A (Third) Year Without Water.

Happy anniversary to us.

I remember the bulk of my teenage years as having been spent on the computer, playing an online multiplayer video game from Korea named Maple Story. Seemingly out of nowhere, it had taken the East Asian boys at my high school by storm, and there was a good chunk of time where it felt like we were all rushing to log in as soon as we returned home in the afternoon.

Back then, I didn’t have a lot of male friends. The ones that I did have were holdovers from elementary school and the boys they’d since befriended, but I mostly socialized with girls, the sort of people with whom conversations never felt forced. Sometimes, during our hourlong lunch breaks, I would even flit between different female social circles, spending a good fifteen minutes with one group before going over to chat with another. I felt that I had a little bit more in common with them.

Online, in the virtual world that provided the setting for Maple Story, the gender ratio of my friends was less lopsided. Whereas most of my peers from school soon moved on from the game within maybe a year of its original arrival, I was the lone person who kept at it. I liked its cartoonish fantasy elements, and I had a gift for talking to all the strangers who played it as often as I did; I found it quite easy to distinguish between genuine and indifferent or mendacious people, and I enjoyed getting to know them. The game’s collaborative aspects laid fertile ground for socializing, and I quickly made a lot of friends both casual and close. In that way, it functioned as a quasi-social network, and it became one of the few constants in my life until I went off to college.

In the real world, I felt a little out of place at school because I had low self-esteem and everyone seemed to be so much smarter or more accomplished than I was, but everything was much simpler online. I wasn’t me—I was just some animated pixels on a screen, pixels that I wound up spending nearly a thousand dollars to beautify over the half-decade that I dedicated to the game. In the digital world, I went on adventures with strangers until they became great companions.

I think that I was lonely. In addition to my diminishing sense of self-worth, I had begun the process of coming out to myself. Homophobia was much sharper in the 2000s, and I was fearful of any possible material consequences if I shared my secret with anyone I knew in real life, notwithstanding the fact that I also felt like I had no friends—which wasn’t true, because I did have friends who I cherished deeply, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I needed an outlet where I could develop my sense of self on my own terms, at my own pace, free of pressure and judgment. Maple Story became the place to where I escaped my slightly tumultuous and very controlling household, during my parents’ divorce that I swore had no effect on me. When my parents would confiscate the internet router because they assumed that I was slacking off from school and that doing so would cause me to focus on my studies, I was isolated and cut off from my friends, the people who truly understood me and chose to associate with me for no reason other than liking the person they knew me to be.

Twenty years ago, the internet was a very different place. Less stringent regulations meant more room to breathe, to freely exchange words, ideas, and concepts without overbearing surveillance and censorship. In that lax atmosphere, creativity and interconnectivity flourished, and I believe that was reflected in human-to-human interactions. Strangers met through chance encounters were capable of becoming lifelong friends; I know this because my close friends to this day are living proof. Some people even experimented with romance—a sort of precursor, if you will, to online dating. The internet was a sort of great equalizer that forced everyone to start from the same beginnings.

It came to be that I was spending all my time online with the same players, the same people. We undertook quests, we felled great monsters and collected rare items, we did everything together, all while making conversation and getting to know one another. I had acquaintances of every gender, best friends…and boys of interest, too.

I had crushes on both boys and girls throughout all my school years, but I almost never acted on them because I was wary of how I could be perceived for my sexual orientation. Thus, save for a very brief month wherein I kind-of-sort-of had a girlfriend, I didn’t date until after I got to college. Yet those same stakes were all but nonexistent online, and I was still learning to conceptualize romantic relationships. I guess, in hindsight, it’s unsurprising that I began to wonder if I’d developed crushes on some of them too.

One such example was a boy I affectionately (and rudely) nicknamed Rat Face. Because we’d played together for so long, I was reasonably certain that he was a real person, not a catfish. We’d added each other on Facebook, so we knew what the other looked like, and we talked all the time both inside and outside of the game—before text messaging via phones was my thing, I was a habitual user of AIM (AOL instant messenger) and, to a lesser extent, MSN (Windows Live) Messenger. Rat Face and I knew all the important stuff about each other because, for a good year or two, we spent all our afterschool days in the same digital space. He was straight, and he knew that I was not.

It’s never been my interest to go after straight guys because I don’t believe it to be worth the effort. The supposed taboo doesn’t stimulate me, and the coercion that’s sometimes required to get to even just a tryst is distasteful. Yet I also understand sexuality to be a spectrum, that people are allowed to experiment without labels, and so it was unsurprising when I began to intuit that Rat Face liked me back. In his case, however, there were more obstacles than could have been overcome to get us to a legitimate relationship.

The internet was where I did my own experimentation. I was exposed to and read as much as I could about everything relating to orientation, gender expression, individuality, communal identity, and such. The mini interactions I had with strangers online taught me infinite lessons about relationships as not just a noun but also a verb. All the hours spent with Rat Face culminated in him telling me, in one quiet moment, that he’d nearly said “I love you” to me and had to stop himself from going through with it; it was simultaneously heartfelt and heartbreaking, illustrating rather clearly the emotional limits that heteronormativity places upon straight-identified men. I chose to parse it as simple proof of the human capacity for connection, that two individuals with enough repeated exposure could eventually journey to greater depths together. We’re not so inflexible, after all.

A friend of mine recently tried to set me up on a blind date. Knowing of my malaise, my general and ongoing apathetic attitude towards love, and empowered by the success of the relationship he’s now had with his current boyfriend for a couple of years, he wanted to share some of his wealth with me. He ferried photographs and snippets of information between us, his acquaintance and me, two would-be suitors, excitedly claiming that we would be a good match. In his eyes, we were more than sufficiently compatible.

Finally, he procured a phone number for me to message, and so I obediently followed through with an introductory text. I didn’t get a response for twenty-four hours, by which point my very low level of interest had completely dissipated, and so I declined to pursue it any further. My heart just wasn’t in the mood for it.

It’s not that I’m not entirely uninterested in dating, but it is true that I’m trying out something new in this phase of my adult life. I no longer think of my singlehood as an affliction, a plague of which I should desperately purge myself, much to the chagrin of my younger self who spent his twenties as a serial monogamist. Back then, whenever a long-term relationship ended, I would fall into a depressive spiral engendered by self-loathing thoughts about how I wasn’t good or desirable enough for a boyfriend to stick around. Like clockwork, I returned to the dating apps each time with my tail between my legs, ashamed because I hadn’t made it to the promised land of romantic bliss. Within each year of my renewed singledom, a successor candidate would inevitably appear, and I would be back amongst the dunes. Time slipped through my fingers like sand and I walked an infinite circle, always almost getting somewhere only to return to nowhere.

The truth that I’m steadfastly avoiding is that the partner I want likely does not yet exist. In my twenties, I had hoped that the men of my thirties would be smarter, kinder, more tender, all of the qualities that would inspire me to love them. Instead, they are willfully ignorant, and if they’re not ignorant then they’re performing intellectual helplessness, and if they aren’t performing helplessness then they’re pathologically therapized, and if they’re not pathologically therapized then they’re sanitized to utter blandness, seasoned with all the flavors befitting a bowl of white paint.

Despite the eternal internal monologue that rages at me for fettering my youth, despite the incessant tick-tocking of my biological clock that reminds me of my few years remaining to accomplish what I’d like before all my energies waste away, despite the great irony that I’m choosing apathy during what may very well be the most suitable decade of my life for hunting down a true partner, I’m trying to break the loop. I’m very possibly quite jaded from having expended so much of myself throughout the last ten-plus years on the search and ending up back at square one; I had tried to give myself chance after chance and it all ended in failure anyways, so I do my best to learn from my mistakes, the missteps of my twenties, I willingly shoulder all the blame because—I’d said “I love you” and what good did it do? They still chose to leave, the men, each and every one of them, and eventually I too had to move on.

It’s okay that my singlehood is my fault because that implies it has been my choice. Thus, I’ve spent the last year settling into my own oblivion, insignificance, a life not lived to its fullest potential as a direct consequence of all the unforgivable mistakes I’ve made. Is it so bad to live a life disempowered?

And if it meant provinces rebelling and the dynasty crumbling like dust, if it meant emperors and thrones sinking into the ashes of history, if it meant Tensha, with all its culture and commerce and glory, becoming only a distant memory, then let them, there was nothing so awful about oblivion.
—Shen Tao, The Poet Empress (2026)

June 25 is the anniversary of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER’s launch, and today marks the end of year two as well as the start of year three.

When it began in 2024, A YEAR WITHOUT WATER was a weekly publication because I wanted to prove to myself that I could steer such a project to completion. Upon reaching June 2025, I had achieved my goal yet found that I continued to enjoy the process of creation. So, after much internal deliberation because I am a creature most impressed by consistency and diligence, I settled upon a middle ground by agreeing to effect some changes.

The greatest change of all was my decision to switch to a monthly publishing schedule. While the works of year one were shared a week at a time, I found that to be draining. In practice, I would spend days agonizing over which subject to write about for the forthcoming week—because I had decision paralysis—before rushing to cobble together an essay less than forty-eight hours in advance. I felt pulled in a million directions, and as my own editor I was the sole arbiter of this project. Subsequently, I put out a lot of writing that dissatisfied me because they didn’t meet my own standards for publication. I appreciated the creative process, but my work was subpar, and it depressed me.

As much as I wanted to write, I also wanted to give people something worth reading. My foundational statement upon launching A YEAR WITHOUT WATER specified connection as my primary reason for making public my words, and that remains true. I’m fascinated by the potential of open communication, and I believe that to be most easily facilitated when the art speaks directly to the audience.

Adjusting to a monthly cadence has given me breathing room and allowed ideas to more sufficiently ripen before harvest. My processes for writing are no longer rushed, and I hope that it’s been substantially more interesting to read as a result. It’s also freed me from my own self-imposed word limits: because I only published once per month, I no longer fretted about lengthy entries out of fear of overwhelming readers. There’s been no need to split entries into multiple parts.

In addition, I revamped the format of each entry. I extended the essays’ titles, stretching their declarative legs, and paired them with a new sort of cover art. The stylistic shift in imagery, away from photographs of myself to individual water droplets (each bespoke and illustrated by hand, courtesy of my greatest friend), carries a set of fresh intentions and mirrors a similar shift in my writing. Someday, I’d like to fill a personal gallery with them.

Whereas the first year of this project was constructed around a central node, the emotional impartment of my most consequential romantic separation, I wanted to give myself permission to escape the box I’d built and write about topics more broadly during year two and beyond. Exiting the gravity of year one meant breaking with a nascent tradition I had just begun to establish, but I thought that it would also be crucial for me as I sought to evolve my writing. In effect, I needed to allow myself to move on. So, the jarring visual incoherence between the works of year one and year two also crystallizes this separation, and it comes with the additional benefit of effectively preserving year one within a time capsule of its own.

The individual water droplets adorning the essays are a riff on this project’s water motif. They are intended to embody their own sort of hydraulic action, as each new monthly release is part of a greater torrential sequence. United, the droplets bring about erosion. It’s simple, quiet, understated, timeless, and decisive.

I think I would characterize year two’s writing as being much more pensive [than year one’s]. Because I felt that I’d expended all the initial creative energy resulting from the aforementioned failed romance—and, frankly, because I became bored of it—I began to pull from different inspirations and found myself producing essays that were colored much more by existentialism.

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR

I WANTED
NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES!
I WANTED
NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK!
I WANTED
NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR
KNEES!

I WANTED YOU
I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL
AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I STAND
DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING
OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT
TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING
OF THE PEARL

YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME

AND I HAVE BEGUN
I BEGIN TO BELIEVE MAYBE
MAYBE YOU DO

I AM TASTING MYSELF
IN THE MOUTH OF THE SUN

—June Jordan, Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L. (2002)

Above all, I wanted to be able to operate without the constraints of brand consistency or whatnot because I am the genesis of this project and it is ultimately accountable to nobody but me. There’s no real reason for me to feel stressed about it; this is supposed to be an emotive and fun endeavor. Going into year three, this will continue to be the guiding and operating ethos of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER.

I acknowledge the likelihood that this is an exercise in futility. It's quite demoralizing to consider that my words serve no purpose, have no value, at this moment in human history where the arts have all been sacrificed at the altar of generative artificial intelligence with great cost to our freshwater reserves, where machines win literary competitions judged by automatons, where people cannot and choose not to distinguish between sentences pieced together by hand or by algorithm. I am aware that the writing I produce is not always great—rest assured that I am my harshest critic, that I am in possession of ample self-contempt. Yet, this is my testament. It is my worthless archive of what I once thought or believed, the incalculably tiny tracks of erosion left behind by a single drop of water, etched into the bottomless valley of time; it is the most selfish endeavor that I have ever undertaken.

Without further ado and for everyone’s ease of perusal, below are my favorite passages from the writing I’ve published this past year. Thank you for being here with me.

---

53 (On futility and executive dysfunction): 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.

54 (On the immutability of regret): 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.

55 (On the tether to tension): “Keep going” is what they say. Persevere. Something good 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.

56 (On day-to-day monotony and its associated ghosts): 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.

57 (On a certain fiery competition): 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.

58 (On idiocracy): 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.

59 (On Olympic mediocrity): 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.

60 (On a wartime birthday): 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.

61 (On a new variant of mahjong): 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.

62 (On the slow death of Asian America): And I suppose this is the real reason why I've been burying myself in books, written by the people who look and behave and experience and live like me, because I'm in sore need of inspiration and, moreover, of evidence that my life is not a waste, that I am not wasted effort, that my insignificance can be a consequence of my own volition and not because it was imposed upon me. So I come to terms with my own triviality, I do, I will not miss the forest for the trees, but it is a curse that I am this kind of person to whom all of this matters, because I too do not want to be talking about this forever! It is a trap! This is not the kind of person that I want to be! I am able-bodied and capable, and I am more than the returns I can generate for my employers' shareholders and I resent that forces greater than me have decided to engender this sort of existential miserliness—that I must be measured and disciplined because of who's in power or due to me only having limited agency over my life. I can only be hired, I can only be dated, I can only be desired as a result of decisions outside of my control. This is not who I am—it is not who I want to be.

“To Cage A Yellowbird” (& my author’s notes): I haven’t been able to muster up the wherewithal to throw the key away, but I think I never will. Most likely, I’ll continue to keep it somewhere safe as a reminder of the experiences I once had. It is my secret memento to a life I once lived, to the person I once was and the boy I once knew, all within a cage of its own.

And, a bonus short story: “He Wore a Catheter”