Forty-five.

I've been read for filth.

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

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.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.

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.