A(nother) Year Without Water.

A renewed statement of purpose.

The heat death of the universe is a speculative assumption about a faraway future. It is a conclusion reached by extrapolating an applied logic of thermodynamics based upon presuppositions about the universe existing within a bounded system, such as the universe’s infinite expansion and the dissipation of heat, or energy.

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 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 dare 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.

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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.