him. Seated somewhere amongst the crowd and watching the groom kiss the bride, I silently cried.

All my life, I haven't necessarily struggled with being gay because I've never seriously desired to be straight, but I have gone down every mental rabbit hole in trying to understand my orientation. What did it mean that I would spend my life being considered a deviant? What does it mean to be gay? I like men—so what? I didn't see why my personal life should matter to any uninvolved third party because it didn't concern them, and it was clear to me that anyone who would be offended by it was so resultant of their own insecurities. At the same time, I understood it wouldn't be my fault that those very same people and their discrimination would make my life more difficult. That comprehension, I think, undergirds my ability to empathize. It makes me more open-minded, it makes me a better person and more willing to love, because I know that my love isn't uninformed. My love is a deliberate choice.

Last weekend, I sat on a park bench in Greenpoint and listened to my friend, Max, dissect his love life. He's on every app, looking to date, but has so far been unable to find a man of color at parity (full disclosure: he's an East Asian man who just entered his thirties with a job and a double Ivy League pedigree). To an extent, I related. My own pedigree is less illustrious, but I commiserated with him about his circumstances. Dating, particularly as gay men of Asian descent, is a bit of a minefield: we're either fetishized or ostracized by non-Asian men, while other Asian men exclusively date or don't date us—we seldom stand on middle ground, where we're seen for just who we are. While we conversed, my mind flashed back to a similar exchange from three years prior.

“I know you know how hard it is to find something genuine in this stupid city, especially as a gay Asian man,” I'd said to Henry. It was the last conversation we'd ever have.

I was in his tiny studio apartment, finally speaking to him face-to-face two weeks after the pivotal event. He had thought I was breaking up with him during the intervening period, but I had been waiting for him to make amends; when I realized he wasn't going to, I moved to save as much of us as I could. And so, he told me about being a triple minority (gay, Muslim, Malay) in Singapore, where he came of age, and of the racialized hierarchy among the gay men there that placed him at the bottom. Our fortnight of silence had resurfaced old wounds.

I was sorry that they'd treated him that way, but the hierarchy here in New York isn't so different, as we both knew all too well. Better than anyone, we understood how hard it is to find a real connection, between all the Asian guys who only date White men or the non-Asian guys who just want us to personify their submissive sex doll fantasies. Grasping his hand and holding on for dear life, I begged Henry not to give up on us. When I left his apartment at last, I thought I'd gotten through to him; that he ultimately reached the opposite conclusion scarred me deeper than anything ever.

It's true that only Henry and I can ever know what really transpired between us. It's true that it's nobody else's business. It's also true that I've been holding onto the memories of him and me, even if doing so hurts me, because I've been trying to parse it in my own way, week by week. But, I think I'm ready to start letting them go.

Of all my exes, he was the one I still talked to the most and one of the two I actually held in high esteem: if Alberto was my most consequential boyfriend, Wayne was the second.

When I graduated from college, I didn’t immediately have a job lined up. I had spent the prior year working at Sony Music in the hopes of securing full-time employment there, but when push came to shove I couldn’t do it. The job offers I fielded came with salaries below $32,000, which was hardly enough to cover rent and living expenses in New York even if I had multiple roommates. It wasn’t an impossible number, but it would be difficult, and frankly I thought that I could do better.

I had devoted the earlier few years to working all over the music industry. It was an interest I had hoped would turn into my material reality. I was drawn to the pop machine, and it was bittersweet to have come so close only to have to leave with naught, save for the illustrious names on my resume (Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, John Legend) for whom I had managed global marketing campaigns. I had wanted to work in music because it was my foremost passion, but I couldn’t afford to do so.

That summer was difficult. I graduated with great dismay at the job hunting process—I thought there would be more to it than just Googling certain companies and perusing their seemingly unending lists of open requisitions. Honestly, I didn’t even know that many companies. It’s a tangent for another time, but suffice it to say that I needed help and I didn’t try very hard to find it out of misplaced pride.

I spent three months applying to everything I saw, hearing back from almost nobody. It felt like half of my friends had left the city after graduating and the remaining half already had jobs. I was falling behind. Every day, I fought off nervous ennui. I was restless in my tiny, sweltering studio apartment. I wanted to get away from my laptop, but I felt beholden to it because I felt like I needed to be applying to jobs every waking minute. Anything otherwise would be time wasted.

To keep myself busy, I took up cooking. I watched a lot of Food Network shows and mimicked their recipes. I made biscuits and gravy in honor of Peels, the restaurant on Bowery I’d loved, and upset my stomach because I didn’t bake my biscuits all the way through. I made banana cream pies, lamenting that none of my creations came close to the inimitable desserts from Petee’s. At night, I listened to the drunken revelry of my neighborhood bars from Fat Baby to Pianos to Arlene's Grocery; the city was alive, even if I was struggling. It was a small comfort.

I interviewed for paralegal and marketing jobs. I perfected my sausage gravy recipe. The paper-thin walls of my apartment did little to muddle the many sounds of my gay neighbor next door in the throes of his hookups; when he moved out, I pilfered the air conditioning unit he'd left behind so that I could cool down the heat. I agonized for weeks on end. I would’ve taken any job just to be able to afford paying my rent.

Finally, an offer came in and I ended up working for a small startup next to Bryant Park. I became a legitimate adult. I was assigned a salary of up to $42,000, and I was making it in New York. With my professional life somewhat handled, I felt ready to date. So, I downloaded Tinder.

I don't really remember swiping right on Wayne. When the app notified me that we'd matched, I rifled through his profile pictures and vaguely recollected having looked at them before making a snap decision to swipe right. I thought he was cute and I was willing to meet him. I was surprised that he felt the same way about me, too.

There's a Whole Foods on Bowery and Houston that I still point out nowadays to the current love of my life whenever we walk by, who chastises me [for calling him that and] when I do it because I have a bad memory; I forget each time that I've already explained to him the store's significance. Ten years ago, for our first date, Wayne met me there to shop for groceries together and bring them back to my apartment on Orchard, where he would show me how to cook a Filipino meal of sinigang and rice.

Wayne was just two years younger than me. He was a student at the Parsons School of Design, studying art and design and everything that aspiring creatives do at a college like that. For where my life was, Wayne was a breath of fresh air.

At the time, I wasn't depressed, but I think I was feeling disillusioned. I didn't really know what to do with myself after graduating college. I had my corporate job, but was that it? Would I simply spend my days at a desk until I died? Was that adulthood? I kept telling myself that I was going to find my way back into the entertainment industry, where I could actually enjoy the work I would do, but that was in some faraway future and I still had the present to consider.

Wayne, of course, busied himself in his own little world. He was in a constant state of creation: he was always sketching or tinkering away, making art out of his drawings and stop-motion films with clay figurines, as if his well of creativity would overflow should he stop. Even the way he talked was inventive; the spirited diction of the pidgin to which he habitually reverted when conversing in private was animated, not primitive. To this day, the vestiges of the language with which we intimately spoke to one another continue to resurface in how I converse with every boyfriend that has succeeded him.

He was born in Hawai‘i to Filipino parents, who'd lived in Hawai‘i for so long that they once worked for the infamous Dole Plantation. If “Asian American” is a label that broadly (and somewhat erroneously) applies to all people of Asian ancestry in the territorial United States, then Wayne was my first Asian American boyfriend. I'd had brief dalliances with such men before him, but he was the first one that I seriously dated.

Wayne changed the way I saw the world. Alberto had done that too three years prior by forcing me to confront my ego and become a gentler spirit, but Wayne taught me to literally see things differently. With respect to art, he instructed me to pay attention to the brushstrokes of paintings and to imagine mixing the paints myself in creating the colors on display, exercising my brain in re-imagining intent. In effect, he re-conceptualized empathy for me.

I still remember the smell of the tomatoes simmering away in the sinigang broth. I can revisit in my head that fateful winter night when we were cuddled up in an armchair in someone else's apartment, in the midst of their house party, both of us just a little bit tipsy and me asking him if he would be my boyfriend and him fervently nodding yes in response. I haven't forgotten the way he sang in the shower every morning, introducing me to the best Whitney Houston runs and Mariah Carey ad libs, and how I called him my songbird. I've kept in mind all along the instructions his doctors gave me for preparing our meals according to his prescribed diet, because they held me as his partner responsible for his health. For that fleeting year when we all but lived together, him and me and Yin too, I was happy. We had our own little family in a tiny apartment by Tompkins Square Park.

I cried when we broke up. I held him in my arms and I sobbed. I'd cried for Alberto, too, but that was a prescribed breakup, one that we both knew was coming because he was off to a new adventure in graduate school. Breaking up with Wayne was different because one of us was unintentionally and forcibly leaving New York. Dating him had symbolized my moving on from my triumvirate of NYU men—Alberto, John, and Stephen—because I'd loved all three in distinct ways yet the chapter of my life in which they had so heavily featured had closed, but separating from him felt like I was foisting upon him a cyclical trauma: Alberto had left me to be alone for my senior year in college, and here I was doing the same to Wayne.

A decade later, as I was shattered by the Henry breakup, I relied on Wayne. He was living in Hawai‘i but still made time to sit on the phone with me as I processed Henry's departure. Wayne thought that Henry had overreacted and left my life too hastily, but I thought that Wayne was perhaps more forgiving than Henry was. Both men had had the experience of dating me, but only one understood that relationships are imperfect. As we talked, I asked him if he thought we would have eventually broken up too had neither of us been forced to leave New York all those years ago; without hesitation, he said no.

If ever he reads this, I hope that he remembers to check his DMs. We've got a lot to catch up about, and there's a lot of overdue reminiscing. I think he's seeing someone else now, too, but that doesn't bother me. He deserves to be happy.

Recently, I've been feeling the itch to play. I have a set with oversized tiles that I painstakingly—and lovingly—lugged back to the States from my most recent trip to the People's Republic, but it wasn't getting much use because I seldom am in situations with at least three other people who know how to play the game, and even less frequently so with folks acquainted with the particular regional rules I've known since childhood.

Because both of my parents needed to work, a good portion of my upbringing was spent in Changsha, the capital city of China's Hunan province that today numbers over ten million residents. There, I was raised in part by my grandmother and many aunts and uncles, an ocean away from where I was born.

I look back on those years with fondness. I remember cycling through various relatives' houses, each home an adventure of its own with its quirks. Aunt #1 was strict and wanted me to be well-read, #3 struck a balance between serious and fun, #4's defining characteristic was gentleness, and #5 was the cool one, given her youthful demeanor. Growing up in America was an experience of isolation, where we had no relatives and very few friends; growing up in China meant an existence of connection, where the list of relatives was seemingly endless and everyone knew everyone.

It's my maternal grandmother with whom I spent the most time. She was a devoted guardian, accompanying or bringing me everywhere, including the mahjong sessions she'd have with her friends from around the neighborhood. Fascinated by the colorful tiles and the clinking sounds of the tiles against tabletops, I was always drawn towards the game.

I recall the adults being entertained by my fascination. Some might have jested that I should stay away because gambling isn't a great habit to form, but almost always they welcomed me to watch and learn. Although I was always rooting for my grandmother to win, the adults at the table would converse with me too, explaining to me their logic as they snatched and discarded tiles.

Frequently, they'd let me play, too. I'd adopt the seat of one of the players, who would then hover next to me and teach me how to construct my winning strategies. Some hands were predisposed towards certain combinations; others were exceedingly unlikely to win. Round by round, I learned to mimic their thought processes and began to formulate schemes of my own. As I did, I listened to them gossip. I ate their sunflower seeds and chewed their betel nuts, unaware of the latter's addictive qualities and links to oral cancer. Despite being a child, it was like I was one of the adults.

Nowadays, my return visits to China are made with two priorities: good food and good games of mahjong. Fortunately for me, the generation that taught me to play is still extant and is now retired to boot—meaning that they have plenty of time to indulge me in a spot of gambling. My relatives will set a date and call up all their friends to meet us at a local hotel, where we wolf down a quick meal before playing for hours on end. Being that I end up playing against people who've played the game for at least twice as long as I've even been alive, I'm quite proud to say that I can almost hold my own against them, coming out of the sessions with at worst a net-zero monetary loss.

Changsha mahjong is played with few deviations from Hunan mahjong, which itself is vastly different from the play-styles popularized by the more numerous Cantonese and Taiwanese players here in the West. Winning hands are comprised of fourteen tiles constituted by one identical pair and four sets of triples (three tiles of the same suit in sequential order or three identical tiles), and non-themed hands must have their identical pair be tiles numbering two, five, or eight. "Honor" and "flower" tiles aren't in our games, as their presence is an extraneous hindrance at best. Because the decks have been whittled down to just the three distinct suits of tiles, Changsha mahjong is much more strategic in nature.

Like some of my favorite foods in the world (Changsha-style stinky tofu and hand-pulled noodles), I've not been able to find Changsha mahjong in the United States. In New York, the people of Chinese descent are most commonly of Fujianese and Cantonese ancestry, so it's reasonable to expect the games played here to follow the rules of those regions.

Of the new wave of regular mahjong meetups, I view Green Tile Social Club (GTSC) as the one that catalyzed the game's recent revival here. GTSC began sometime in the early 2020s as a hangout for a handful of friends who simply wanted to play and grew into large, public sessions as word spread of their gatherings. I attended their first few monthly sessions in the aftermath of my Henry breakup because I was looking to keep myself busy as a distraction from grief, content to sit down at tables with strangers so long as I could be occupied. It was a pseudo-networking event without the pressures and artifice of making connections because we were all just there to play, and it contrasted with the other social activities I had begun to frequent (gays playing volleyball, gay finance professionals meeting up at a bar, Chinese speakers canvassing for a local election campaign).

In the most polite way possible, I want to say that I was unimpressed by the GTSC attendees. I don't mean it personally or professionally; rather, I mean it in terms of their ability to play mahjong. The broad majority of attendees were twenty-year-olds whose heritage stemmed from the Greater China region, and most of them didn't really know how to play. They showed up to GTSC hoping to learn the game, whether because it made them feel connected to their culture or because it reminded them of their grandparents. That was fine; I learned to play from spending time with my own grandmother, after all, and I understood the impetus. However, that usually resulted in me taking on a more advisory capacity whenever I showed up, watching over the players at my table and teaching them strategic processes.

Plainly, I grew bored. The people were nice, and I became acquainted with artists and McKinsey employees and Harvard Business School students, but I just wanted to play at a higher level. Moreover, the GTSC games typically followed Hong Kong- or Taiwan-style rules, which I dislike because I find them to be cumbersome in comparison to my region's. After a handful of sessions, I stopped attending.

There was a deeper reason for my dissatisfaction, of course, as there often is with me whenever I frequent anything that generally targets people of Asian descent here in America. I felt that the crowd was similar to that of Bubble T and Papi Juice and all the other social circles in that the cultural element seemed to be performative, not natural, and I've been a bit frustrated with the political ignorance and/or apathy expressed by the people who look like me. I disdain the discursive stagnation of lunchbox trauma and I don't derive affirmation of my cultural heritage by publicly drinking milk tea because I don't identify as a boba liberal, but I don't assume that every GTSC attendee was one, either. It's just that the tiniest ripples of self-orientalization were pervasive enough to be another reason why I no longer wanted to attend, particularly because I viewed them in stark contrast to the people I met as we canvassed for a better collective political future.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that I've somehow managed to rope a group of people (friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends) into playing regularly with me this May, commonly known as Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month. Maybe it's just because it's finally warm again here in the city and we're all the more willing to leave our homes. Maybe we're creating our own third spaces and building community and all the buzzwords, or maybe I'm finally caving in to inevitability by teaching people to play according to the style I know best (because it is the best!), but I figure it's all relevant only as much as I want it to be. We don't bet money, instead swapping cards from my Céline Dion-branded deck of playing cards as collateral, but stakes were always secondary to the main event, anyways: getting together to spend some time with one another.

P.S.—Vote for Zohran.

Every episode of the Real Housewives television franchise opens with an introductory reel to acquaint viewers with the major players of the show, during which they each deliver quippy one-liners. Some of the housewives use it as an explicit branding opportunity (Bethenny Frankel); others like to make oblique references to ideas or concepts logical only to themselves (Ramona Singer, Sonja Morgan). The truly savvy deploy searing tongue-in-cheek remarks that verbally skewer rivals and demolish the fourth wall, inviting audiences into their world with all the finesse of a nudge and a wink (Lisa Vanderpump, Erika Jayne).

Fans of the series commonly invent taglines for themselves as a comical and reflective exercise intended to mimic the show's stars. I began to brainstorm mine after seeing a 2013 Lady Gaga interview on Andy Cohen's Watch What Happens Live late-night talk show, during which he asked her what her tagline would be. I was watching the interview because I was, at the time, a diehard Lady Gaga fan, and I very much enjoyed her answer: “They may say I'm a woman, but underneath I’m all man.”

Gaga’s tagline was a cheeky nod to the clickbait rumors at the time that she was a transgender woman, rumors that she herself didn’t care to dispel when asked during a separate interview with broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper, explaining that she felt no need to do so because she doesn't consider being transgender as wrong or offensive. Her tagline was therefore a triple entendre: it played with the frivolity and artifice of celebrity, it invoked a Judith Butler-esque understanding of gender being a performance, and it demonstrated simple self-awareness and humor.

I never watched Real Housewives until after my big breakup in 2022, when I was desperately using media to distract my brain from grief, but it didn’t take me long to come up with a tagline of my own. I imagined myself filming a season as a new member and considered how my debut would be received. To the society crowd that often features on the show, appearances are everything and I knew I would be immediately judged by them on my discernible physical traits; to the fans, every housewife fits neatly into an archetype, and I would probably be boxed in as the gay Crystal Minkoff. Some housewives are brought onto the show because their celebrity attracts viewers, whereas others are cast to provide the kind of train wreck soap opera drama that has defined the show and made it so memorable—if I had a choice, I'd like to be the latter.

I structured my hypothetical tagline to place "gay" first and "Asian" second to subvert the obvious: when first encountering me, I know that my physical appearance is perceived first; my being gay, like my other traits, is secondary. Although I can no less divorce one from the other, I'm well aware of the operational logic of categorization when it comes to identity and first impressions.

In the United States, May marks the start of a month-long celebration of pan-Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander heritage, and I've found myself thinking about my most immutable characteristics. I am a gay, cisgender man who is also of ethnic Han Chinese descent; I am an Asian American who happens to be gay. I am this and that and both at the same time.

As published in full within Forty-six, the following text is the opening section of my personal statement from when I applied to law schools for admission:

Are you familiar with General Tso’s Chicken? It’s a popular Chinese take-out dish, but there isn’t much authenticity to it—it is largely nonexistent within China.

My biological parents are Chinese immigrants, and for them my birth was symbolic—I was named after Uncle Sam. My ancestry is rooted in Hunan, a province in southern China, where I lived when I was young. Hunan is famed for its fiery spirit, which is reflected in both its cuisine and its people: the food is blisteringly spicy and the region birthed decisive figures like Máo Zédōng and my (actual) ancestor, Zuǒ Zōngtáng—or, General Tso. As I was born in the year of the rooster, I jest that I am General Tso’s Chicken personified. More seriously, I hope to embody throughout my lifetime that Hunanese spirit of transformative passion.

I was twenty-three when I wrote that essay. Fresh out of college and working an entry-level job for a banking conglomerate, I felt aimless. I had spent years reading critical race theory as I tried to enlighten myself to the state of the world because I felt disillusioned and, as a result, dissatisfied, and the idea of spending my life generating shareholder wealth didn't excite me; I wanted to be the change I hoped to see, as the platitude goes.

As the internet has connected people from all over the world and collected us into many shared town squares, I've seen over time a recurring comment from non-Americans that the Americans are preoccupied with the concept of identity, most typically with regard to race, gender, and sexual orientation (the latter of which being a function of gender, because the categorization of attraction is predicated upon the gender binary). It's implied that discussing our social strata and milieux is inherently divisive, but I disagree—I think it's part and parcel of critiquing power, and I believe that doing so matters because we live in this society. We owe it to ourselves to be proactive participants in shaping our lives.

In college, I read and reread Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider and her seminal essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," over and over again because I was jaded. The Obama years in the United States had engendered a cheery sentiment pervading popular culture, that equality and improved civil rights were on the horizon for minority groups in the country because we finally had a President who'd experienced firsthand a lifetime as a person of color, such that compassion was more than expected—it was assumed. The logic of representation and identity politics was that the ascension of one of our kind would set the country on a righteous, progressive path forward, notwithstanding all the drone strikes as we continued to wage war around the world on civilian populations or the rapidly-inflating and crippling medical and student debt nationwide. What did any of these issues matter? We had hollow victories to celebrate.

We are also citizens of the most powerful country in the world, a country which stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth.

Lorde's 1985 essay, "Apartheid U.S.A.," brought to light the contradictions of being an American citizen of color, benefiting from existing within the heart of the empire as the empire meanwhile did its utmost in oppressing people of color around the rest of the planet. She saw the Black American fights for equality and justice as intertwined with the liberatory struggles of Black non-Americans elsewhere, arguing in this context for a focused boycott of and financial divestment from Apartheid South Africa. As I sought to understand my own place in the world by studying scientific racism and colonialism, her insights became my guiding light, and remain ever-relevant even today given the United States's ongoing actions against the Palestinian people.

I wrote the following paragraphs in the midst of the reactionary anti-Asian violence committed in the wake of COVID-19's initial spread and impact here in the United States:

I’ve been quietly ruminating upon the recent spate of brutalities inflicted upon Asians, particularly elderly Asians, across the West and I don’t quite feel outrage alone—I also feel deep sadness and unsurprised disappointment that the Westerners, in their infinite, self-proclaimed civility, continue to demonstrate their commitment to Orientalist violence, not least because each successive video, sensational, vivid, depicts attacks on those who might very well be my own grandparents, which isn’t to say that attacks on complete strangers are any less upsetting but rather that they are all my people to whom I’m inextricably linked by heritage and spirit. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment camps to the Vietnam and Korean Wars to America’s neocolonialist presence in the Philippines and elsewhere, Asia(ns) in the American imagination has/have never progressed beyond being the Other.

I’ve seen enough of my friends and peers moderate their own calls for justice to explicate that we as a community don’t want increased policing, which must be abolished for its explicit connection to anti-Black racism, such that I feel somewhat hopeful that my community is learning to preserve the traditions of solidarity established by the likes of Yuri Kochiyama and the self-proclaimed Yellow Peril activists (Third World Liberation Front). The attempts to self-educate are there, as is a demonstrable intent to act beyond feel-good platitudes; so, I won’t repeat what has already been said.

The truest solution to preempting further attacks, bigotry made physical, is simple yet still unattainable, resultant of willful ignorance. White supremacy, the very foundation of capitalism, will not acquiesce overnight to efforts seeking to educate it out of existence because those enshrined in its power, laymen and heads of state alike, revel in its benefits such as perpetuating the permanent (and disproportionately non-White) underclass. Ergo, I’m frustrated by futility: with each passing year, I believe less and less that any semblance of equality will be achieved within my lifetime. Members of the various Asian diasporas understand all too well the impulse to minimize ourselves, attempts to preempt danger, yet what appears to be the active targeting of our elderly, the easiest victims and perhaps most inoffensive, signifies something much more sinister: this is deliberate retribution—hunting season.

This isn’t an impassioned plea for peace—I don’t believe that oppressors can be begged into recognizing the humanity of their victims. It also isn’t that I’m hopeless—my people and I will continue to strive for survival with or without it. But, I would qualify this as yet another somber reflection on the sad state of the West’s multicultural experiment, particularly that of the United States, flawed from the onset for its original sins. I’m not despondent, but still I grieve in my own way, silently.

Truthfully, I really was unsurprised at the violence to which Americans resorted in dealing their retribution to the people they held responsible for the pandemic: Asians. For the color of our skin and the shape of our eyes, we would be made to pay a blood price for the freedoms Americans never lost—mask mandates went unenforced as Americans politicized the virus and faked vaccine records, undoing centuries of medical progress despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. I watched bad faith efforts to pin the brutalities on Black Americans even as the facts blared an obvious truth: this was about who gets to be American, and people of all colors were all too happy to scapegoat Asians, the perpetual Other. McCarthyism never left; Edward Said ought to be mandatory reading across the nation.

As my people grappled with what it meant to be Asian American, a demographic roughly grouped together only by an estimation of our ethnic heritages, all that we could collectively sputter was a hashtag: #StopAsianHate. There would be feeble attempts at reckoning with being a citizen of the empire even as leopards ate our faces and anti-violence protests saw fewer attendees than Electric Daisy Carnival, otherwise known as the largest annual gathering of Asian Americans on this continent. I'm not saying that I hate fun—I just hoped, with a pogrom on the horizon, that we would have devoted greater energy towards building organized power.

Ryan Coogler's reference to the Mississippi Delta Chinese in his newest blockbuster, Sinners, was a welcomed depiction for highlighting the long-lived history of Asians in America. Advocacy groups breathily lauded the film's surfacing of "our legacies," yet what is our legacy beyond total capitulation? I'm well aware that we're a non-monolithic, amorphous entity with vastly divergent viewpoints, so perhaps "Asian American" is no longer a useful framing for discursive purposes. I mean, come on: Kamala Harris, the most powerful Asian politician in the country, was by and large endorsed without question by virtually every Asian advocacy group without seriously endeavoring to seek meaningful concessions, such as a guarantee of the ceasefire in Gaza for which she was allegedly (and untruthfully) "working tirelessly" to achieve. Absent such concessions, she alienated her core constituencies and lost the election, jeopardizing each and every one of us.

I guess I might as well spell it out in plain English: I'm frustrated with the current state of Asian America. Who are we beyond a class of perpetual outsiders, tech company product managers, rave attendees, cut fruit poets, and bubble tea connoisseurs? For what do we advocate beyond hollow representation? Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth, Ted Lieu, Grace Meng, politicians who weaponize their identity in service of corruption and war, none of these people will save us because they're too busy chasing down their next AIPAC dollar.

Look—I get it. We’re not Black, and we’re not White either. We exist in an oft-ignored liminal space because we number less than a tenth of the United States, but we must interrogate our own standing. There's a through line from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the reactionary violence of the coronavirus era; it is long past time that we shed our model minority badges. I don't want to be in the next Marvel film. I don't need the next President of the United States to be Asian. I don't look forward to a future of tokenizing myself as an accessory to racialized institutional power by donning the caricatured garb of my motherland's aesthetics. I am Asian American by default; should I spend a lifetime apologizing to myself for my lunchbox trauma?

I want more for us than a servile, consumerist politics that is governmentally impotent because it is too concerned with its own conceit, a political identity that wields its many cultural heritages as a cudgel in service of entrenching monopolized power and not as a weight that bends it to concede. I am dissatisfied with the Asians of my generation who pride themselves on their apathy, the self-proclaimed "Gaysians" in my social circles attending their "homepas" financed by their six-figure email jobs who will trot out their identities as permanent victims and not as a stepping stone towards challenging our own complicity in abetting historic wealth transfers to the upper echelons of the economic top 1%, for whom we work as investment bankers and lawyers and accountants and technical PMs.

Just as Audre Lorde was Black, she was also lesbian, too. Her identities were inseparably linked and how, I believe, she was able to arrive at her political compass. I've experienced a lifetime of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation from people of all ethnicities, yet I've also encountered firsthand discrimination on the basis of ethnicity from people of all sexual orientations. It is precisely because we are marginalized that apathy is not an option; we must be proactive instead of appeasing via conformity. It's not to say that none of us are trying; it's to point out that not enough of us are doing.

I am heartened by the best of us, from ACT UP protesting the FDA for its deadly inaction on the AIDS public health crisis to 18 Million Rising standing firm after losing a quarter of a million dollars in funding for their stance on Palestine. I am inspired by my friends, who actually work tirelessly to provide free English classes and tenant unionizing support to the Chinese enclaves here in New York. I have witnessed my Asian American peers donate their time and hard-earned dollars to the most pressing causes of our time. I have not lost hope on us yet.

These next two paragraphs are excerpted from the closing sections of my aforementioned personal statement:

As the firstborn of my family’s first American generation, I arose where East met West. So, too, did General Tso’s Chicken. But it is marketed to Americans as Chinese without being Chinese, and it is considered by the Chinese to be specifically American. It inhabits both worlds without citizenship, yet it is still tangible, it is popularly consumed, and it is real.

Just as I exist at the intersection of my identity, so does everyone else at theirs; this makes evident the necessity of interdisciplined leaders, particularly in an age of violent and virulent demagoguery. With my skills and an open mind, I won’t back down—I am no chicken.

This past week, one of my best friends and I walked her childhood block as we canvassed in support of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. We're just two people who each inhabit our own multitudinous identities, but we're aligned in not giving up on shaping the world in which we live. I doubt either of us believes that electoral politics is the only means to our desired end; nonetheless, neither she nor I exert ourselves solely in that direction. I might harbor my own conflicting emotions about the complexities of my identity, but I try to let it guide me towards proactivity. It's the only way I can make peace with my existence at this juncture.

I've only made extremely minor edits to the below by inserting relevant context in parentheses where it's necessary. This is a part of next week's larger entry, so I promise it's not an irrelevant read altogether.

Are you familiar with General Tso’s Chicken? It’s a popular Chinese (American) take-out dish, but there isn’t much authenticity to it—it is largely nonexistent within China.

My biological parents are Chinese immigrants, and for them my birth was symbolic—I was named after Uncle Sam. My ancestry is rooted in Hunan, a province in southern China, where I lived when I was young. Hunan is famed for its fiery spirit, which is reflected in both its cuisine and its people: the food is blisteringly spicy and the region birthed decisive figures like Máo Zédōng and my (actual) ancestor, Zuǒ Zōngtáng—or, General Tso. As I was born in the year of the rooster, I jest that I am General Tso’s Chicken personified. More seriously, I hope to embody throughout my lifetime that Hunanese spirit of transformative drive.

At eighteen, I chose New York for freedom. I wanted to become a real adult, and NYU was the perfect conduit: I lived in the city and not on a campus, I built up my career while pursuing my education, and I was responsible for designing my academic curriculum. We normally must dedicate ourselves to few interests in college, but (the) Gallatin (School at NYU) enabled me to pursue them all and even went further by challenging me to find a common thread.

I found myself returning to music throughout my education, so I decided to test my mettle in the industry. In four years, I progressed from artist management to sync licensing to publishing to marketing because I wanted to be well-rounded, rationalizing that a nuanced understanding of every facet of the industry would only benefit my burgeoning career. I developed my academic coursework in tandem with my internships, supplementing education with experience and highlighting music’s deeper connection to my field of study: because an artist’s music sells best when their audience identifies with their songs, identity is paramount.

To be both broad and specific, I deemed intellectual property the crux of my academic concentration—it was the perfect umbrella for my work. It housed my efforts in music, but it also encompassed my academic interests in various other fields. In addition to learning about the usual patent and trademark disputes, I studied the ephemeral: I considered the transformative impact of musical zeitgeists on public policy, I decried the patenting of the molecular building blocks of life, and I debated ownership—of music, of food, of you, of me.

I eventually arrived at "Ethnocapitalism," my Colloquium. "Ethnocapitalism" is a slight—yet, purposeful—misnomer of a term that I coined to capture the complexities of the relationship between identity and value. Whereas the word has been used to attack ethnically-localized capitalism and justify neoliberal globalization, I employed it to explain how identity filters systemic oppression in capitalist societies and to situate intellectual property within our era of neocolonialism. Informed by (studying) the likes of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, and Slavoj Žižek, "Ethnocapitalism" is thus my attempt to bridge race, gender, and class in the present to inspire a contextual approach to history and public policy. It is a catalyst for pragmatism: by providing the framework for recognizing the realities of difference, it pushes us to establish a society that truly provides liberty and justice for all.

As the firstborn of my family’s first American generation, I arose where East met West. So, too, did General Tso’s Chicken. But it is marketed to Americans as Chinese without being Chinese, and it is considered by the Chinese to be specifically American. It inhabits both worlds without citizenship, yet it is still tangible, it is popularly consumed, and it is real.

I now understand that the benefits of an interdisciplinary education are infinite, chief of which is the comprehension that everything relates to everything else—nothing exists within a vacuum. Therefore, an interdisciplinary praxis is precursory to achieving justice and resolution.

I hope to begin law school because it is an education uniquely positioned to collate my interests and to enable me to achieve change, be it as a musician’s legal counsel or as a public servant. Just as I exist at the intersection of my identity, so does everyone else at theirs; this makes evident the necessity of interdisciplined leaders, particularly in an age of violent and virulent demagoguery. With my skills and an open mind, I won’t back down—I am no chicken.

This statement was painstakingly condensed into two pages from its original four- to five-page draft, and I remember feeling distressingly constrained. I wasn't yet twenty-five when I wrote it, but I wanted to be ambitious. I wanted to prove that I had genuine interest in becoming a lawyer while remaining honest about my uncertainty with the direction my career would take. What kind of law would I practice, and for whom? These were seminal questions that I couldn't answer without dishonesty because I was just a year out of undergrad, and I didn't want to oversell myself. It's for that reason I ended up removing the sections about my hopes of ascending to the Supreme Court of the United States as its first Asian American (Chief or Associate) Justice, but that really was my goal for a time because I witnessed how transformative court decisions could be.

I chose to frame the essay around General Tso's chicken because I wanted a hook. (In pop music, a "hook" refers to the catchiest parts of a song that are designed to grab listeners; as such, hooks manifest in musical riffs and choruses.) I knew that I needed to stand out to each law school's applications readers because I was but one of many thousands of aspirants, and I wanted to do it in a way that would feel genuine and relevant to my developmental trajectory. I also hoped that my triple entendre about cock would be appreciated for bringing humor and my precocious personality to the readers' admissions process, as I figured reading so many essays would be beyond boring.

In truncating my personal statement, I had to excise the portions referring to my gender and sexuality. Space was limited, and I needed to be strategic—and I wanted to avoid throwing down my identity cards all at once because I was trying to make explicit that I merited admission not because I would fulfill their (un)official diversity quota but because I was cognizant of the ways that my lived experiences and perspective would benefit the student body at large. Besides, I would expound upon the gay angle in a diversity addendum.

I resented segregating my ethnic identity from my sexual orientation, which is a function of my gender, because they're intertwined parts of a whole. I am not one and the other; I'm both at the same time. One informs the other, but I struggled with the categorization I preemptively imposed upon myself—if I was to be (mis)understood, I would at least have it be on my terms.

In 2011, Lady Gaga released a song titled “Born This Way” as the lead single from its eponymous album. It’s a song about our most immutable characteristics, and it was famously divisive for its rather ham-fisted lyricism as she tried to craft a hook around innumerous identities and communities. I watched her sacrifice a certain level of commercial success to stay on message during the years immediately following that album campaign; I choose to believe that she was acting in good faith.

All these years later, what I remember most about the song isn't that it was aggressively pro-LGBTQ—it's that she went out of her way, however awkwardly, to include those of us of Asian descent when such generic empowerment messaging (at the time and now still) usually leaves us out. Perhaps it was more than serendipitous that the album was released in May.

Suffice it to say that May has me thinking about being the Asian person whenever I'm in queer spaces as well as the gay person in Asian social circles. I don't know if I love it or hate it. When I was younger, I was much more fiery about identitarian advocacy; nowadays, I’m a bit more measured in my considerations of the matter. This isn't to say that I've moderated my politics at all, but rather that I've learned to take into account certain realities like the fact that around 7% of the American population is of Asian descent. Despite my many frustrations, it just kind of is what it is.

Why was—is—identity so important to me? Well, it was and it wasn't—it is and it isn't. It's a background context that functions as a rhetorical shorthand for the implied formative experiences that have shaped my worldview and me, as nurture does nature. It's not something I think about during my every waking minute, and yet it affects how I navigate life because it influences how people interact with me.

I suppose that it ultimately comes down to connection. As social creatures, we're drawn to each other, we're undone by one another. Mutual understanding is an accelerant for forming interpersonal relationships, which is the basis for living in society, birds of a feather and the blood of the covenant and whatnot. Thus, discussions about identity are predicated upon a desire to be known and to find common ground.

I didn't ask to be born gay, just as I didn't ask to be born Chinese and all the other fixed traits that make me me. Because the circumstances of birth are just that—circumstantial—it seems to me that they're also an inegalitarian basis for social division. What matters more is, as I once quoted Annie Dillard, how we spend our days, because that's how we spend our lives, our limited time here on this earth. It's the only life I have; I'd like to spend it with the people who are just as understanding and forgiving of the human condition.

Lately, I've been having some problems with reading. It feels like my mind is a closed door, and it abjectly refuses to open. I can work my way through short essays, fiction or nonfiction, and I can easily pick up books I've already finished years ago, but I cannot for the life of me start reading something new. I can't immerse myself within a new world.

I mean it quite earnestly when I say that I love to read. I love to chance upon a glowing review, a full-throated endorsement of some seminal or underappreciated work, and to go out of my way to acquire a copy of that work for myself to peruse. I love diving headfirst into a literary unknown, meeting new characters and accompanying them on their journeys. Sometimes, it's because I find a bit of myself in them, and their circumstances parallel my own; other times, it's because there's a foreign scenario I've never before considered, and I enjoy or I learn from how the events play out.

I think I became a voracious reader out of necessity. Because I grew up sans the internet in suburbia with absent parents, I was often dropped off at the local public library and given a rough estimate of the time at which I would be picked up. I remember occasionally feeling miffed or inconvenienced at being treated like an afterthought, but in truth it didn't really bother me all that much.

I was around ten in the early 2000s when I discovered Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes, and I credit the comics for having greatly influenced my worldview. My deadpan humor and my sense of imagination—I'd like to think that they're a result of countless hours spent browsing those strips, and I'm grateful that my library had those comic books in spades.

What did upset me was being forgotten by my parents—I've mentioned before how they once forgot to pick me up and, by the time my doddering father actually did remember me and arrived to get me, I was stepping into a police car to be taken away—and I won't call it child abuse because I think there are much worse situations than mine, but I suppose that's why I came to love books so much. Books never left me behind.

As I attended elementary school, I prided myself on being one of the few kids who asked librarians for lists of recommended novels organized by grade level and actually finished every book on those lists. I felt so accomplished for having parsed my way through, never asking my parents for help because my English seemed to be already better than theirs. I loved the teleportation magic of Jack and Annie's Magic Tree House, I followed Laura Ingalls Wilder across the United States to her Little House on the Prairie, I solved mysteries with The Boxcar Children and battled aliens alongside the Animorphs, and I felt personally affected by the miseries of the Irish Potato Famine, too. In church, I read the Bible not because I was studiously religious but because I simply wanted to know what happened next.

Given this context, suffice it to say that my current inability to delve into something new is impacting me quite negatively. I've made many attempts, from Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement to Min Jin Lee's Pachinko (I am a diehard fan of Free Food for Millionaires) to Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, all to no avail. My brain just won't get going. Instead, I've found myself taking multiple, short-interval dives back into the series I finished most recently before my block began: I've been reliving the genius machinations of Jia Matiza in The Dandelion Dynasty series, and I've been shadowing Eleanor Young as she struts fashionably around the world in Crazy Rich Asians. I managed to finish Kevin Kwan's Sex and Vanity purely because of the thematic similarities to his more famous series as well as some novels set in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, but that's apparently become my limit. Some of my inertia is due in part to my own shortening attention span, I know, but there's a more uncomfortable reason for my paralysis.

This is a quote by James Baldwin from his 1962 essay, "The Creative Process," and has made its way around the internet time and time again. It's part and parcel of a broader statement about the importance of art, of self-examination and discovery, in the face of life's unpredictability. Art comforts the aggrieved because it demonstrates the very human bonds between us all, and that connection alleviates some of the suffering that ails us by attacking its core tenet: loneliness. As I mourned the partner-who-should-have-been, I sought refuge in established characters and universes because there would be no surprises—I could count on them for the succor they'd reliably provide. Like a fledgling still refusing to take that first leap, there's a comfort in familiarity that my brain hasn't yet been able to do without.

I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

Wayne, who had happily taken up the mantle as my consequential second boyfriend a decade ago, was born and raised in Hawai‘i. In New York, he trained his creative capabilities and taught me how to properly view art. He drilled into me a foundational understanding about Hawaiian history, and we spent a brief summer together on O‘ahu, where I experienced firsthand its multifaceted culture and felt a deep respect for and kinship with the people who looked more like me than anywhere else outside of Asia. It was back to Hawai‘i for him after our year together and I was forced to move on, but the impact he made on me has endured.

Ho‘oponopono is defined as a traditional Hawaiian practice of rectification, translating roughly to actively placing something back into balance. There are blogs aplenty about how it can be used as a prayer for self-empowerment or forgiveness; I am neither Hawaiian nor the proper authority on how ho‘oponopono should be articulated, and I'm not keen on furthering any cultural appropriation of an already dispossessed people, but it came into my life at a time when I was desperately latching onto anything and everything in the hopes that it would make me feel even marginally better. Ho‘oponopono's Hawaiian roots comforted me because it felt familiar.

Rudimentary Google searches taught me the four basic mantras that one would make as one sought to make restitution: "I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you." It's not intended solely for romantic contexts, but I was grieving the loss of Henry, the man I had hurt, and my brain was out of control. I needed something onto which I could focus my frenetic energy, and repeating these words felt like speaking my atonement into existence. Maybe if I sufficiently begged, the universe would deliver me my salve. I spent weeks replaying the words in my head and writing them out.

Losing a loved one via a breakup wasn't new to me, but the pain of rejection by the hands that used to consistently reach out for me was. I had never before felt so singularly responsible for such a separation, and yet I also felt that I unfairly shouldered the majority of the blame. I did something that hurt him, that he didn't say wasn't forgivable but rather that it scared him away, and I never got the opportunity to point out that how it fell apart wasn't right. It wasn't right that Henry walked away, so flippantly placing me at fault. It wasn’t right because he was afraid of how angrily I’d reacted to something he’d done to me on my birthday, and he wasn’t willing to reconcile with his own errors. He wasn’t willing to reconcile with me.

I recall reaching out to two of the three men (Alberto and Wayne, because I still had Jun blocked) who'd been Henry's predecessors because I wanted support and affirmation. I asked them to tell me, honestly, if what I did was so unforgivable, knowing full well that every individual has their own red lines but needing to hear some semblance of forgiveness from the men who'd walked in Henry's shoes because he wouldn't grant me what I wanted. (Wayne, ever chipper, was much more exculpatory.) And so, I retreated to my echo chamber of men who'd loved me until they didn't, indignant that nobody in Henry's echo chamber seemed to want to sit him down and tell him that it was ridiculous to end a relationship over something so trivial. I wanted one of his friends to stand up for me because I genuinely loved him but made a mistake for which I wanted to atone, and it felt like they wouldn't because they were all inexperienced youths in their twenties who dealt in absolutes and weaponized therapyspeak. I'm not a fucking red flag. But life isn't black and white—there's some brown and yellow in there, too—and I was willing to forgive all his mistakes, yet to no avail.

For months afterward, I couldn't sleep alone. The space Henry formerly occupied next to me in bed became a glaring absence that screamed at me about my failures, and then I'd close my eyes and venture off to some nightmarish dream wherein he'd manifest and scream at me there, too. It was fitting atonement, I supposed, being unable to speak the words I wanted to make it all better.

In my journals, I wrote that I hadn't much left to say, or at least nothing new, no newfound insight or wry commentary, hoping that my emotional turmoil had lessened. My anxiety seemed to be less present. My days had mostly returned to some sort of normalcy, and I forced myself to "do stuff" and keep busy despite knowing that it was a distraction, gambling that the distractions would occupy my time until they were distractions no longer. I tried to make new habits and forge new neural pathways. Maybe.

Old wounds festered: him being sighted on Grindr so immediately after our breakup, none of his friends advocating for us to properly reconcile. I needed to stamp out every last bit of hope that remained in my heart. I doubted that ho‘oponopono would "work" for me, but I kept at it because I had nothing left to lose, and I would simply dissolve into tears if I thought about it too much.

I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

There was a time in my life when none of my ex-boyfriends lived in the same city as I did. I tried to move on without them, rationalizing that physical distance, thousands of miles, made separation the logical outcome. It made parting that much more bearable. I'd broken up with the first two because they moved away, and the third because we'd reached the end of our rope. The fourth—well, that was somewhat my fault. I thought I'd learned from all my mistakes with the first three and gotten it all out of my system throughout my messy twenties so that the rest of my life with the fourth could be smooth sailing; I was wrong, of course. Life isn't so easy.

As of right now, there are three of them here in New York. Three running rampant all over the city I used to adore, three men trampling all over the autonomy I once felt, the independence I tried to build as I weaned myself off of their love. Three men with whom I'm terrified I'll cross paths on the sidewalks we used to frequent together. Three men I used to love. Three.

I've been taking baby steps on my road back to myself. Reading still happens with insurmountable difficulty, so I've been trying to find alternative inlets to other worlds. I took up ceramics to ground myself, finding great satisfaction in creating something out of the earth. I've been learning to paint, typically with acrylics and seated alongside some of my best friends as we chit-chat. I've also been blowing my life savings on traveling around the world because I no longer care about the future when my present is so depressingly dire, searching out there for the adventures I used to undertake through literature at home. I just want to cheer myself up a bit and reconnect with my innermost spark.

It's not Henry to whom I've been repeating my mantra, at least not lately. In the intervening years, his silhouette has shifted to take on the shapes of Beau and Jim and plenty of other men as well. But, I'm reminded most of all the times my friends tried to snap me out of my stupor and shake some sense of self-worth back into me. So, I suppose that the words are for me, too.

I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

There was a time in my life when I thought I had hazel eyes.

Back when I was just over 10 years old, I knew that hazel as a color leans closer to the fragmented shades of pistachio, but I was a kid who wanted to feel special. I rationalized that the complexities of hazel, not merely green, allowed for the inclusion of brown. My eyes are firmly brown (not even remotely hazel), but there was a song that I loved, that made me feel seen, and I wanted to stake my claim to it because it was mine—it was about me and nobody else. I'm talking, of course, about "Behind These Hazel Eyes" by Kelly Clarkson.

If every gay man has a relationship with a pop star onto whom he projects himself, then Kelly was my North Star. I was a diehard “stan” before I knew it. Because she was with me through all of my ups and downs, all of my formative experiences, my adoration for her was incontrovertible, and to me she could do no wrong; I thought I would love her forever. It all began in 2002 with a reality television show, when she came into my life before I even came out to myself, but I never foresaw that my relationship with her would eventually crash and burn, hijacked by a string of ex-boyfriends.

Founded by Jerry Portwood, who formerly served as the Executive Editor for Out and the Digital Editorial Director for Rolling Stone, the Queer Love Project’s editorial mission is to advance and archive LGBTQ+ narratives. Through our stories, we give voice to the humbling and deeply human experience that is love. Expressing our love, our humanity, can also be a political act in defiance of our systemic persecution; therefore, by leaving behind as much of our art as we can for future generations, we show them that they are not and will never be truly alone.

"Kelly Ever After" is a fun essay. It retraces the (parasocial) relationship between me and a certain pop star as my life has progressed, and it's an attempt to preserve a spirit of lightheartedness despite the changing seasons. I'll pause here before discussing my essay in further detail below to avoid potential spoilers. I hope you like it!

Fans of Kelly Clarkson will know that she has been drumming up interest online over the past decade through video recordings of her cover versions of various artists' music, usually shared under the hashtag #KCFanRequest. (Indeed, I used to personally maintain for posterity a running list of such covers at Last.fm.) These performances first began as she toured and were later incorporated into her television show, The Kelly Clarkson Show. My original concept for "Kelly Ever After" was prompted by her more recent performances on her show of "Good Luck, Babe!" and "My Heart Will Go On" by Chappell Roan and Céline Dion, respectively, both songs that have entered my personal canon. Her takes on these records came to me through virality because I no longer follow her as ardently as I once did.

That, I realized, was a train of thought that could be fleshed out into a proper full-length essay. When the Queer Love Project sought work by LGBTQ+ writers about how music has shaped our lives, I knew I had the right piece. Some of my eagle-eyed early subscribers may recall previewing my drafts for Fifteen and Sixteen, which served as the basis for "Kelly Ever After" and were my early working copies as I tried to parse my way through a relationship I used to have with the music I used to love. Thus, "Kelly Ever After" is the first time it's been published in full, and I hope that those interested will find intriguing the essay's process of evolution. (It reminds me of when Carly Rae Jepsen, who I promise is relevant to this essay in an extremely tangential way, released her songs "Felt This Way" and "Stay Away" on the same album as a sample of her songwriting process.)

As I wrote this piece, I had in mind many of the men (of Asian descent) that I've dated. Two of them, Jun and Henry, ultimately made it all the way through to the essay's publication because they were the ones most consequential to the subject matter. Others were excised, including a man from Hinge with whom I had a very fun first date and who would later go on to attend Kelly's first Las Vegas concert residency, which made him a bonafide fan in my eyes.

How did Kelly Clarkson become my diva of choice? I know that every gay man stereotypically has his idol, but my relationship with mine was intense. Honestly, I think I just discovered her at the right place and time, at a critical juncture in my life as I began to undergo my adolescence. I retreated into music very early on when I began to withdraw from the world, and listening to my favorite songs helped me to create and curate a vibrant inner sanctum. Something Corporate, Jack's Mannequin, Taking Back Sunday, The Killers, and Senses Fail were the bands whose music adorned my mental refuge; I felt misunderstood by everyone except them…and Kelly Clarkson. Kelly, whose music was on heavy rotation at every Top 40 radio station when I began to pay attention to pop music, was the only pop star who presented as authentic to pre-teen me.

I was around twelve. "Since U Been Gone" and, of course, "Behind These Hazel Eyes" were the first songs to really break through via pop radio to enter my life, and I was fascinated. Kelly didn't seem to be like any of the other pop stars. She had the affect of a next door neighbor; she wasn't manufactured, and her music felt real. Therefore, she was also the reason I became interested in pop culture, celebrity culture, music culture, just plain, simple culture. She was why I began to pay attention.

I've always been drawn to lyricism, I think as a holdover from a childhood spent in libraries. The songwriting on Breakaway was easy and straight to the point, which is probably why it connected so easily for me, but—as I mentioned within the essay—it was My December that really hit home. That album, from start to finish and including all the bonus songs I had to track down across the internet, had—has—zero skips for me, from the romantic yearning of "Can I Have a Kiss" and "Be Still" to the roaring scorn of "Don't Waste Your Time" and "Judas" to the forlorn "Maybe" to the secret "Chivas." I loved that album. I still do.

In the lead up to her fourth album, All I Ever Wanted, I became a fanatic. I followed her WordPress religiously, desperate for any news about new music. When it finally released, I was instantly smitten with "The Day We Fell Apart." The angst was as real as the mythos of the successor song to "Irvine," which turned out to be "Ready." I followed news about her tour, obsessing over her performances of unreleased tracks "Poison Candy" and "I Wish I Could Be Lonely Instead." I got into play-arguments with my friends online, who told me they thought Kelly made music blaming other people for her problems. I read fan-fiction named after a Thankful deep cut. I was obsessed.

I couldn't be the only one, right? Well, I thought I was, until I wasn't. I met other gay men as I came of age in college who were absolute Kelly fanatics, and it was always kind of a surprise to me because I never pegged her to be a celebrity with such ardently devoted fans. She wasn't a Madonna or a Cher—she was just Kelly. I was almost baffled to discover that Kelly Clarkson had shooters because, speaking frankly, I knew her music was somewhat artistically staid in its unwavering commitment to generic self-empowerment and that she wasn't an iconic musician. (As I write this, my friend yells over to me from my couch that Kelly is like the mom-from-next-door who absolutely kills it at the neighborhood karaoke jam, which I could concede is iconic in its own way.) I loved her despite all of that, but I didn't realize so many others did in the very same way.

Jun, who would become my third boyfriend, was one of them. He had fairly expansive knowledge about the landscape of music, so his devotion to Kelly seemed a bit paradoxical to me. (You're knowledgeable about the legendary Donna Summer's discography but choose to be a Kelly Clarkson devotee? I was totally mystified.) Meanwhile, Henry, who would become my fourth and most consequential boyfriend, had an obsession with Kelly that seemed justified to me because he wasn't a deep connoisseur of music. He wasn't the type to dig into an artist's production and backstory context; his interest in music was purely shallow. That suited his Kelly Clarkson fandom just fine. (In comparison, living with Wayne, my wonderfully artistic second boyfriend, was like having my life intertwined with a songbird of the great musical canon; I would frequently wake up to him belting Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston classics in the shower. On the other hand, I feel as though I owe Alberto, the first, an apology for putting him through the whole "Alone" ordeal during our first intercourse.)

I suppose I should articulate my caveat that I don't seriously believe every single gay man of Asian descent has deeply loved Kelly Clarkson at one point or another within his lifetime, particularly because we aren't a monolithic demographic, but that wasn't the point. I simply saw a through line between identity and love, and I wanted to have some fun with the essay while balancing humor against history.

Henry was such a consequential boyfriend because I wanted him to be. I wanted him to be the man with whom I'd fall into a stable, secure, and loving relationship because he was kind, caring, and reliable. After a decade of going out with guy after guy after guy, I was tired of stringing myself along with men who for one reason or another couldn't go all the way; I was sick of dating. Henry represented the possibility of me moving on to a new chapter of life, one wherein I had a life partner with whom I could share everything. It wasn't that I wanted to conform to mainstream conventions of monogamy or whatever—I just wanted to know what it was like to have someone who would choose me above all others for more than just a year or two.

Above all, I think of "Kelly Ever After" as a bit of a metaphor for the fickle vicissitudes of life. The pop star who was also my North Star, whose live performances were always reliably superior to the studio recordings, whose depositions in the Dr. Luke and Kesha lawsuits I read voraciously, became a falling star when the gravity of my dating world unbearably intensified; my parasocial relationship with her was tainted because I had come to associate her with the man who shattered my heart.

The image art I created for "Kelly Ever After" is a composite of pictures I've taken with my cardboard standees over many years, from the record label offices to the New York City subway to my apartments from throughout my twenties. I should also say—I know the stereotype about writers needing editors because we're overly verbose—that I'm grateful for the Queer Love Project allowing me to keep as many paragraphs as I ultimately did, because I'm a maximalist on occasion and I love to over-share. I want to believe in the capacity of humans to read just a couple more sentences than most would expect in the era of the attention economy.

I hope the Kellebrities enjoy the puns and references I've embedded within the essay itself, and I know they'll understand when I admit that I can't listen to our favorite diva anymore. Although I intimately felt her progression between Wrapped in Red and When Christmas Comes Around… because Henry had loved her new Christmas music, it just all got to be a bit too much. I'll grant that, with years of distance between my ex-boyfriends and myself, I can appreciate chemistry’s "my mistake," "magic," and the Carly Rae Jepsen-penned "favorite kind of high" all the more, but my relationship with Kelly Clarkson will never return to what it was. It is, instead, a beautiful disaster of my own.