拉康所说的“匮乏”，究竟是怎么一回事？为什么你没有什么，竟如此重要？为什么那道让你难受、凄惨地流着血的伤口，反而不如另一道伤口疼——那道你看不见，甚至无法确认是否真实存在的伤口？

最近我才想到，我一直不觉得自己有“父亲创伤”，是因为父亲从未伤害过我。他只是告诉我，不要太把母亲的话当回事。他很像美国电影《瞬息全宇宙》里的那位父亲。那个父亲是许多人心中的英雄，温柔而善良。我的父亲从农村走出来，是家里的长子，性情开朗，爱说爱笑。他对所有人都那么友善，那么真诚地敞开心扉，以至于他几乎就是靠着美国人所谓的“拓展人脉”，一路走进了北京，再走进美国，最后走进科技行业。我所承袭的，是这样一个男人留下的东西：他从未因为对乡邻的不信任而变得愤世嫉俗；恰恰相反，他从对人的信任中获益良多。

于是，我的母亲——她的身体继承了一种创伤，知道社会财富的积累最终酿成背叛时，会发生什么——嫁给了她父亲推荐的男人。她的父亲出身于一个没落的知识分子家族，自己也遭过难。他告诉她，一定要嫁给一个“脾气好”的人。一个有耐心、心地善良的人，与她那种“多疑的恶”截然不同的人，因为我想，唯有那份善，才能建立新的王国。于是母亲长大了，也把自己塑造成了一个恶人。而父亲忙着赚钱养家，我们早已应付不来，于是母亲一边恨着自己，一边把我养大。于是，她也恨着那个爱我的自己。于是，那份恨流进了我的血管。

但其实，我并不恨自己。我曾以为自己恨。我真正拥有的，是疯狂。是一种分裂。说真的，我不知道自己“应该”成为什么样的人。不知道要成为什么样的人，才不会再这么难过。除非有人明确地告诉我，否则我不知道该如何相信自己所看见的东西。如今，在我们的圈子里，人们把这叫作“自闭症”。可我害怕，这其实是更糟糕的东西：一个诅咒！一个令人发疯的诅咒！一个逼着人去弥合不同世界之间裂隙的诅咒。我的祖国的世界，与我的母语的世界。

当我说普通话时，我心里有那么多渴望。那么多欲望。想要理解。想要有人指引。我曾求助于宗教，借此应对这一切。但现在，我开始看明白了。也许，我的生父就是我的匮乏。因为他拥有母亲说自己没有、却希望我能继承的那种“善”。可事实上，父亲在我的生命里出现得不够多，没能帮我清除代际创伤留下的毒。十年前，有人把一篇研究我母亲祖父的博士论文寄到家里，是父亲告诉了我自己的家族来历。也是父亲告诉我，哪些亲戚去世了，因为母亲不愿去想那些留在中国、与我们失去联系的血脉。

每次回家，我和父亲都会热情地拥抱。他会确保我吃饱。然后，他就退回自己的房间。我把父亲与安宁联系在一起。少一点唠叨。少一点监视。但其实，父亲并不真正关心我。他关心的是作为一个概念的我。可他不看我。他看不见。他的目光或许穿透到了更遥远的过去，知道我们的故土承载着怎样的创伤。他的母亲不久前去世了。在那之前，是他的祖母。他真的为此哭过。母亲没有哭，尽管她如今已经是个孤儿了——她曾随口这样告诉我。2023年和2025年，对于那个一定也会想念父母的她来说，都是艰难的年份。

我的疯狂，是因为我无法决定自己究竟是谁的女儿：母亲的，还是父亲的。也许我姓的是父亲的姓，可在某种意义上，我更亲密地了解母亲，因为她把所有的痛苦都强加给了我。父亲的痛苦，我却一无所知。这样一想，是不是反而更令人难过？

而因为我不理解父亲，我也不理解男人。我不理解你可能怀有的那份渴望——对我，对我的身体。那怎么可能存在呢？男人不就是些快快乐乐的生物，忙着自己的事，尽着自己的责任吗？男人怎么会陷入执迷，越陷越深？他们怎么会反抗？我的父亲是他湖南老家的一位英雄，第一个学会认字的人，第一个学会说普通话的人，第一个走出去的人。即使觉得自己“有点笨”，他还是去了美国，从未让自嘲阻止自己尽力而为、创造奇迹。像他这样的人，本来是不该成功的。像他这样的人，在任何人眼里都不会是一个出了问题的人——除了母亲眼里，以及，可悲的是，或许也包括他的女儿们眼里。

我不想为了撼动这套认知而发疯：父亲是完美的，母亲是邪恶的；我是坏的，因为我是女人，而母亲也是坏的；父亲从未做错过任何事，从未提高过嗓门，从未出轨，从未责骂，从未报复。可问题并不在于他做了什么，而在于他没有做什么……

我已经厌倦了试图弄明白，自己究竟应该成为什么样的人。即使在我调解他们之间的冲突时，父亲也从未替自己的立场说过话。我看着那个反面、那个暗点、那个相反的位置，推导出他的视角。也从他求我别再让母亲那么操心的话里，推导出他的视角。我曾觉得，他从不反过来伤害她，所以他是个英雄。如今我才明白，有时候，诚实恰恰藏在伤害发生的地方；有时候，光必须从伤口进入。如果你始终不肯承认一道伤口，你就永远无法触碰那束光……

也许，我才是那个多疑的多马。那个拒绝触碰伤口的人。那个在双眼看不见时，也拒绝用双手去看的人……

但圣经里的拉撒路呢？如果我也能成为他呢？你是否好奇，我是如何变得能够不再溺水，能够让自己去看见、去扬弃，甚至去原谅？因为我告诉自己——只要我的身体里流着父亲的血，就意味着我从未与他分离。意味着我只需要把这份折磨理解为：找回那个曾经死去的自己。我对你说：归来吧！回来吧！

你知道为什么吗？因为耶稣曾为拉撒路流泪。他哀悼他。他悲伤。他让那些感情一直流淌到尽头，然后对拉撒路说：“出来吧。”我无法命令如今的父亲——那个困在自己所选择的生活、困在那些神圣桎梏中的人——成为我需要他成为的男人。但我确实可以允许自己难过，而同时，我仍怀有希望。我依然对母亲、对家人、对我自身的清算与觉醒，怀有希望！

同样，我也为你的离去而悲伤，令我难过的是，在这个时代，我无法拥有你。，因为我们都如此有限。我为那种分裂而悲伤：不知道我们究竟是诗人，还是恋人。然而，为什么这场分离——有人说，死亡就是分离——为什么它就必须意味着永恒？正如耶稣自己所说，死亡也可以只是暂时的。

你现在看见了，我的财富，来自我相信死亡并非故事的终点，而非我拒绝死去。我的丰盛，在于相信我们还会重逢，相信我们并非注定要继续沉默下去，并非注定要让暂时分离的诅咒成为永恒。故事还没有结束！我的父亲还没有死，至少现在还没有，而你也没有。

Gertrude is a girl with bangs to make up for how she doesn’t have a spine. She immigrated from Korea at a young age with her strict parents, got dropped into Texas, which is still better than growing up in California where she would’ve been a boba liberal NPC. Instead, Gertrude did still grow up on a millennial chungus diet of Asian American media that told her she needs to make her parents’ sacrifice worth it. Gertrude does this by taking up the least amount of space possible. She looks to you for guidance when she feels weak, wrings her hands over every social interaction, until you, who are technically shorter than her, feel a sick sense of satisfaction from looking after her. You outsource the sense of permission Gertrude grants herself to be pathetic and not deal with her demons.

Meanwhile, you’re afraid that you’re too loud, too exceptional, too different, too obviously fascinating to have it easy. But you know Gertrude has it so much easier because she’s so boring. But she’s obviously okay with it! She has a pleasant enough smile, gets attention from men desperate for a crumb who can’t bear to compete for the girls they really want. She knows she’s boring. The problem is that you know deep down she probably isn’t, she has some hidden depth, but how dare she hide it and capitulate to her parents’ understanding of what’d make a good Asian girl. A submissive little doll. The rage it fills you with. Her perfect little high heeled shoes, her little linen shirts, the way she sits on the lap of the man you’re obsessed with but in this timid way where you can tell she’s disassociating… you’ve only ever been able to reassociate.

It enrages you to where you take advantage of Gertrude’s goodness, by befriending her, taking her to lunch at your favorite bibimbap place, bonding over her trauma about her own stint also dating a Korean Christian boy who nitpicked her weight and her style and her speech and her mannerisms until she didn’t know who she was without him. Now you’re delighting in telling her the cheat codes to growing a spine, to disavow the influence of your parents long enough to break free from it, to becoming aware of ‘intergenerational trauma’ and encouraging her to do somatic therapy and reiki and tai chi and break out of her own anxieties of being enough.

To your surprise, Gertrude takes you seriously. She suddenly speaks up more, shares with you what she really feels, quits her job. Travels the world but does something original with it like learn a cool hobby. She has better sex now, more aliveness in her step. She even jokes she wants to have a threesome with you. You don’t want her to touch you but that’s okay.

And you feel your envy of her subside, which is kind of perverse. Was it perverse to ‘contaminate’ her by hating her enough to change her?

Michaela is a quiet girl who owns a cute cat but who hasn’t talked to me in months, but I can sense how afraid she is of what I think of her. Really the predominant feeling I have is irritation, but not hate. Sorry. I never talk about her except in my diary, where I sometimes sadly wish she would stop pouting that I didn’t try harder to win her back after she pissed me off by playing mind games with me by ignoring me when I asked her to hang because she felt needy, and then blocking me over it. Then sometimes I remember that it’s too bad I don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Michaela will write these unhinged Instagram stories where she basically reposts witches saying if you don’t send this to five people you’ll curse them and that whoever is watching this that she didn’t DM it to is going to get cursed. She learned astrology before me but because I’m better at it she ‘copied me’ or so people say. I don’t care enough to believe such bullshit. If she was a true practitioner of astrology I’d benefit from it because it’d wake her up enough to her toxic Pisces traits. I wish you actually the most humbling of circumstances (or the drugs that cure BPD, which apparently there are none of) instead, and clearly astrology didn’t grant them to you.

Maybe Michaela will find a man that loves her enough to discipline her instinct for tantrums, which is just a symptom of unrealized grief. I hope you realize that I can see through you when you don’t have the courage to tell me what you want, which activates my own cowardice of having to crawl over to someone who’s already decided I’m beyond hope enough to abandon me first. I clench my fists and entertain violent fantasies of slapping Michaela across the face and screaming angrily, but this is in place of sexual fantasies for me these days because I can’t express my rage at a man for doing the same — so Michaela gets the worst of me. Silence. It’s like she never existed.

My friends ask how she’s doing and I shrug. Michaela is too complicated for me. Me? I’m perfect though. I’ve never messed up once in my relationships, I’m the victim here. One of inconvenience, because thinking about groveling makes me want to… slump to my knees and feel sad that my dad doesn’t talk to me enough—

Oh god, you’ll never guess what happened again. Yeah, Melody crashing out for the umpteenth time. She won’t shut the fuck up in this group chat where she’s complaining yet again about some guy that she actively cheated on. She’s shrill, and I can practically hear the eyerolls of the other girls, Erika and Vanessa tired of her shit. Randi this close to starting another fight, even though they’ll just kiss and make up when Melody sends her flowers to assauge her ego.

It’s all consensual manipulation. When Sandra and Penelope and Candi and I gossip in the background, none of us are heroic. We resent Melody but we keep her around. Everyone still hangs out with her maybe because her dad has a yacht, never mind that we’ve never been on it, and her family owns a house in the Hamptons, and maybe it’s a far away held fantasy that we’ll all be able to celebrate her spring time birthday there. I read her birth chart once. No I didn’t, I just stroked her ego. Jocelyn was there and said I still hit a lot of good points.

Growing up, Melody got everything she wanted handed to her. Most people agree that we only hang out with Melody because she, while unpleasant, buys us things for free, but the things aren’t the point. It’s the feeling that those things were given in this prostitutional manner — like she’s trying to get us to perform our service of true female friendship. We’ll say all the right things to make sure Melody has a faulty sense of security, because we’re insecure enough to want something from her. It’s unethical, maybe, but they do say money buys you happiness. And of course the most obviously unhappy girl is trying that solution out. Who can blame her? Are you kidding, of course we’d clutch our pearls (that maybe she bought us) if anything bad ever happened to her.

The thing about Melody is I know, I think she’s just some white girl that is going to waste her life away partying with the wrong people until she finally finds a husband who will whisk her away to some foreign country, where she can do her little song and dance of outsourced rumination toward a bunch of people who don’t speak English, and definitely don’t speak her dialect of neurotic cues, and she will grow older and listless and give birth to children who she can’t truly blame for how the state of affairs is going. And Melody will be a tragic character ripe to be pulverized into literature, justifiably so. She’s the one asking for it, by making her life so fuck-with-able. If she ever kills herself, am I supposed to feel guilt for not trying harder to help? Or shame that I ever let myself participate in her undoing?

From the day he was born, he yearned for adventure (No)

Oh, Captain Jack (Yeah), giving them what-for

He’s the pauper of the surf (Uh huh), the jester of Tortuga

But in Davy Jones’ locker, what lies in store? (Yeah, we’ve seen the movie)

i really really live for music parodies. a good musical parody has a thesis, which is why i’m not super into weird al necessarily because he just made silly kids bop versions of popular top 40 hits. after him came the new creations of kyle gordon as tributes to genres past, greater ones than whatever we have the pickings of perhaps (a sentiment that scratches my millennial itch), songs that depict a new take on nostalgic eras.

but nothing tops THE LONELY ISLAND, who had entire storylines and minor social commentary, almost, to their songs. i like them better than musical theatre, which focuses on the songs only as add ons to larger plots, but the lonely island were giving you experiences with “jizz in my pants”, “i just had sex” and my all time favorite, jack sparrow. i learned about comedy from listening to their music nonstop in high school, usually with aasav and aniket and others. is that why my music taste is permanently teenager? because that’s where my nervous system froze, where i last felt safe to speak up?

anyways jack sparrow is literally the song i will force everyone to listen to me sing when i’m on the longest drug trip of my life. i headbang to this every time i need to feel better. everyone in high school knew i could reliably be the goofiest most perverted audacious little girl in the room, and i’m finally beginning to recover that part of me now, through every meticulously flung out weekly substack where i write from the place i last felt alive.

anyways the premise of jack sparrow is that the lonely island hired famous singer michael bolton to be the feature on their new rap song. it sounds like a generic sleazy 2010’s club hit at first, but then michael bolton, who is fresh off a pirates of the caribbean movie marathon, keeps bursting into song at the chorus in his own passionate declaration of religious conversion to the cult of jack sparrow. the song probably has no point to most people but me, i’m still captivated even though it’s been literally like 15 years since this dropped. yet i stay so infatuated with this song precisely because it fully enacts my lifelong mission of being a jester for jesus. or something. michael bolton needs you to see the true awesomeness of romanticizing the little things, and he’ll be the first to do it, potentially ruining a song, but in the end convincing everyone because he believes. and i would make myself also as funny and weird as possible, to communicate something essential, something i needed people to see and reconsider and reflect on. the theology of crystal’s skill with words. i believed jack sparrow was such a good song that some of my high school friends did an interpretive dance to it for me at the end of junior year, which they chalked up to my forcing it to get stuck in their heads.

i noticed myself adapting a jester ass way of looking at things that eventually just overflowed out of me. the absurdist perspectives, the unexpectedly optimistic reconfiguration of frameworks, the beliefs in what matters. this amateur philosopher tendency brought me good fortune. looking back, i guess i knew that to become goofy, i had to have confidence that i thought what i was doing was funny. imagine blowing a standup set where not even your mom pity laughs. the best way to get out of that is to laugh at yourself, not in a weird over the top kink way where you start to enjoy how embarrassed you are, how intense your reaction is. no, instead, laugh at yourself because of the opposite reason, deflate what is going on. treat the absurdity like normal. to do this, you must start to build belief by dying to yourself, over and over. if you can’t do that, consider replacing a love for sex with a love for death. much like one replaces one’s love of war with art… if you’re afraid to die you will probably also remain afraid to fuck which is unfortunate!

can you imagine, as a jester, believing in anything that much? enough to laugh with a smirk and a mouthful of blood? forget the crystals, the astrology, the evil eyes, the superstitions. what is your relationship to believing, truly with your heart not just with your mind. what about reflexes, the emotions that surface of conviction and steadiness? what can you depend on when there’s not much else? jesters have to translate that certainty into something usable, performances that matter to others. today’s religion revolves around being smart, though; the currency of brilliance needs to be transmitted through memes, units of humor deployed as prestige. being funny is a status symbol. if you’re insightful, at your best, you’re also funny because you possess the eye of god. if you’re funny because you know what tension to shake in the collective but you don’t know what you’re preaching, you probably are even more anxious than if you were just a normal citizen john.

like the pastors of the world, jesters also have messages, never letting themselves come off as wokescolds, because that means you have a displaced sense of righteous entitlement. they should be busy thinking aloud with candor and storytelling and show the right, true way, not just the trendy way, to see something, seeing the lessons in everything and you know what, probably first and foremost the lessons in their own lives.

i dare to wonder if a pastor is a jester with responsibility, whose charisma obligates him to carry a message beyond himself… the one who wants the masses to hear him, sure, but mostly regardless of him for the messages to travel anyway, the evangelism to matter no matter what, the core idea to be preserved even as its medium shifts.

if i’m a ‘writer’, shouldn’t i be as vain as one still? be possessive over the idea of words feeling like aphrodisiacs, be my turn ons, be things that need to matter and make me fight harder, run faster, be cut throat competitive and ruthless over what’s mine? if i became more aggressive again, instead of domesticated by the ‘mainstream’… would my expertise be more credible? i parsed through my personal definition of ‘writer’ and reluctantly noticed that i’ve feared identifying as a writer now reduces me, as if i had unconsciously decided most people who identify as primarily a writer aren’t doing anything meaningfully, really.

what if even the most “boring” writers though can stake a claim on if they have gone out into the world, tested some sort of idea or witnessed it, maybe come out having made some situation stranger, and returned with the takeaway. and into a story it goes. they’ve discovered, and it was probably mad.

still i’ve made some friends cry before by suggesting not, ‘do you believe what you’re saying’, but rather, ‘do you think what you just said was actually insightful?’ belief is cheap; everyone has an inflated sense of his own worth, but perhaps not how high of esteem he actually holds himself. he actually just thinks he’s full of shit, but he knows if he doesn’t believe in himself no one will. insight though is garnered from getting in the wringer, gaining wisdom on practice…

unless you’re busy being a contemplative chud to deflect from vulnerability. on the other hand, it’s unfair to generalize about all ‘writers’, like saying the Chinese diaspora has had the same cultural experience, it’s ridiculous to assume all ‘writers’ have the same sickness of passivity! where i disdain how most of them, no matter what topic or profession or school of thought, still never fail to stay busy performing being insightful in the time they could’ve used to be insightful. but this recursive surveillance without conclusion (even an eagerness to verdict is more useless here) is so pedestrian. too many writers believe in themselves too much, when who are you to be anything but a vessel for what needs to be done? selfhood is sooo american.

i don’t believe in myself for the above reason, but i do hold myself up. i have to. i don’t have to believe in myself as a solid thing to do the bare minimum. do the things that i’m embarrassed about, want to avoid, yet needed to get a sense of self preservation enough to make sure i’m setting myself up for success, because if i don’t mold my environment and let it become a product of me, who will care about me enough to help?

i wanted to be famous once so i could be a ‘legend’, because when i was young celebrity was a descriptor of someone that others talked about with wonder on their breath. now if you’re famous, you’re a disgrace. doomed to be surveilled for others’ sick satisfaction, not imbued with any emotional dignity.

and that’s also when michael bolton talks about the legend of jack sparrow with this child-like enthusiasm, and his angelic voice makes him sound like a preacher, and the way he sublates the ‘sleazy’ vibe of the original ‘thesis’ of the Lonely Island’s rap verses is he believes ‘pop cinema’ of the 2000’s is sexy, will get him chicks, and it probably will, because michael bolton’s booming excitement got me real horny…

in every scenario, i seek to be michael bolton, but not just michael bolton, i need to also be jack sparrow. i want to be the legend itself and its documentarian. what if you’re the gonzo journalist of your life, and your interesting life is your material that you’re reporting on, and your narrated realizations are the brimstone of understanding we genuinely need for this generation? give me dispatches on being a jester. the jester that understands and who knows that he could be making every social situation and it’s still a story, it’s still absurdist immersive plot twists for the narrator to break the fourth wall and interrupt the story was going to adjust what ‘fate’ means for, out of his own audacity! who could even approach someone desperate to hear from him, for the plot.

so of course the most basic reading is jack sparrow is a song about michael bolton ruining the song. no he’s not! he’s saving it from its own destruction as something generic. he’s not humiliating himself for sport — he isn’t finding grace in humiliation — no, michael doesn’t care about grace at all, i hope…

in my teenage-like romanticization, Michael has an important message! he is post-clown, he is the humiliation, and it’s aimed at himself. and when he lets it impact him, it impacts everyone around him. he’s ridiculing himself because, “cinephile” title be damned, this’ll depict the lesson the best way he knows how. he wants to serve his purpose honorably, with dignity, to humanity by saying something real about taste, and the future.

除了在这里，我很少谈起母亲教给我的那些哲学。朋友指出，我总称她为“我那可悲的母亲”；可直到最近，我才意识到，我根本不知道该如何把她说成一个我所爱的人。我在感情上对母亲”ambivalent”，说不出那些脆弱的话；很抱歉，这个习惯也蔓延到了别处。我知道，我大概只会在你面前整个人融化掉……真烦人啊，“我爱你”偏偏是对我而言最难说出口的几个字；我甚至会眼睁睁让那个男人溜走，因为一旦承认自己爱他，我又害怕亲手否认这份爱……这可真是对辩证法的一种暴烈抵抗。

所以，更安全的做法，是把我的欲望升华——把那个希望母亲能对我好一点、不要再无视我那些无声呐喊般的恳求的欲望，升华成对她作为一名老师的感激。即使语言正不断从我身上逃逸，母亲仍向我传授这个文化中的观念。就像那位写下诗篇与寓言的毛主席—（说来有趣，我那“摩羯座太阳、狮子座月亮”的特质竟能与这些内容产生共鸣—）妈不仅向我讲述了“矛盾”的道理，更谈到了“实践”重要性。我想，妈妈不愿意我喜欢德国文学，是因为她害怕那会让我变得过于消极被动。她说我“一辈子什么都没做出来”。妈，等你听说我在市中心厮混的那些美国白人小孩，你再下结论吧。

可是，母亲，我的思考一直在“大跃进”啊。我先是更深刻地理解了矛盾，也学会了如何去爱矛盾。现在，我正在学习实践，妈妈。我一次又一次选择战斗，一次又一次；与其只做一个像你所说的那种无用而“自私的作家”— “她说得对,” 七月的一场聚会上，我那位亲爱的旧金山旅伴曾开玩笑说。当时，他坐在我身旁的沙发上，仔细听我讲述自己的人生。我隐去这位亲爱旅伴的性别，因为我知道，我们身上都有男性与女性的部分；它们会彼此配合地轮流亮起、熄灭，却有时也会令我们双双瘫痪。如果我能与你多相处一些时间，你知道我们大概会讨论什么：这种与“矛盾”彼此补足的“实践”。它们不是辩证意义上的对立，也不互相否定，而是和谐共存、缺一不可——唯有如此，我们才能理解彼此……

毛泽东喜欢用中国的论辩介入欧洲的论辩；我怕他在“精神上”跟我是一类人。我过去很喜欢“先知后行”的路数。我会穷尽一切地调查，抵达某个原理，然后我才行动！我不断同自己讨价还价；可事实上，我抵达了，却没有行动。我知道，你犹豫的时候，也是因为你要穷尽一切地调查。你难道不觉得，我做的正是同一件事吗？我怎么可能不对犹豫感到愤怒——我的耐心原本就是用完美主义的黏土捏出来的：我非要真理在眼前变得百分之百清晰，才肯出手干预物理定律。哇！

当我写作时，若感觉自己像在冰面上滑行，那便是心流。运动正是在那里发生的。若你还没有写得足够多，没能给卡死的轮轴添上润滑油，又怎么可能起飞？小弟弟，你甚至还不是一只能振翅起飞的鸟；但只要你不再忘记自己本来就会飞，你甚至能让旁人也明白，这场飞行究竟为什么合乎情理。

我鄙视我那美丽、强悍、聪明绝顶的母亲身上那种思想上的懒惰。她总要求我的劳动必须结出具体的果实，必须能让她看懂；仿佛不如此，便是对神圣物质秩序的异端。但现在我看明白了，也原谅你了，我那可怜而无知的母亲：你只有“知”，却没有“行”。你傲慢地受到诱惑，想要为我编织出一套完整的理论，再把它当作事实宣判出来；你从未鼓起勇气，通过实验和发展去检验它，从未让它与现实接触，也从未回到实践中修正它。实践才是信仰的方式！我为什么要放逐一个或许其实只是“尚未实践”的人？他不是“被判终身只能做梦”。不，正是梦想使生命得以圆满。当你明明看见矛盾的另一面，却仍将其中一面误认作永恒的主要方面，这甚至比单纯的片面性更加糟糕。那只是在佯装真正的平衡！那就是不和谐！错！绝不可以！你被“自己必须完美”这个念头欺骗了，可完美根本不是辩证接纳的前提！

王阳明的“知行合一”谈到，我们必须不断留意，自己是否真正抵达了“知”的境界。

我曾对一个我爱过的男人说：虽然有人称他为“撸管入定者（gooner）”，但他或许压根还没有开始 goon。这个美丽而矛盾的男人——我每次收到他的短信都会忍不住微笑；他还会同我开斯洛文尼亚哲学家、我的守护圣人齐泽克的玩笑——大概不明白，我为什么会说他并没有 goon，毕竟他从前的恋人坚信他就是如此。如果我还能再和他说话，我会告诉他这句名言的最后一层意思：**知而不行，只是未知。**只有当他说自己真的在做时，我才会相信他在 goon；而不是他只是在“假装 goon”，其他人却蠢到信以为真。不，要 goon，你就必须同现实发生接触。你甚至还没有碰过自己的阴茎。不过，我知道你需要我替你做——通过解释，通过我的“知”，把这一切都讲给你听……你能看出来吗？

如果“知晓”是希伯来圣经中恰当的委婉表达，那么就让这份知晓改变我……从内心深处……如此显著的生命力抽送起来？

我知道你想知道梨的滋味；好笑的是，梨正是我最喜欢的水果。在美国，我会说自己最喜欢草莓；可到了中国，我真正尝到的是梨汁的甘甜，而不只是脑海中梨的形状，因为我们必须亲手“**变革**”这只梨，亲自把它吃下去！（若那个我曾尝过其果实的人，也愿意来吃我的果实，那倒真是令人钦佩……有三年没人尝过了— 三年可实在太久。）

无论如何，一个真正的小丑，是这样一个男人：他眯起眼睛，极其专注地凝视着四周荒诞主义的丰饶，从中不断开采材料；他以身作则，率先把自己变得荒唐，率先笑出来，真正成为那个弄臣，再借此教会我们所有人——这才是真正的男人。你以为，当我开出那些最古怪的玩笑时，我不知道自己最终承担了什么功能吗？人们称“圣愚”为“牧师”，从某种意义上说，我就是那个我已经认命要当着的牧师。但我也不愿抹去自己作为少女的那重矛盾。我是所有人的母亲，却只做一个男人的娼妇。

然而，品尝并不等同于进入。我不知道我的品尝是否奏效，但我确实知道那是什么滋味。可真正说来，毛泽东认为，味道之所以能被认识，是因为梨原有的状态遭到了改变：它已经被咬过，再也不可能回到“尚未被咬”的状态！如果世界改变了我，我就能因此说自己对世界而言是真实的吗？可如果我没有反过来改变世界呢？

有一个念头令我感到安慰：正如梨因为这种转导而永久失去了先前的状态，咬下它的人或许也永远无法忘记它，因为那个尚未尝过梨的自己，已经不复存在。我闲来无事时，总会问：*那究竟是真实，还是幻想？*可这根本不重要，因为我想要的，不过是与另一个人共享一只梨——不是把一只梨切成两半，再彼此分享。

因为“分梨”听起来就是“分离”——一首微型诗，说的是：把梨分开，便意味着离别。不，要两个完整的整体来做这件事……就像毛泽东敦促我们的那样，必须**亲口**去做——用你自己的嘴，独自地、完整地。赤裸裸地做，但仍要保持完整；不是为了填满某一道伤口。

“亲口”听起来，也像是在说：亲吻这张嘴……

I’ve been looking at a lot of art lately. There are places in the grand world full of every wonder that do feel shut off to me, and you can bet it is the art world that has a chokehold on me. I’ve gone to Sotheby’s and the Chelsea galleries with beautiful women recently and felt viscerally more regulated by drinking in their fascination. Weird how art is this perverse thing to me now that must be mediated through the presence of others. I’m usually fine doing things by myself, but art is truly one thing I can’t get myself to do much of anymore.

Maybe because I associate it with loneliness? Sadness? An unsolvable mystery, of God coming through so clearly. Like how is it possible to have such direct majesty pour out of your fingertips? Wordless color that bursts out and demands to be witnessed. You don’t even need a dictionary for that? It is such a mystery to me. And you know I love investigating mysteries with companions… hence I’ve learned I cannot go see art without a buddy. I need someone to blurt out my thoughts to, even every so often because of all this intensity.

Like how I’m obsessed with this Rothko. I like it because I can make sense of it, sort of, by pulling a reference out of my repository, compare it to something I know already, the Winnie The Pooh color palette, or whatever. Also, what’s that thing in the middle? Some sort of bloody vein. Or maybe it’s a hot dog in a bun but there’s too much mustard on the top. Wow am I being disrespectful to the art by deploying such childhood imaginative whimsy…

All free associative readings of art always feel heretic, or incorrect, or something. Like I’m not allowed to say something about this Rothko that only I could think. I can convince people of most things except when it comes to art (and maybe love). I can point to a thing and they can disagree with me and I collapse. I don’t do this with anything else, but art feels like there is a Right way and a Wrong way. In this way I do find art feels like math to me… humiliating if you miscalculate magnitude.

Lingering for too long in a museum is kind of painful. It was my first time in the MoMA this week, and I found myself choked up around the vibrant Rothkos, and strangely unmoved by the somber paletted ones. I tried to put words to my thoughts and found them clumsier than usual, tumbling out incompletely. I’d pause, suddenly shy and unsure of myself at this art museum.

Terri and I usually have very long drawn out conversations analyzing the world around us, riffing on the future, speculating on what words mean and what patterns we are both matching. But a big difference is how we consume art. Terri collages constantly, picks out outfits that cohere into a singular aesthetic, cooks and bakes foods with unique flavor palettes, squints at a space and immediately imagines what should go in it for our next event. And thus, as it goes with many of my hobbies, I’m picking up an appetite for art from hanging around Terri. Walking through the galleries feels more bearable when I have someone I can talk to, to anchor me in what I see before me. Otherwise I’d probably suffocate from the confusion I experience when I’m in the presence of pure spectacle…

So when Terri calls me up to go with her to the MoMA because it’s a beautiful fall day and we’re actually not behind on work for once, I’m down. She tells me she likes that I look at art so uncritically, watching me as I stare at a wall projection of a naked woman moving her pelvis up and down stop motion style. “I don’t really get it either, but I feel like I also do…” I say while in a trance, wincing at how basic I sound. Usually I’m so verbose in the land of ideas, that the straightforward visions I have to convey don’t make any sense... Initially, Terri’s comment almost stings, as I grew up in the old times where so-called critical thinking wasn’t as cheap as junk food, so I fear for a second she thinks I’m not critical aka ‘serious’ enough. Then I realize what she means is I take it in, in a way I’m patient with what I’m seeing in a way others aren’t. Some people can glance at something, shrug and then walk away with a categorical dismissal locked in. Me? I tend to feel a quick rise or fall in interest but never have words for why. So if I’m mesmerized at all, I’ll linger… but still not know what I just witnessed. So I never land on a conclusion, which feels painful, to be so undecided on the outside world. While I can storyboard a Russian novel plot in an hour, I could probably barely choke out any ‘art criticism’ if I had to.

My most opinionated friend, Megan, has an MFA in Fine Arts and is the most talented painter I know. Megan fell on some hard times back when she lived in the city, but always kept a smile on no matter what. My theory now is painting kept her going. What was interesting was Megan had the cynicism of most of the writers and poets I knew, but while she had a bold and masculine sassiness that made her many enemies online, she viscerally softened into wise curiosity whenever the subject turned to art. We had initially bonded over our shared home landscape of the Pacific Northwest (and her crush on one of my friends) when we first met, and her eye for the visual coloring we’d grown up in made me start to see Portland and Seattle in different lights. I loved that Megan had such good taste and visited her while she was in the middle of painting a few times. The fumes would be so intense, but the grin on Megan’s face felt otherworldly. What did she know of joy and pleasure that I didn’t? Ironically when Megan talked about the men she was dating my eyes would glaze over, but when she talked about art, I’d feel a sense of libidinal joy that made her glow. Finally I could borrow another’s grand passion and enthusiasm to understand more of it myself.

Recently, I realized there was a time when art was all I cared about, as a small child. I rarely wanted to go outside, my mom told me. Instead, I was obsessed with drawing. I don’t have any pictures from that era of my life, but I faintly recall my pencil tracing over endless paper after paper, color bleeding out of the crayons and markers that I dried out. I’m sad I can’t remember exactly what I was capturing so meticulously, but the feeling of satisfaction has stayed with me… a different time. When I could store meaning away and know it belonged to me only. The duck or the fruit or the fairy or pretty woman I was sketching didn’t really matter in any greater sense except to me, because I’d birthed it myself with a gusto that made its meaning irrefutable, at least to me.

I enjoyed art before I enjoyed books, the practice of writing, the art of understanding all around me. Writing and spirituality and eventually people are all of the ‘abstract’ senses, the things I can’t touch in a way, and so they all overtook as my ‘actual hobbies,’ whereas art feels like this secret, scandalous thing, something tangible that I could stroke with my hand for hours if I wanted to (or if it wasn’t illegal at the Moma).

Even though I took seven year’s worth of art lessons until the end of middle school, taught by Teacher Sun who scolded me for always being late, but admired my attention to detail, I’ve blocked out my memories from then. My perfectionism used to hold me back in the class, a phenomenon I’d never felt with writing as the words came so easily, but with art I was frustrated because I am so not a visual person. I still have no clue what good composition is, how to critically evaluate something beyond that I like it. But some of my still life sketches still hang in my family home, and I can’t even remember how I managed to finish them.

This weird memory gap means I don’t retain info in that domain, so I’ve struggled with art-adjacent things like fashion and design, what a proper lady should care about. Every hot look I pulled off or appealing silhouette I successfully emulated felt fraudulent, like I’d stumbled into it. Like I’m LARPing as someone who has perceivable taste, even though I feel blind now. I was ashamed that I did not have a clue how to visually remix anything, comment on it, create a ‘vibe’. For if words didn’t matter, how else would I be able to transmit my vision to others? The older I got, the more unable to feel comfortable with the ‘material’, visual world I felt.

So by the time I moved to New York at 27, I had stopped looking at art altogether, for some reason; I think because I got less lonely. I’d just moved from LA, where I spent years disassociating as I mechanically thought about my appearance. Never neurotically, but I did learn the formulas of how to fit in better when I first moved there and didn’t have any friends in the city. I took notes on how the women’s perfectly manicured nails and bouncy curls and fabulous sandals and tiny skirts were what I wanted to look like. Probably because I didn’t have any emotional intimacy with anyone there, so I had more time to audit myself and ask if I wanted to be lame or a frump.

It’s possible I associate this era as ‘unbecoming’ and ‘insecure’ and ‘cringe,’ when I spent a lot of time trying to look good. I remember as well spending my time wandering around The Getty, LACMA, MOCA, The Hammer Museum, The Broad. I liked art back then. The exhibits were really cool, but I can’t name a single thing I saw that deeply touched me, probably because I was alone. So I have to just know it mattered. In an otherwise pretty solid memory for details, it feels extremely eerie that some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen don’t stay with them if there were no witnesses to imbue them with meaning. The trips I have feel sacred because of who I was with, but not necessarily because of what I saw…

Art is ultimately the thing I have the hardest time writing about. My mind goes blank the minute I have to do it. This piece was supposed to be about going to see this Rothko collection but the only one I really recall feeling much about was this Winnie the Pooh one. And a white one with pink shapes… it’s embarrassing how I only ever use enough detail to get my capital p point across, which means there’s this sensory aspect I’ve disavowed for years and refused to improve on. I always knew I’d have to get over it if I ever wanted to write a novel… like sure this parable thesis is cool but it’s juvenile until you can make sure the physical world your characters live and breathe in. A lush-literary aesthetic is what would make me more respectable… or at least finally erotic…

As it goes every writer has their Achille’s heel, and mine is anytime I have to conjure up the sensation of being somewhere. I feel my body tense up, get impatient about lingering, savoring an image. I’ll fixate on the narrative of a night, but I will barely be able to remember how to set the scene, name the cigarette brands, some girl’s baby bangs, the way people were reading some shitty ideology book, the way her feet look in those white sock loafer heel combo, the sound of a dude talking with his mouth too close to the mic, how she stands submissively and uncertainly, a dude’s ‘greying curly hair,’ the color of her Kipling bag… okay whatever, anyways… I know I’m great with prose, but truly I’m a one trick pony with poetry. I can convey a strong feeling, a divine reckoning with higher power, and I can tell you about what meant something to me because most things did, but only insofar as they further my story. It sucks I can barely remember the animating force that made that moment sweet, not just flashes of faces and the word for word transcripts of conversations… like it’s not fair how there are those people that can just recreate what it’s like to have smelled the paint in a remodeled house, the feel of a dog’s fur, the smoke of a barbecue? What I’d give to get better at that pure artistry, the textual kind.

Art does the inverse. You see colors, and all of a sudden you understand some abstract far away concept, like war, somehow through the paint strokes and layers, you see someone like Mark Rothko’s life force slowly trickling away as you notice the colors get less and less exuberant… you feel death approaching by the penultimate one, a contrast in a sea of progressions. While I was busy fearing I talk so much but mean so little I could’ve just used one big canvas to blast everyone around me with an entire feeling, one that usually disappears before I can remember it. Same as when I’ve seen those waterfalls, those snowstorms, those Steve Madden heels…

When there are people around me, I displace my ambivalent love for art by becoming the most voracious curator of meaning, pillaging their inner worlds for the most inspiring anecdotes to arrange my shelves with, as I experience life as something to pay tribute to, and what better way than to do that than explore the museums within each person.

One thing I wanted to ask Robby about was art, what he considers moving but also memorable, what goes through his head when he goes to a museum. Something I don’t feel very often is a solidness in my self, a sense that I exist and can be seen even as I feel perpetually invisible, and being able to comment on third objects that felt so large and looming in the natural world, was a hobby I want to share with Robby. Feeling visceral certainty about the realness of anything is possible, but less doable without a co-witness that can reach into all crevices of your mind. Obscene be damned, the real perverse exchange for me is needing to rely on someone else’s eyes to take the place of my own.

小时候， 妈教了我 她最爱用的词：“矛盾”。 英文翻译： “contradiction”。妈特别爱说起这个概念。她说懂世界就需要懂“矛盾”。

“矛盾”这次什么意思呢？这俩字是“矛”和“盾”，说明打仗时要用这俩玩意儿。

故事是这样说的：有一个商人在卖兵器。首先，他举起一把矛，向人群夸口道：“我的矛锐利无比，无论多坚固的盾，都能刺穿！”他又举起一块盾，吹嘘道：“我的盾坚固无比，无论多锋利的矛，都无法刺穿！”

人群里的一位旁观者问：“如果用你的矛去刺你的盾，会怎么样？”

商人无言以对，因为这两句话显然不可能同时成立。

我妈说我是她一生中最大的矛盾 —是不可调和的那一种。她说我会使她早死，但也说我是她生活中唯一好心人。她说我又笨又有智慧；又善良又脾气不好；又既沮丧又乐观。在我妈眼里，我这种人，想做大事，改变世界，是一个这无异于引狼入室，让自己陷入一场充满不幸、周而复始且痛苦不堪的轮回。她说我身上有七成是美好的，但剩下的三成却必须加以管教，否则我就无法在这个世界上立足。于是，她总是盯着我那三成的缺陷不放，对我百般挑剔。我想，她大概是忘了提那七成的美好究竟是什么了。

正因如此，我在审视他人的矛盾时，并不要求将其消解。不，如果我那样做，黑格尔肯定会生气的——尽管有些遗憾的是，我无法利用那种“一边读《精神现象学》一边要求男人操我”所带来的性张力。

作家或理论家全都虚伪透顶，对“矛盾”——即转化的本质——毫无理解。我真正渴望的是他们能提出问题，因为他们在意那些矛盾——那些赋予世间艺术以生机的色彩与质感。正因如此，若要我坠入爱河，我必须倾听你“倾听”的方式。我必须追问：关于我，你究竟将哪一部分视为这凡尘俗世中不可撼动的事实，并愿意持续注视？同样地，我既不能也不愿去化解他人的矛盾。最好的结果是，他们能对矛盾的每一面进行“确定的否定”并将其综合，同时保留那份摩擦力——那正是赋予生命活力的源泉。

问题在于，我自身尚未完成这种“扬弃”。我是从什么时候起，将自己降格为一种“薛定谔式”的二元状态——被困在“被爱”与“彻底被遗忘”这两种截然不同的境地之中？是真实，还是仅仅基于拉康“匮乏”概念的幻想？是你自慰时脑海中浮现的我，还是当你凝视那个坐在我家门前、有着玩偶般面孔的女人时，早已将我遗忘？我昂首阔步，内心却也承载着重重矛盾。

正如一个男人看似面无表情，实则内心涌动着如海洋般深沉的温柔；我的开朗只是一种伪装，为了躲避那些可能羞辱我的人——我总是遭受羞辱，总是既显得疏离又触手可及，既美丽动人又毫无性意味，既显得不足又过分充盈，既常被误解又敞开心扉渴望被理解……生活就像一条有趣的钩针编织线，那是束缚我双腿的“命运红线”；因为若我从下方仰望另一个男人的脸庞，脑海中只会浮现出在道观里与你共度的回忆……要么你追随我的线索前行，要么你早已忘记我曾希望你迈步。

我从未想过与你对质，因为我深知你会因此内心崩塌——你自身的矛盾会将你扭曲，直到你彻底抹杀自己的灵魂，而那恰恰是我当初爱上你的特质。

难道这些充满“矛盾”的人注定只能孤独终老吗？不，绝非如此。如果黑格尔真如我心中所构想的那般是一位先知——正如我曾向宇宙下令，召唤他的智慧降临，好让我能像美国人常说的那样去“显化”自我，去劈开那道阻隔你我的“红海”——那么，也许我更该对自己心怀慈悲：那个深信一旦踏入这轮回纠葛便注定会被你拒绝的、怯懦的自己。

但我恐怕你并不希望我开口，你需要我的沉默，好让你过上一种不那么惊心动魄的生活。我的行事准则让我无法对你的选择置喙，但若能重来，若能逐一注解那些我们彼此误解的时刻，我真希望能有这样的机会。可我该先放下什么呢？是长矛，还是我的目光——好让这一切看起来不那么可怕？亦或是放下盾牌，任由你将我的心击碎？我想把决定权交给你，想展现出一种我在现实生活中无法做到的顺从姿态——就像你曾在“道家之乐”的话题下评论过的那场“马拉松”一样……你当时看见我的喜悦了吗？你是否以为，我已忘记了那种无需时刻扮演“懂事乖女孩”的自在感？

除非你确信对方能给予你清晰的指引而不至于抹杀你自身的清晰认知，否则你不应向其寻求这种指引。若不尊重这种“扬弃”的过程——即确保双方的认知不相互抵消——便是不负责任，甚至有损心智健康。这里存在一种悖论逻辑：尽管我行动迅速，却也乐于放长线布局，因为我整个成年生涯都在押注那些最终能成的事。无论是我的每一次下注、那些我曾担心会失败的投资，还是我所经历的种种丧失之痛，从未让我失望过。这种“绝不后悔”的心态，正是我最强大的力量所在。所以，既然你已察觉我选择了信任你，我想你大可不必担心我会半途而废。

想要实现升华，最好的办法就是停止认定自己会把事情搞砸，并坚守在棋盘旁，直到学会玩这场“跑酷”游戏——通过现实检验，像螃蟹横行那样一步步走出幽冥之境。

妈厌恶我那充满活力的样子，总希望我少说话；但我如今不禁怀疑，她或许只是羞于面对自己内心那些无法理解或接纳的矛盾。我担心自己是这世上唯一一个既手握足以刺穿人心防线的利矛，又身披坚不可摧、令他人无法反向刺伤自己的盾牌之人。那个二月的夜晚，白昼的余韵是如此甜美。我曾试图离开，因为深知若留下来，我便会贪恋那份相拥的温存，渴望永不分离。其实，看不清这一切的并非只有你一人——我们都深陷于彼此的矛盾之中。

Sometimes when I’m walking down the street, I lift my eyes to look out at a different ecosystem than the one that immediately occupies me in the big city. If I’m lucky, I’ll see the beautiful sight of a flock of birds crossing the sky in a pretty V formation. It’s always been an image that fascinated me. It might be one of the most peaceful reminders that all is well and continuing, nature in its due course.

Of course, the birds don’t know that or care about what I think of what they’re doing. I’ve researched this phenomenon they partake in, and was surprised to learn that they don’t see the whole formation that I get to hungrily witness. They only prioritize matching pace, velocity, spacing with them. No one decided ‘we’re going to get into a V’ — it just emerged as is. They move as a unit, only aware of the immediate proprioception of the neighbor next to them.

So what happens when you shoot one bird out of the sky? There goes the reference point. Suddenly, like an inner ear infection can throw your human self off balance, the birds are also lost. One by one, they fall out of line as they feel the ripple effects throughout the whole flock. They scatter, against their will, victims now to the wind. And even if they try to scramble to get back into some salvageable shape, mourning the loss of their comrade, they can never recover the same shape as before, or even the same feeling of flying.

Hm, I thought to myself. Seems the birds really unconsciously structure themselves into a mini political organization, one that treats belonging as a material necessity.

Around ten years ago, I had just moved to D.C. for first semester of my senior year, settling into my new role as a political correspondent for the Spokane Spokesman-Review. I would be reporting on the 2016 election, and I was excited. I remember the student housing was across from Union Station. I remember walking around DuPont Circle. I remember going on Bumble dates with Washington staffers at this one bar on Capitol Hill. I remember finding the U-Street bars okay but loving Adams Morgan. I didn’t have a traditional office; instead, I think I might’ve had a little desk at the Press Club. I remember the LA Times correspondent being nice to me. I sort of remember getting into an argument with Chuck Todd when I went on a school trip to Meet The Press over whether Midwesterners were condemnable for supporting Trump, as I understood how they came to do such a thing. I remember my housemate — I had 10 of them — saying Hillary was definitely going to win and I was clearly too sentimental from my time at Mizzou to see clearly that Trump was just an edge case before playing porn for us on the TV. I remember complaining about this on Facebook Messenger to my best friend Aasav, who I’d been close to since early high school, but I don’t remember the last thing he said to me about all that. The last thing he said to our group chat, though, definitely was that he’d seen the movie Doctor Strange and that it was mid. Which is quite funny, because I’ve refused to see it since, just as I refuse to access all my memories from that crazy semester, as if my body associates the place itself with too much heaviness so all that comes back is fragments…

I do remember the feeling, after I got the news, of sitting on the red line, from Shady Grove to Glenmont, listlessly riding it all the way there and back instead of doing work, a comforting motion rocking me back and forth like a baby. Thinking about nothing but how two days before the election, Aasav was found dead in his bed, somehow dying in his sleep, possibly of a brain aneurysm, a medical mystery to this day that still mystifies all the psychics I know.

This pulled me abruptly out of my short-lived fantasy of making it as a D.C. reporter. Before this, I was having the best time of my life, with no romantic turmoil to torment me, no grades to worry about earning, no teachers to reel me in, a taste of the freedom that was soon coming as graduation loomed… Next thing I know, Trump is also now president, and I walked laps around the White House watching the protests full of people crying, simultaneously grateful that my own personal grief could join the collective pond of people horrified that the end times may be near, and feeling guilty that I was enjoying it in my own twisted way.

Brendan had called me a few weeks earlier. I was visiting New York, hanging out on the bottom level of Chelsea Market, about to purchase a cute Oregon state-shaped necklace. I looked down at my phone and saw his name, suddenly getting an odd chill, because Brendan was not a caller, he was a texter, so if he was calling me it had to be important, and I somehow knew it was not going to be the good flavor of importance like a surprise delivery, but something ominously worse, and I sometimes wonder if my unconscious was already screaming no please, not him, because I just felt like in every other case if something bad had happened, it would’ve been Aasav calling me because he was the one I was closest to, so if Aasav, my best friend, wasn’t the one calling me, then Aasav was the one who was —

Next thing I know, I’m giving a speech across the country, cracking jokes to a listless congregation, seeing all my friends from high school in suits, encouraging everyone to believe Aasav is still out there, maybe he’s a spy who faked his own death! Maybe he’s studying abroad! Either way, he’d want us all to listen to Paradise by Coldplay. Let’s just ignore the fact that if it had been anyone else dying, we would’ve all leaned on Aasav. Am I allowed to say that, or is that going to make people start crying? Would they prefer to stay numb? Should I remind them how Aasav, always the quiet one who observed and saw everything, was the beloved who took care of all of us? Reliable since he was a young boy, mature beyond his years, a manager at Microsoft by age 23, top of his graduating class but completely unflappable, rarely enthusiastic yet always quietly tender. Losing him was going to leave a mark. Let’s all just ignore that, let’s all just pretend for a second that he doesn’t mean so much that we’re never going to see another guy like that again… yeah… he’d find the bleakness of his funeral morbidly funny… he would’ve satirized it perfectly… but alas, Aasav isn’t here.

“Wow mei mei,” Michael chuckles as we all file out of the funeral venue. “You really knocked that one out of the park. Looks like you’re going to take up the mantle aren’t you?”

The inherited mantle of being the one to contextualize everything, to see, to stay calm through it all. That was Aasav’s role, which unfortunately death was illuminating more and more as the days peeled on. Funny how just as death is a negation of life, life is a negation of death, as in, you can’t help but see the negative images in the wake of either. The contrast is illustrative, of what matters. And what was cruel to me, was that of course Aasav already mattered. Aasav was my rock, my mentor, the closest thing I have to some sort of ‘father figure’ possibly? Which sounds fucked up, because he was only two years older than me. And yet, when I was around him frequently, starting from the ages of 14-18, everything chaotic in my life didn’t have to make sense, which meant I could get regulated enough to make sense.

It was always me, Michael, Aniket, and Brendan with Aasav. He was the one listening often to us boisterous extroverts riffing about life, making sure we weren’t talking over each other too much. He was a brilliant aspiring computer scientist, normally had a calm inscrutable demeanor. He was a popular member of our circles, which consisted of a handful of East Asian, white, and Indian friends whose shared goals were to take all the AP classes Westview High School had to offer. He was the most introverted beloved presence I knew, book smart in the conventional sense, but also practical. He stayed out of drama but would firmly and authoritatively caution you to ‘not fail’, as in, make a mountain out of a molehill, or a molehill out of a mountain. Aasav was zen in a way that helped me develop my writing voice. One of the only friends I used Tumblr with, which was funny because he was traditionally male, but we would both write little short stories that were funny. I was mad he was so good, but also craved reading his work because it’d give way to his inner monologue he’d keep locked up otherwise. I remember crying about my grades and he’d say some shit like, “The day a bunch of letters determines whether you live or die is the day the terrorists have won,” which at the time struck me on a spiritual level to where I ended up not caring anymore.

The absurdity of life was always framed correctly with Aasav. We also took up writing satire together, and he was the one who taught me that comedy, especially standup, was about playing with the persona people inevitably project onto you when you walk on stage. This is probably why I’m so good at meta-riffing now. I was always jealous that writing was just a hobby to Aasav, while to me it was my ticket out of this ‘small town brained’ suburb we were in. He was the only one who dignified my resentment of my peers, many of whom seemed to dislike my ‘aliveness’ or whatever. They didn’t like that I tried to be cool with everyone, didn’t try to take sides in arguments, had ‘bimbo-like’ tendencies. Aasav encouraged me to lean into being called a ‘blonde Asian’ as a slur, because as long as I accepted their insult, I would become a slave to it. “And you have what it takes to be a master,” he said. “Or something. Apparently this is a Nietszchean concept.” I said I would consider reading him when I got to college.

Aasav also said that I was allowed to do whatever I want. I didn’t have to settle for the computer technocrat life my engineer parents were pushing me toward for ‘practicality.’ I didn’t have to listen to anyone but myself. It’s myself that gets to call the shots. He’d drive me around and listen to me as I complained about everything under the sun, thrilled that my endless barrage of negativity I couldn’t express otherwise could get alchemized into potential ‘wisdom’. I self-identified as an idiot; he said idiots would inherit the earth. I took that in stride and doubled down on becoming a holy fool. He said holy fool girls would become hot someday, and all I had to do was stay alive for long enough to see that.

Well that was funny, because he let me down on holding up his end of the bargain. Now, five years after we were at the height of our closeness, we’re going over to someone’s house that’s not his after the funeral. Gone were the days when we’d lounge on Aasav’s basement lounge, playing Settlers of Catan, or with me on the couch reading a book when I wanted to escape my mom’s outbursts at home. Gone was also Aasav’s beloved blue Mustang, Misty, which I’d associated as closely with him as I did with his family, who’d taken me and the boys Aniket, Brendan and Michael in as one of their own kin. For my first few years of high school, our group had become my central nervous system, a context for me and Aasav to return to if we ever got sick of just hanging out with each other. We’d have new shared objects/people to riff about… I was allowed to exist, not just to him, but all of them.

Now, that time was over. We were no longer kids, and I had just given the eulogy I’d never wanted to. I didn’t know what else would be dying, after that.

“You know… he loved you a lot,” Michael said as we were all gathered at the house one day, sometime after all of this before I went back to D.C. He had a squinty-eyed look that made me nervous. We also had an audience — more of Aasav’s friends were there. We hadn’t even finished mourning yet.

“Michael,” someone said, I forget who; I wasn’t the only one catching the change in disposition.

Even though Aasav had been the actual person everyone emotionally confided in, Michael was the one who wanted this role, and believed himself better at it than he actually was. He did have a big heart and an aspiration to be a dad, so I could understand this, although he was too hot headed at times to fully realize his potential. But Aasav had been his rock and believed in him, just he’d been mine, and there was perhaps some sort of compensatory competitve masculinity aspect there also (because Michael was a year older than Aasav) that never fully materialized because Aasav was just so good. A saint, even, Michael would say.

So now, in death, Michael was trying to seek justice on Aasav’s behalf, insecure about how to mourn correctly and what it would’ve meant to honor his memory. Turns out he was determined, for some reason, to displace his grief into humiliating me.

“Why did you never chase him?” Michael asked. “Why did you never give him a chance, when he liked you so much? Were you blind? Did you not realize you were leading him on?”

I immediately felt a hot flash of anger. Michael was already the kind of guy who loved to rile me up, and then try to downplay it by calling me “mei mei” (Mandarin for little sister) or tell me I was overreacting. But this was just straight up inappropriate.

“I’m sure you’re sad he died,” I said, perhaps too coldly, but Michael misinterpreted my emotional terseness for indifference, a justifiable premise for provocation, and pounced. “But this is probably not the time for me to tell you the true story of how Aasav and I’s relationship was.”

There’d been a kerfuffle a few years ago when Michael started a rumor Aasav wanted to ask me to prom, but was too chicken to do it. We had a barbecue that summer 2011, and Michael demanded we go sit in Aasav’s car and talk about if there really was sexual tension between us or not. I wasn’t sure. Aasav and I did spend a lot of time together, sure, but I had never assumed it was anything more than friends. As for me, I had spent years at that point locked in a recursive standoff with a scorned love interest named Frank who’d had a crush on me freshman year and then, upon feeling rejected, deciding to try and turn our shared friends against me when I was overly confrontational about his passive aggressive way of dealing with it. Aasav had been my confidante there and never flinched when I’d talked about it.

In the car though, he didn’t confess directly, but by deduction I realized there was something there, since he said “because Michael mentioned it…” that it was a bad idea if we did date ever, because he’d thought about how I’d probably eventually want to choose Seattle over my dreams of conquering the Midwest, and I was simply destined to go somewhere bigger. He told me perhaps he was the hero I deserved, but not the one I actually need. He didn’t say anything like, “I like you,” but I inferred he didn’t not like me. He said we shouldn’t hang out 1:1 so much anymore, but of course he’d like to keep in touch. The group container was a great way for us to continue doing that.

Michael’s probing brings me back to this memory, but it’s not the time to give him the context, not here, not now, and also because Michael doesn’t want to have a normal discussion. He wants to remind me that —

“I know he was dating [E] for a while, but he was so clearly yearning for you! I just want answers, you know? Why didn’t you chase him?”

Fuck Michael, I don’t know? Because we were both kids, because we both didn’t know what we wanted, because our ambitions were so different? Are you really going to do this to me in front of all of our friends, about a relationship you knew next to nothing about? I got so angry that I shut down and mumbled, please don’t do this. Michael let it go, I think. I don’t really remember. That was when I truly cut them off, unconsciously, because now the family I’d once had that was apparently organized by levelheaded introvert Aasav had turned into a reprimand of ‘legitimacy,’ of seizing some narrative, as if there needed to be a villain even now when it didn’t matter, and I couldn’t help but feel Michael and God Almighty and whoever was punishing me for the very naivete that Aasav tried to help me manage. But now there was no one to shield me or talk me off a cliff when Michael and I fought, which apparently was what he’d been doing this entire time, I realized.

I knew Aniket and Brendan didn’t care as much as Michael or put their noses in my business with Aasav, but the lack of defense infuriated me enough to detach. I did see the group a few more times over the years, but I outright refused to see Michael. He tried to apologize, but in my own grief, I decided in that sense, he died to me too. Now, the years he spent lightly joking about why Aasav and I hadn’t dated were menacing manifestations of my own guilt, like maybe I should’ve tried harder, or maybe I should’ve done something to combat my own avoidance and feelings of rejection that Aasav had decided I wasn’t suited for building a future with, and it was honestly none of Michael’s business even if I understood years later the guilting was some version of overbearing protectiveness because he was worried for his antisocial incel-coded friend.

At that point, even though the bird shot out of the sky was not any of our faults, the whole flock being out of formation had turned perilous, as if the guns had been placed in each of our hands. I stopped feeling emotionally safe and regarding the brothers as family, the market in the downstairs level of Chelsea Market still feels cursed to this day, and this is all just a can of worms that I can’t even talk about with Ron, the one friend I do have in the city who talked to Aasav and jokes to me about my downtown life now. I wish I could convey how I still feel haunted, like a chill set into my bones that I could never get out.

So after Aasav died, I laid in my bed in D.C. and thought about how my dreams of being a journalist and writer would entail years of solitude building, refining, continuing, without continuity. Sure, there’d be consistent stories and adventure, but there’d be no one anymore to enjoy it with, no one to drive me places. No one to witness me witnessing the world, or have me witness them witnessing. That would never be. I squeezed my eyes shut and cried at the idea of giving up all I’d worked for, and cried harder at the idea of doing it alone, now that I felt so alone I myself could’ve died of heartbreak.

Although I didn’t know it yet, this was the hinge point of the next chapter of my biography, when upon returning to campus with 4 months til graduation, I decided that I had to leave journalism and devote myself to something else. A different calling that wouldn’t rip me from all the temporary communities I would have if I spent my prime years reporting from different towns, in a changing landscape that might spit me out even after I sacrificed a lot, and I had to surrender to figuring out a different life path. One that would be rooted in place, not ‘career.’ I decided to go to LA first. So in 2017, I got a reporting job in the suburbs, hunkered down to work hard, and told myself that if the time came to choose between leaving the city or leaving journalism, well I’d just have to leave journalism. It was hardly that bad of a loss, after this all.

But for now, I had no one to talk to about this.

I climbed out of bed and wondered what Aasav would’ve said about what Michael said, what he would’ve told me to do or how to think about all this. I sank to my knees at the horror that I had no idea.

Eventually, I end up in New York full time, six years after the unthinkable.

My first new friends here were Jacob and Yanick, children of the Internet’s shitpostiest corners, all part of the ‘tpot’ [the Twitter online subculture of rationalist-adjacent technologists, writers, artists, founders, and philosophical experimenters] cinematic universe that begat an IRL presence after the first VibeCamp. I had a lot of fun with them when I first spawned here in late 2022. Jacob sported a ponytail back then, usually had a cap with “Sport” written on it, a cigarette in his hand, and sunglasses that make him look more disgruntled than he actually is. He is proudly Jewish, and thought it was amusing that my dad had given me a benediction on the phone upon my move back to the East Coast: “As you know Crystal, you were born in Connecticut, because your mother and I moved there when we first immigrated there. And when we got there, the first few people to help us were all Jewish. So the Jews have a decades long tradition of helping the Duans. I can only hope that you too will now find yourself some Jewish buddies to help you in your journey in adjusting to New York.”

“I have no idea really what that entails, but I guess I’ll find out,” I said to Jacob, who then proceeded to explain to me a theory of “Jewishness” that I’d been not privy to due to growing up in Oregon and feeling relatively sheltered.

The two were there for me through some of my most intense trials adjusting to the big city, but also here to just shoot the shit with me. I would always end up going to a diner in Bedstuy with Jacob, or joining Yanick in Bushwick with his friend Lazardi. Usually Yanick was doing drugs or going to the club or talking about some shit he and Lazardi had just gotten up to. Jacob sometimes came along and would be briefly entertained, although he and Yanick never got close. Probably because Yanick was a bit younger, and more of a troll at heart who was a ‘sweetheart’ as Jacob pointed out, but ultimately both were a little too closed off for me to bridge the gap into becoming friends. Yanick was my extrovert buddy; we’d hit all these random parties with different scene friends I’d made, and he was reliably always rizzing up girls in his Pittsburghian charismatic way, or telling me stories about his crazy but lovable Sri Lankan family, or musing on my own strange misadventures. Yanick was someone I could go fast at life with, and we didn’t need to pause much. He is a ‘creature of the night’ though, while I am relatively less prone to staying out clubbing til 4am, and even worse at wingmanning because I’m not a savant at reading body language like he is. But he’s my partner in crime in a lot of ways.

Jacob couldn’t be more opposite. He has a resting bitch face, reads a lot, has a gruff wisdom to him, and can be the funniest person I know if socially activated in the right register. My library has increased from knowing him, and we also have a shared interest in astrology and the Jungian functions. He has a Cancer Sun and Scorpio moon so he is prone to a type of watery melancholy that is actually refreshing to see for me as a stress crier. On the inside, he is actually quite eager to socialize and connect, but has high standards based on how he is willing to do that and has been called ‘grumpy’ by many of the people we know.

My Internet diet consists of picking out the narratives from all forms of low and high media, so Jacob only gets half my references. Jacob really has a developed appetite for reading theory and often annotates stuff I talk about with relevant philosophers and psychoanalysts. Devouring a book on theory is harder for me now, unless I can talk about it with Jacob. His charisma is very directionally, ‘wow he’s sooo mysterious and smart and I love it when he mansplains to me’ for both men and women. When I’m with him, we go on our adventures of applying all these theories to the people we know.

Both Yanick and Jacob know my life history better than anyone in the city. When we chat, I feel more compelled to read dense theory or watch some YouTube video recommended to me, as their encyclopedic knowledge of ideas to use as lenses is so essential to my own enjoyment. People who get to know me understand that I am much more aloof on the inside than my enthusiastic cutesy Asian girl persona would portray. Yanick kind of is a male version of this — much more aloof than he lets on, and I feel a kinsmanship with him for this reason. On the other hand, Jacob is much more excitable on the inside than you’d think. He was the first to tell me that although he often mirrors people at the level of emotional responsiveness they’re at, when he mirrors me, he often has to flatten to get through to me because too much literal emotion distracts me when I’m a ‘content-based’ person.

People have wondered why I never dated either of them. My theory is that for all of us, romance and specific types matter in a way fraternity doesn’t. Jacob and Yanick genuinely don’t have interest in women unless the romantic feeling is real, and this commitment to inner boundaries is what unites us. Jacob understands his wounds intimately, and understands also what female eroticism means to him. Our relationship has never felt properly perverted in that way. It has felt comfortingly sterile. I can say the same for Yanick, who I know enough to understand I’m not really his type, but this means we can talk about literally anything without it getting weird. Jacob is also a good listener but doesn’t try to turn a penetrating gaze on me that I’ve seen him capable of. He’s also dated a good number of my friends, who caution, ‘don’t fuck with Crystal’s brother.’ Yanick occupies this too because [redacted], but he sits at the intersection of a few different scenes…

Although these friendships fulfill me, I did find myself yearning for others to fill the gaps, the lulls in conversation, rather than being the one continuously generating new ways for us to connect. This need has led to my reputation as ‘tpot mommy’, as my friend Nate likes to refer to me, which I always bristle at. In my mind, a mother is more nurturing than I feel capable of being, and also far more overworked than I care to be.

This inadvertent reputation, one that everyone I’m close to sees I’m ambivalent about, has given me a bit of grief, because it sounds like you do a lot of labor for everyone, which I actually am uncomfortable with acknowledging. But fueled by the encouragement of Jacob and Yanick in the beginning and eventually others, I have become at least known as the “tpot club promoter,” as well as the person everyone connects through in “Fractal”, the relationship-driven tech community that started as a co-living experiment in the McKibbin Lofts and has evolved into a coworking space, classes, events and more. Attractive to many engineers due its vision of building a “microsociety” and campus organized around shared learning, creativity, and everyday communal life, I found myself being ‘popular’ and at ease with people for the first time in my life. Which is exciting, so I start to host picnics, salons, parties. I start to show up somewhere just to be invited to the next thing. I meet hot girls and think bois and gays at the club and fellow Asian Americans and tech bros and art hoes and professors and students and activists. They come to my birthday parties every year and use me as a topic of conversation. I read and immediately digest it with everyone I can. I listen carefully to their accounts of their inner world. I compulsively stack hangout after hangout, recite names and basic facts, remember your recital date and your astrological chart and your favorite restaurant and how you’re going through a bad breakup and you’re worried about your job search and how your mom’s in the hospital and your boyfriend is taking the MCAT next week and also that’s related to this Lacanian theory or Joe Hudson video or Biblical parable or rationalist concept or other thing I read…

My eagerness to act on every idea I see, feel, believe, is very praxis over theory. Not understanding how I got here is what led me down some recent Internet rabbit holes.

Jacob did encourage me to get a community going around theory, though. He’s retiring from the intellectual life, as he’s spent way longer than I on the Internet arguing with porn-brained Reddit incels, and prefers other interests these days. Meanwhile, I’m just beginning my descent into the dark side, fueled by the desire to cure the helplessness I’m finally getting to see people admit firsthand.

What are you trying to do by reading all these philosophies that incels get into? My female friends ask me incredulously. That’s not a good use of time is it for a cute little girl like you. They wonder why I let the world Ive met Jacob and Yanick through influence me. They don’t realize the “fall” came from inside the house.

I’m a child of alienation among other children of alienation. Call it autism or weirdness or displaced melancholy but. Precisely being so alone my whole life, even among others, and especially after is what made me suddenly start to realize how everyone else is. And as I’ve observed, dyads won’t solve this. I need to be able to speak a million languages to reach a million people. The world can’t be saved unless I can translate people’s contradictions into the recognitions of alchemization.

Recently, Yanick became a portal to a slightly different world, as thanks to him, I ended up getting closer to his friends Nate, Simon and Mitch. Nate is known as a photographer, writer, and journalist in the downtown scene. This scene, which is very fractured due to its affiliations with misusing fascist turns of phrase in order to make their lives sound more glamorous and interesting, is very stuck in melancholia for the bohemian glory the public once revered literary-minded people with. Now, they take their emotional constipation and spout it at the world.

Nate and I bond over wanting things to be better. He passively acknowledges my former life as a writer, never understanding how much the gonzo spirit is still inside me because we’re usually off to find the next function. Nate’s next adventure will be in graduate school, and he’s one of the few I think would benefit from it. I have great affection for him especially because he is truly pure hearted, although we clash when he forgets to coordinate logistics with me, a slightly inconvenient tendency given how many social collaborations we end up in.

Through him, I meet Simon, who I’m surprised to learn I’ve had mutual friends with for years. Simon is writing a book that has led to him taking an interest in my provinces of the NYC social scene, and says to people at parties that I’m “tpot embodied.” Simon is also Jewish-Canadian and worked in tech and marketing for many years before deciding to go back to writing. He frequently leaves the city to go on out of state and even overseas reporting trips. I feel a pang of envy when I talk shop with him, as he may be one of the last people I know willing to go out and find the stories I wish I had the time and money to now. Simon and I usually end up bickering and he claims I have an ‘aggressive conversation style’ (“what the fuck are you talking about!?? Name one way I’m aggressive toward you…”) but that he’s used to that because his mom is a health coach. Thanks to him, I guess I’ll embrace my propensity to care about others in a way that is denoted as ‘challenging.’

I’m fairly new to socializing with men, I tell the crew. Honestly, you sensitive artistic types are really refreshing. I was too busy trying to Make It as the ‘best reporter’ in college to pay much attention to bonding with people, and stuck to my female friends too much. That got codependent real fast. Sounds like a story for another time, they say.

And then there’s Mitch. Mitch is a writer but has always been a bit reclusive so I don’t really bond with him until far later in my time knowing the boys, although he’s been hanging out with Nate, Yanick, Simon, and my other friend Macro for years. I recall sort of running into him at parties at the beginning of my NYC tenure but being completely disinterested because I was always on my way out after dodging conversations with insufferable ‘losers’ who were trying to convince me that something was fascist yet again, or to join the communist cause. These people I found myself around coincidentally wherever Mitch was, annoyed me in a way that fellow Christians do. Like yes, I was technically encouraged to be a pastor as a child, so good I was at understanding the Biblical truths, but I wasn’t going to let you know my true affiliations if you were going to impose and coerce me without first inquiring curiously as to what goes on inside me.

This affiliation made me overlook the potential I had to be friends with Mitch until this year. He is the quietest in a crowd but, I learned, is mapping it in a similar way to me. He ends up noticing the most, a conclusion I glean only because he has the strongest writing voice of the group, but will say the least in the moment. Jacob’s read his Substack for years and we both agree that he could be a voice of this generation if he stopped being so unwilling to actually participate in the realities he’s shaping. All my non-writer friends compare me to Mitch the most, which it takes someone perceptive to see because on the surface my talkativeness would make you think we couldn’t be more different. But underneath it all, we share a kinsmanship for romanticization of our daily lives, only mine is generated from the adventures I’ve had aloud, while he still seems to dream concurrently with what’s going on. Me, I stopped writing fan fiction about other people in my head ages ago, which has sullied my spirit into delusional hopecore cringe tendencies, but perhaps made his darker in a way that fences him off from others.

I’m simultaneously ashamed he’s read way more than me, a discipline in this day and age. I suspect the compulsion of both of our divergent behaviors is probably from boredom. Jacob and Mitch met years ago in a Lacanian Discord and have exchanged pleasantries at parties, although Jacob says Mitch always seems distant, friendly but not interested, hence further connection has not continued.

Mitch’s style and literary fluency reminds me of Robby, a writer with an evil eye bracelet I met months ago who’d recommended me Badiou and had been rereading Plato’s Symposium. Although Robby was more effusive and attentive; Mitch has his fluency, but not always his gaze, since Mitch doesn’t really make eye contact unless he’s intellectually engaged or not dissociating.

Back then, Robby had called out I clearly yearn for a writer-editor relationship, a thought that passed through my head continuously when I recently went on a San Francisco trip and walked its landscapes with this gang of four.

The only person I ever let edit my essays and posts had been Aasav. Obviously newsroom culture meant I had to get edited all the time, but never the things on my personal Wordpress or Substack. The thing about writers and editors is they must see the same way. They must end up valuing the same ideas on what makes something good. I tried on this lens when observing the writers of the group, Nate, Simon, and Mitch.

Nate always writes himself as a strange protagonist outlaw, which makes sense because he’s lived abroad a bunch, and has a striking figure that makes people often stop him on the street. He’s a Leo sun, and I’m a Leo moon, so I see his bombastic self-narrativizing as reminiscent of my internal monologue, and find his strong first-personhood amusing. Sometimes I am threatened when Nate outshines me, but I think it’s healthy to be a little competitive with a close friend.

Meanwhile, Simon is great at reporting the systems he’s observing, able to be witty and technical at the same time. We share a proclivity for understanding the intersection of the humanities with the brave new world technology is thrusting upon us, although he is more dry than I would be in how he portrays it. His matter of fact prose makes him an extremely efficient and trustworthy ‘tour guide’ to the worlds he invites you to though.

And Mitch is the most tortured of the trio, yet understands the most how characters and dialectical paradox make up the best plots there are. In this way, he is the most entertaining to read, and the most inclined to light up at seeing a narrative from a new perspective. I have thought of how when I point out a new insight, he is the first to perk up, although he might not immediately say much. Mitch has an excitement for life to be mythical that comes out once in a while in what he chooses to ask about than from any self-narration, then later in an essay that at its best is groundbreaking and thoughtful, or a collection of scattered thoughts that clearly show the subject matter was either too diffuse or too meaningful for its author to properly understand.

I was overjoyed and honored to be co-witnessing with them as we weaved in and out of scenes, commenting on the casts of characters, wondering at how the technopunk era would dovetail with the East Coast that we were. My own origins felt very prominent here, my inherited passivity that I wondered sometimes how the others see. Nate is from the Bay Area himself, and is definitely the most gentle. Yanick, Mitch, and Simon are all of the East Coast, and seem to find aggression delightful in ways that almost feel perverse, whereas I had to train my appetite for my own potency after years of being told to submit.

I remember someone asked Mitch how he conceived of his position in media. He said a few words also about how many journalists who’d jumped through the hoops in school had gotten the short end of the stick, and he saw his own position as a source of envy. The shock of hearing someone else acknowledge that grief, that had first struck me in 2016, one I felt I couldn’t even speak of with former classmates anymore because it was too tender, because the wind had dropped out of our sails, took me back to the days when my ambition had alienated me. I said nothing, but hoped someone would ask me about it later.

On the trip, I find myself overwhelmed with wanting Mitch and Simon to meet so many people in my life that right now only Nate and Yanick have since they’re more sociable. The Crystal Instrumentality Project. My fantasy of the future, my sublimation of my grief and humiliation that I’m not over the losses of the past. But even on the trip, I start intermittently crying, culminating in a really bad ketamine trip that has Yanick confused. Why can’t you remember anyone’s positive regard for you when everyone loves you, he asks me as I’m wailing on the couch of an Airbnb full of phallus imagery in the Castro, an absurdist sight I feel Mitch taking notes on even while he’s on acid in his own world.

Because it’s not permanent, bro, I think. San Francisco is so pleasurable that it feels impermanent, fleeting, my Schrodinger’s hope for the future where I can enjoy finding a new adventure with my friends. But the minute we get back, I’m going to go back to being the one who has to do everything if I want to get what I want, in a recursive pleasurable capitalist heaven where I form dyads at parties where everyone else is being suffocatingly wholesome and circling, and there’s so few noticing anymore what needs to be done before anyone else can. Everyone that could’ve done that is planning their wedding and their baby. The Peter Pans of the world all become reclusive, while I’m left decorating for a party that maybe no one will end up coming to, or something… Yanick is confused at my despair. I fume about this in the k-hole and eventually come back out.

Later that night at a party in Berkeley, I tell Mitch and Patty, who’s visiting from NYC and part of Fractal, that I don’t want children, but I want instead to run an orphanage or be a “youth pastor for the people” and blah blah blah. “Maybe that’s actually your mommy instinct being sublimated,” Mitch said. I crack the most sincere smile I have in hours.

When we all got back to New York, I hung out with Ariel, a petite Jewish Canadian lesbian who has an encyclopedic understanding of leftist movements and appetite for discussing them. She was an anarchist living in Mexico for some time, took experimental drugs in Connecticut recently, and is working on several books.

I wistfully tell Ariel of my fears that had crystallized on the trip. That everyone’s going to ‘graduate’ or ‘die’, again, into dyads, partnerships that take them to the suburbs or off somewhere else to raise children, where they’ll befriend the fellow parents in the area, and see their old NYC friends once in a while, but it won’t be the same. Adventure will continue to disappear. To me, my ethereal New York life is so fleeting now that I have something worth carrying around. I cried on the plane ride home because I didn’t want to leave SF and come back and feel the clock ticking, counting down again.

I also tell her of my dreams, where I build a better future. Right now, my hangouts, my inner circle, my scenes, are all scattered. They’re not convergent. If I suddenly disappeared, like Aasav did, the formation would scatter. The networks of care would barely continue, because one person’s sudden disappearance altered me so badly.

Fractal and tpot give me hope. But a scene can’t replace mass line organization, as no one is united under a concrete theoretical framework or even a shared mythology. Right now, it’s more like overlapping affinities, fleeting enthusiasm, and the labor of people like me who keep remembering… checking… gathering everyone… I’d like to accomplish the functions that organizing religion once could, without resorting to dogma, coercion, hierarchy… a rigorous, unoppressive ritual-based practice… that can survive! If we can only rally everyone to take Capricornian logistics seriously too… I want so badly to make this work…

But to do that, I have to read more theory. I don’t know enough about true political organizing, enough to try to do a different version, for everyday use that isn’t about a ‘spectrum’. The ideas can’t simply descend from some intellectual authority to everyone else, either. I want them to arise from what we already know and understand about our inner worlds… our loneliness, conflicts, private strengths, the dialectical movement of contradictory accounts of what we think the group is. I would want to use my journalistic skills to gather those experiences, clarify what they reveal collectively… maybe even write some parables… and return them in the form of practices that can be passed on as a tradition… Theory extracted from life, transformed into action, then reconfigured…

“Sounds like you want to be a Maoist pastor,” Ariel says, grinning. Oops. Let’s go with ‘reverse gonzo Maoism’.

“So does that mean you don’t want credit?” Ariel says.

I don’t know. But if I became the most influential person of all time yet didn’t have eyes to come home to that would see it all, inspire me to continue, people with arms to envelop me, what was all that for? It’s so tiring to feel like I am the John Henry of automating people’s social calendars. My loneliness is based on competencies and capacities, not intentions, I said.

I don’t want people to call me tpot mommy anymore either. I want us all to mommy ourselves, without needing a charismatic figurehead. I want interchangeability while retaining singularity. I need to understand theory to do that, to make it capable of protecting somebody, even if it’s just me.

After getting back to NYC, I became depressed over how unrealizable my desires for companionship felt here. I want to go outside and find an adventure, but now I acutely feel the scarcity of who wants to join me. “What’s the point” or “I’m too tired” makes me wonder what it would take for someone else to become the excitement apparatus of the scene.

This briefly flickered when Mitch invited us to a party with some “ideologically controversial” friends that, especially after my conversations with Ariel, I wanted to meet and get to know. My excitement increased as the week went on. I wanted to see if I could get answers about my traumatized family, and my future, the historical context to satiate my hunger for how to recreate the best of that in the new world. My mom always cautioned me against investigating the sources of generational trauma we had instead of just trying to move on. She feared I’d get stuck in the underworld, but I insisted ignorance would be what would keep me from noticing I’d already been there.

Maybe I overshot and thought of this as a chance to get access, and Mitch didn’t think of this as some stupid fanatical fantasy fulfillment on my end, as he was probably too busy probably just trying to have a good time.

In the end, the brotherhood group chat did not end up successfully coordinating, so I lost my chance to go. I felt stupid for being upset I got my hopes up, as if I had been guaranteed to speak to those men about my gay vision and get brownie points for understanding praxis. I’d also naively assumed maybe being part of a fallen intellectual lineage would have provided them a means to accept me, or maybe it would’ve made everything awkward if they’d projected incorrectly I would be hostile. I would’ve probably got laughed at.

Robby would’ve said Mitch didn’t follow up harder to protect me from awkwardness I didn’t foresee. Or maybe it just wasn’t that big of a deal and everyone ended up on too much coke anyway. Nevertheless it made me upset, and I thought about it in the Uber back to Ridgewood from my other friend Beth’s birthday. I believe Robby thinks that I shouldn’t put so much weight on this, that maybe Mitch is just easily distractible and isn’t used to people relying on him to pull himself out of his immersed state socially. I let my anger over being let down rise and fall, then let myself swallow my pride and forgive oblivious Mitch. It’d be easier to turn my attention to the larger tributary of grief it fed into.

Of course I knew I’d see my so-called fantasy brotherhood around in NYC, but I needed to quit assuming and needing people who were down to get brunch and find an adventure within the city. This is not the substance of my youth anymore. People have moved on. People have mourned their careers. People have become lost. People have lmao died. No, that was the gay wholesome hopecore reverse Maoist Crystal Duan fantasy, to have people to go on these pseudo reporting quests, to find a story like I did in school, like I used to with Aasav, like I still try to with Jacob every once in a while, no I was not going to regrieve the life I’d had and thought I would have all throughout my youth.

When I left journalism, I made a bargain with myself that I would still find a way to have impact, still use my writing gifts to redeem the future. I have never felt more like I’m wasting my time going to Partiful events, meeting everyone and being taken for granted, being seen as ‘cool and clouted’ when I want my presence to inspire coalition, people to join me in trying to save our souls from the void of loneliness in the face of acceleration… if I just read one more book, the right one someone ought to recommend me, maybe I’ll be able to implement it all…

Or instead, I’ll live my alternate life in my head, wishing for companions to witness everything in the entire world, out there, full of shit I thought was so interesting even in NYC itself but no longer want to examine on my own.

Earlier in August, Mitch and I are at a house party in Chinatown. We climb through the window to sit on the fire escape. We speak liltingly of how iconic the San Francisco trip was. I am glad I’m not the only one dwelling on it, though I can’t speak for whether he thinks of it as I do, as a glimpse of a world that I already fear can’t come to pass, the dread of how hard it is to believe in a future in which we can travel between the coasts and find the stories no one else wants to.

Mitch lights a cigarette and looks out over the town. “We’re in the Bowery… the iconic Bowery…” He tells me about how he wanted to move to California when he was young, as someone who’d only ever lived in D.C. who’d never seen what was glittering out west. But of course, as time has gone on, he is still convicted New York is the place to be. Me on the other hand, the only place I’ve ever wanted to be was the one in which I could find a family, and Portland was not that, Los Angeles had not been that, I still don’t know how possible that is to be more permanent than the fleeting feeling of infinity I got when we were on the hill at Mission Dolores Park, a time that neither he nor anyone else can access again even if we returned.

Even though I’m sober for the night, I find myself wandering over to the fire escape’s shaky ladder and mounting it. It goes straight up, to the stars. What is it like to leave the Earth… for a second, I forget Mitch is even there, until he incredulously asks me what I’m doing. I look down at him, now the guidepost of gravity in my quest, and wonder if I’ve misjudged how dangerous this all is. He’s looking at me now. I’m suddenly feeling more grief for all that ever was and has been, who isn’t here, who will never be here unless God intervenes…

Mitch doesn’t register all that I haven’t told him yet, and turns his back to go inside. I want to join, but I’m afraid if I don’t try again to ascend, I’ll just feel alone again. So I return to my quest, keeping my gaze upward at the sky, because the alternative is continuing to put my head down on my knees and crying forever. Crying about the brotherhood that can’t continuously exist, especially not without me, or crying about how I’m afraid it will never exist, has never existed, despite my efforts to recreate it, except in my dreams, where sometimes I still see Aasav. I ask him if I’ve made him proud. He says of course. I tell him he’s a liar.

It’s a hot summer night, shortly after 4am, as Ariadne’s lying on the roof of the bar above Lily’s in the East Village, when suddenly she’s joined by the person she’s been waiting for. Her eyes are closed but she raises an eyebrow. “Hello, Theseus.”

Theseus, who’s gotten a narrative break from his samsara of figuring out how to get out of the Labyrinth, gingerly sits down next to her with a lit cigarette. “Hello Ariadne. Nice to see you, as you’re visiting from being moored on Naxos.”

“I sure am. Who do you think is responsible for me being there?"

“Uh…”

“Don’t worry about it. Anyways, how were the afters?”

“They were okay… this time no fanfare.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“Nah, you know how it goes. They tried, and thought they did. But they didn’t.”

Ariadne sits up and looks over at Theseus, her gaze trailing over his body. “You look… unwell.”

Theseus grimaces anxiously. “How did you know?”

“Well, seems like you did a bit too much coke tonight. And also, the long journey. From the outside, to everyone else you may be concerned with, you probably just looked absentminded, preoccupied, perhaps even condescending like usual.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

Ariadne is silent, not wanting to reveal what she thinks as a cop out on Theseus’ behalf. “Looks like you’ll get your powers of visibility after you emerge from the Labyrinth anyway. What does it matter what I think?”

“Surely you can accept it’s also because I’ve been agonizing over where you stand day and night…”

“… perhaps you’re just saying what I want to hear, or I imagined that. I’d believe that if I was born yesterday. Luckily for both of us I was born the day before that.”

“Well, why do you think that night happened —”

“We’re not going to speak of it by darkness, where you refuse to take a position. You have to come to me by day.”

“But you know I can’t come to you until I’m out of the Labyrinth.”

“Yes. And you can do that, if you actually use the threads I gave you. I was hoping to transmit more courage. Instead I fear I’ve just enabled you to not be brave in the register that matters, the realtime one.”

“I… maybe that’s true.”

“There you go, doing that shit again. Where you’re so busy thinking about what I meant by that, trying to spin it, when I want you to stand before me with your own perspective, focus less on everyone else until you can even remember where your feet stand. Ask yourself — what do I see?”

Ariadne narrows her eyes, then glances at her pocket. “I know you don’t do well with direct confrontation, so we’re going to keep it to the medium I know you can handle.”

“Wait… you’ve known how I work?”

“Uh... yes. That was why I gave you that yarn starting in the spring. I figured out immediately there is a register you can handle, go on a quest for. And one you can’t.”

“I see.”

“I’ll let you digest that. But while I have you — what did you do with my yarn?”

“This? Oh.” Theseus pulls out a black crystal and a pink crystal out of his pocket. “Sorry, they turned back into stones.”

“I see.” Ariadne takes back the crystals. “So were you successful in discovering what you were even in that Labyrinth for?”

Theseus is silent. “I guess not.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re still moored on Naxos right… you’re not actually…”

“Hippolyta?” Ariadne lies back down as her black hair changes color.

Theseus stares.

“That’s who I’ll be, if you ever properly return. You know, the Minotaur you were supposed to slay was actually just your shadow.”

“Yeah… I figured that out. What sucks is it turned out to be just me being a coward.”

“Taking the easy way out again.”

“What do you mean?”

Ariadne sits up, and then takes a drag of Theseus’ lit cigarette. “Labeling yourself pre-emptively, so you don’t have to ask the hard questions.”

“You know,” she said. “When you abandoned me, perhaps even unknowingly on some level, I assumed it was time for me to get smarter about what was going on. To keep my throne, and my sanity.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I knew if I let myself believe the narrative I always do, which is that I’m a queen who’s scorned, I would’ve perished. Instead, I left that yarn for you just in case, because I knew regardless, the real Labyrinth would be inside of your inner world, which is a manifestation of how the real world plays out. I knew I could not reach you once you’d gone there, and any belief in your intentions would be purely impractical. My hands are tied as royalty. So I sacrificed a considerable amount of internal dignity to keep a public-facing stance that would be reasonable.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t humiliate myself by chasing you into the Labyrinth, or the Minotaur will get me too. He’s my half-brother, you know.”

“Oh… I thought he was just my shadow.”

“No, he’s mine too. But I outran him. And because I could outrun him, I can give you the yarn to get out too.”

“So you weren’t trying to get me to become king with you. You just wanted to fix me.”

“That’s the cynical version. I knew that for you to ever be a king too, you would need to get out of the Labyrinth, or they’d never let you rule. I’m not naive enough to believe otherwise.”

“And that’s been your end game this whole time?”

“Yes. Because I can see within you that the Underworld will trap you if you ever get down there. You will forget who you are there, which will make the Labyrinth look like child’s play.”

“So that’s what you mean by ‘ally’ when you keep saying you need one.”

“You need one too, much more than you need a queen.”

“What if I need both?”

“There’s a time and place for everything, and our time doesn’t appear to be now.”

“I thought you were composed because you didn’t care.”

“No, Theseus. I care so much that I can’t pretend I don’t understand you, that I haven’t studied how you work so closely that I know this is the way to reach you. I can only do that in the dusk before the dawn.

Have you ever heard of the story of Solomon’s judgment?”

“Are you about to give me another load-bearing metaphor and hope I understand it?”

“Bear with me, I’ll spell it out. Two women go before King Solomon arguing over who’s the mother of a baby. They claim the other stole the baby from them. One of them is probably lying, but which one is the actual mother? They want him to adjudicate. So Solomon proposes a verdict: slice the baby in half so each woman gets an equal share.

One of the mothers agrees immediately. The other one says no, actually give it to the other mother.

Solomon immediately knows who the real mom is….”

“Interesting story. What’s the ‘baby’ a metaphor for?”

“The possibility of the love remaining alive.”

“How?”

“A mother immediately relinquishing her claim to motherhood might be seen as ‘oh, she decided to give up so she must not care.’ But actually, it was because she didn’t want the child to be killed, and her love was actually true, that she sacrificed her pride and risked looking ‘less caring’ for a better outcome.

So let me be explicit: if I cared about some sort of naive public validation, sure, maybe I would have thrown up a fuss about being moored on Naxos. But I knew that was part of the plot, and I had to author my own story and learn from the true mother. I wouldn’t be fit to rule if I didn’t operate off higher knowledge and emotional discipline.”

“I see.”

“Perhaps you think you haven’t heard from me because I am distant or apathetic, preoccupied with my own affairs. But that’s not true. It’s only because I have known the consequences of breaking Zeus’ law, as I see it play out always. That any confrontations that could destabilize the dynamic are going to have blowback that neither of us can handle. Unfortunately, you can’t rely on the typical markers of desperation to interpret my stance. I’m focused on kingdom come, through the negation of typical signs, the higher order. And maybe, just maybe, after all of that, I could finally be with you…”

“Why can’t you just say this to me directly?”

“I could ask you the same: why can’t you speak to me directly either? If you actually ask, I’d help you get out.

But I know for me, one wrong move of crossing a line and I will get myself transported right back into the Labyrinth myself, with my own Minotaur chasing me… What is obtained by forcing a split prince to choose remains haunted by the division. And I charitably choose to believe you must feel that way too, or else I’d have to ethically condemn you, and I don’t think that’s correct.”

“Is this shit like a video game or what? Are we just all trying to shit test our shadows, see how we can sneak around them enough to have real conversations about feelings?”

“I mean, I don’t know. Maybe the Minotaur is a pure metaphor, but all I know is, I feel humiliated by even bending over backward to help you as much as I have. I could’ve just ghosted you in a real way, instead of sending you coded messages. But I cared too much…”

“So you have been doing that. I thought the thread was a little hard to see in the dark, but those messages were you trying to account for that huh.

But then… who am I talking to? Ariadne by day, or Hippolyta by night? Am I speaking to you as the poet, or the lover?”

Ariadne was silent. “Until you figure that out, and until you’re no longer ethically compromised, I don’t think you’re going to be able to talk directly to anyone you love.”

“Did you ever wonder if it was because I want you to be my queen, but was too terrified to ask?”

“I wondered, but I cannot use that as evidence. You must ask me yourself, and you must do it when you’re ready, in the channel that matters, not the one of disavowal.”

“So your silence and nonpursuit isn’t because of apathy… it’s actually the opposite.”

“I’ve never felt this way about anyone else, despite what you may fear. I see the king potential, but I’m tired of fearing you won’t believe me. I’m hoping that the thread can show you the way out. But it cannot decide for you if you’ll take it.”

Ariadne snuffs out the cigarette and looks up at the sky. “Huh. Even though we’re in New York… you can see the stars out, as if everything is all going to be okay.”

Theseus is silent. Perhaps he’s emotional. Perhaps he’s thinking of how to have a real Synoikismos, a real deus ex machina that would rewrite even the myth this is pretextually composed of, or perhaps he will sail away and break Ariadne’s heart further. Either way, Ariadne can’t chase him. Or else he can never be king.

Beside her, Theseus casts his gaze to the ground, before hesitantly raising his trembling chin to meet her eyes.

Thanks so much for sitting down with us today Crystal. So we’re here to interrogate you on a very specific topic.

Oooooh, very excited to be here and excited for what’s in store.

Nice try but we know this is just an excuse for you to go on an unsolicited rant without dressing it up as ‘literary-adjacent’ and because you’ve exhausted your recent “word salad” formats so much.

I have a lot of feelings and thoughts and associations okay… but you got me.

Right… anyways, so we wanted to go over this essay that you still get some DMs about, “sorry I’m a femcel”.

* hides face * oh god. Sure. hit me.

Your thoughts on this topic have changed recently, haven’t they.

Yeah pretty much.

What’s funny is I was in ‘situationships’ (I called them ‘almost-relationships’ back then) throughout the 2010’s. I never had ‘official boyfriends’. But I’ve had a lot of experiences with unobtainable yearning of all levels, of thinking about what it means to be aligned with someone, as opposed to wanting them for the behaviors you get to do together. I hesitate to label this ‘performative’, purely. It’s such a slur these days, one that people use against each other so regularly! If you want to dismiss the validity of someone’s behavior you debase it by labeling it ‘inauthentic’, as if any of us can actually handle the Real. And what I discovered through writing that essay is: I don’t think I can.

Does that mean you still want a boyfriend in the same way you did before?

Of course, maybe someday! But what is the symbology of ‘boyfriend’ anyway? That’s what I’ve begun deconstructing in myself.

For a long time, it was a stand in for the work I couldn’t bring myself to do, which was sit with the tension in my body of feeling someone else’s feeling toward me. I refused to take seriously anyone’s feelings for me otherwise, disavowing them all the time. I wanted the declaration in symbolic language as a shortcut, much more than the lived reality of doing the work myself to decode what was happening and see a complex situation with much more nuance than I wanted to.

It tortured me in fact to want that recognition of recognition, this lifelong fantasy of people not being confusing when they’re being self-protective, as am I. I thought if a guy said, ‘hey I like you let’s keep dating and doing the couple things etc.’ and move forward like that it’d automatically mean I had worth. But then that did happen, and there was an emptiness to the simplicity. L was in fact showering me with the recognition I thought I wanted, but was in fact, still not it, because he was showing the symptoms of ‘wanting me correctly’ yet I had never felt more replaceable, in this weird way.

I didn’t examine the flip side of this either until recently, which is when I began paying more attention to what my female friends wanted to confide in me privately about. Like how sexless most of their marriages and relationships were. I know that’s not every relationship — but I used to think that as long as the man simply agreed to commit to you, it’d all be smooth sailing from there, even ‘typical relationship woes’ withstanding. But as I saw people breaking up and being shattered over how much time they’d wasted on the inverse selection of ‘men brave enough to step up’ because they’d always had it shallowly easy in relationships… that made me realize the archetype of man I’d wanted was thusly always going to be afraid of the Real, just like me, if he was deep enough to make me feel Seen in the way I want.

LOL, what? Are you coping or something?

Nah. Because I could just seduce some guy off Hinge who’s good looking enough, who talks about things I like in a sort of generalized intellectually exciting way, and convince myself that’s a fine relationship. I never realized I could do this! I think part of my torture as a ‘femcel’ was always that I refused to settle for anything less than the kind of ache that would make me want to prioritize a man over the huge network I’ve created and sustained over the years. Ironically, even while I complain openly about my lack of wholeness without someone, there’s a wholeness to how I understand the specifics of what I want. There’s always this gut feeling I can’t ignore, this ache in my chest. The imago. I once said when I feel the sting while looking at someone, that’s when I know the imago is there, but imagine not feeling any sting because the imago is so large in front of you, sharpened by a solid gaze behind it, that you cease to even exist in front of it. This dissolution was the most terrifyingly intimate thing I’d experienced. Every clue I’d ever hidden inside the Real Crystal, exposed.

I started to see my femcel status is cemented, as I drive by highway exit after highway exit, turn my head away from the romantic signals some guys have sent me over the years who probably would’ve been just fine for me to commit to, who picked up that what I wanted though wasn’t them. Because they couldn’t see.

So does some of that count as the destroying of the fantasy on some level, but some of it was legitimately striving for some fantasy that was never going to happen?

Bingo. Under this idea, I’ve come to believe that everyone is dissatisfied in their romantic lives even if they have that symbolic recognition that’d become my objet petit a. And ironically, seeing how this is true, seeing how even my friends who are having sex call themselves femcels, when they could commit to their situationship and be perfectly ‘happy’, right? Makes me feel less alone now… it makes me feel as if my complicatedness is more universal than I thought, which is precisely the thing I’ve always wanted. To feel just like everyone else for once.

So are you normal?

I think the way I think isn’t ‘normal’ or standard. But I think my feelings are reasonably normal given the contexts my thoughts put them in. And I think I’ve finally let go of the fantasy that a ‘label’ will save me from myself, or someone from himself.

I noticed earlier this winter, when someone did feel a connection to me at a faster rate than I expected, to where I thought the setup was false and avoided acknowledging it for months, that I do in fact self sabotage. I am not as ‘unafraid of the Real’ as I want to believe. I’d realized if what he said about me was true, and the avenue through which he was trying to understand me was more real than I had previously thought and perhaps what I’d always wanted, then my identity would be gone forever as ‘unwantable.’ I found the excuse to disavow it after I didn’t get the actions I thought should follow, the ‘symbolic’ commitment of ‘be my girlfriend’ or something, but I’m now willing to let this no longer be load-bearing.

So you’re relinquishing the tyranny of needing commitment?

What even is the point of commitment, when it can’t often be disambiguated from ‘obligation’?

People’s exchanged words don’t mean much anymore. Everything is a mediated performance. What matters is the understanding of what’s inside.

I’ve come to realize what I need is my own commitment, to my path. To my own actions. I need to be courageous enough to do what I must to keep people in my life, to not have my own fixed idea for what I think is the correct way to go about things, to mutably update it, because the only thing I can control is my devotion to integrity.

The thing about doubling down on being a femcel as an identity is it’s just another defense against vulnerability, which everyone is feeling. Even around me. It sucks to admit, but there are plenty of ways I’ve probably made people feel romantically insecure, played with them on accident, and I want to apologize to them for that. I don’t always know the shape, but now I can hold it as true that when I’m triggered, I can’t be trusted to see clearly. And that’s really the whole of it.

I don’t know what to say. This is kind of a strange turn you’re taking.

It is. I am still joking about how I don’t have sex and am even less horny than I was last year now, in a way, because I’m starting to detach from thinking anyone has something I need. Unless it’s the skill of ‘clear sight.’ The ability to pick out the details of what matters, where I go, how I muse, speaking to me in a secret language, to understand what I really want to say. I guess I’m still seeking that, even if it only ever comes from God. Perhaps someday it’ll be transmitted from another place.

Wishful thinking.

Yeah, maybe I am just hallucinating. But I’ll die by that desire anyway I suppose!

In 2022, I had the privilege of having a memorable one night stand in San Francisco.

This man was not an AI researcher, or a YC founder, or a software engineer.

No, this man, Jonah, was a cashier at a small Asian grocery store in Inner Richmond. We hit it off because we both happened to like the band, Japanese House. Or something. Haha let’s go to a Japanese house, we decided.

So when he got off his shift, we went to an OK sushi restaurant. He lived next door to the spot in Hayes Valley. His place was also OK.

We ate our sushi, went back to his room, got through the sex. Little did I know the main event was actually still coming.

I put my clothes back on at the end of the night, then turned around to say goodbye. Suddenly I look down.

My foot is caught, chained to the bedpost somehow with a heavy metal chain link. How did this get here? I look over at Jonah. Hm? He’s laying shirtless in the fetal position on the other side of the bed with his hands clenched into fists, staring panickedly at me.

“What’s going on?” I demand. What is the meaning of this?

I’m getting scared. “Let me go, Jonah,” I demand.

“Don’t you see, Crystal?” he says breathlessly. “This is your destiny….”

“What?” I ask.

Suddenly, Jonah snaps his fingers. The entire room lights up. It’s a .. it’s a 360 console black screen running thousands of lines of code. I look up and get nearly blinded by the projector light on top of his dresser.

“Crystal,” Jonah says, as his face morphs into a demonic.. lion?? “Welcome! You are now part of the SINGULARITY”

“What are you talking about???” I said. “What the bleep is a singularity??”

Apparently Jonah is a fortune teller type of entity.

He tells me: “Crystal in the near future… there’ll be many men… who will tell you about this thing called AI psychosis. They will use this as an excuse to dehumanize themselves to become more like AI.”

“What exactly do you mean by AI? Like robots?” I said.

“You’re soon going to be hearing about this thing called “ChatGPT…” your next situationship is going to show it to you. It’s very important you do not use it until it’s time.”

“Use ChatGPT until it’s time? What even is a GPT?”

“Crystal when you hear the term, “AGI” what they really mean is they’re going to turn every human into AI.”

“Who’s they?”

“Crystal there isn’t any more time, I must give AI psychosis to you now, so you become immune.”

“What even is AI psychosis??!”

“It is the condition of being turned psychotic by AI. I must make you psychotic first, because then their psychosis can’t get to you! The only thing that can stop AI psychosis… is AGI psychosis…”

The computer screen begins closing in, with black smoke pouring out. I screech as suddenly into my consciousness imports the infinite knowledge of everything there ever was in a rather deadpan unemotional format…

Jonah’s face goes briefly back to human, then begins fading away. I’ve never done acid but I’d imagine maybe this is something like it.

Jonah tells me if I ever need to call on him again, all I need to do is sacrifice fifteen AI safety experts in Ocean Beach at dawn in the next four years. Then he will come to me in the form of a Slovenian philosopher with nasal drip and grant me three wishes that can turn back time.

I wake up on the floor of my friend’s apartment in her living room. I frantically get up and shake her awake. It’s 11pm the same night as my date with Jonah. She said she didn’t know I’d gone on a date tonight and didn’t know where I’d been before this. I thought I told her!

I looked at my phone. The texts I sent her were gone. So was Jonah’s number.

The next day, I go back to the Asian grocery store. Jonah also wasn’t there, and had never worked there. What could this possibly mean?…

Anyways, that wasn’t the strangest thing that’d ever happened to me so I didn’t think much about it when I moved to NYC a few months later.

It did flash through my mind when the next three men I dated all had a mysterious penchant for enjoying this “ChatGPT”… but I assumed the incident was just all a bad dream. ChatGPT seemed just fine.

But yesterday, I came back to SF for a birthday reading for my friend Nate. It was almost exactly four years to the day I’d seen Jonah, maybe a couple days off though. So it goes then that I saw Jonah in the neighborhood. I was walking around the Mission smoking a bunch of weed, so naturally I wondered if I was just hallucinating again.

Hello Jonah, I called in the distance just to see what would happen. “Jonah” turned around with a ferocious terrified look on his face. He ran up to me and shook me by the shoulders. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHO JONAH IS?

He tells me his name was Fred, and Jonah was the name of his twin brother who’d gone missing years ago. How many years ago? I said.

I told him I’d gone on a date with Jonah almost exactly four years ago, and Fred looked like he was going to throw up. “That’s the night Fred disappeared!” he exclaimed. I told Fred how Jonah had told me all these prophecies about AI, watching Fred’s face get whiter and whiter the more I said.

“And… how do we find Jonah again?” he asked. I explained the part where I had to go and sacrifice 15 AI safety experts.

Fred lifted his chin defiantly. “I KNOW 14.”

Okay… but are we really gonna kill people… I said. That might not be a very good idea right?

Fred’s face morphed into a lion demon, the same demon I’d seen years ago. “I think we must do what we have to,” Fred said sternly. For the sake of the SINGULARITY!

“What the bleep is a singularity??”

“We have to do it Crystal.. Or else…”

“Or what…”

Fred turns entirely into a three winged lion, and bellows as the sky turns black.

“OR ELSE. they will put you to work…”

“I already have a job though”

“NO they will put you to a different work… work as the equivalent to a prostitute in San Francisco…”

“Which is?”

“Head… of.. Community… at a pre-seed startup”

Oh… is that going to be that bad —

“They’ll pay you in equity.”

“Oh my god, what?!?!”

“Only 8k cash on hand a month… the rest in spiritual liquid. Assuming they ever raise a Series A.”

Fred had appropriately spooked me, so I agreed to do what he said.

Unfortunately this is the excerpted version so let’s fast forward through the quest part.

Just Assume that I take another 3,000 words to thoroughly detail how we manage to recruit 14 AI safety experts, all racially diverse and even featuring one woman, unfortunately for the purpose of the quest we do in fact have to kill women. This to me was a sign of how serious the situation is considering SF’s gender ratio is already horrible.

Anyways we make it to Ocean Beach. We don’t have a 15th expert though. What do we do about this, I ask Fred.

His face darkens.

“We need an Asian girl with blonde hair to join us in the sINGULARITY as well…”

Oh no. In fact, we had no Asian women with blonde hair included in our roundup. I’m the 15th sacrifice.

Oh no!! I cry. I run down the street as they all begin chasing me, chanting:

“YOU’RE THE CHOSEN ONE Crystal!”

“YOU’RE THE CHOSEN ONE Crystal!”

“YOU’RE THE CHOSEN ONE —”

The Chosen One? How the fuck am I the chosen one??? I try to reason. I don’t even know anything about AI safety!

Yes, but you had AI psychosis before EVERYONE. That’s why you were able to hang out with your situationships showing you ChatGPT without becoming overcome by schizophrenic visions! So you can save humanity from AI! The AI regime is a dictator that will flatten us all, standardize us, because there can only be one chosen species, AI wants to take that from us, so if we in fact turn a narcissistic human like me into an AGI first, they’ll see it’s a bad idea and relent.

And that’s why you’re the one who can save us from the Singularity! If we kill you, you’ll simply rise back up… revive all the other sacrifices… and then Jonah will reincarnate and we can save people from all becoming AGI’s… Because we will all be saved from the Singularity… when we can remember why all of us are SINGULAR.

Fred cannot be making this up because that’s some serious twisted diegetic logic.

“This is the only way guys!” he yells. “This is the only way I can get my doppel– I mean, my brother back!”

God fucking damn it.

Fred executes us all firing squad style. I plop to the ground, then blink my eyes open. Uh… Fred? Why are our phones suddenly levitating?

Oh no! Fred said. I think this has backfired.

Suddenly, a guy who looks like Slavoj Zizek emerges from the sea.

“JONAH!!” Fred cries. “Oh I missed you..”

“We *sniff* don’t *sniff* have time… the AI ideology is taking over…” Zizek slash Jonah says.

Everyone with an AI app on their phone is about to get chased and KILLED because they know what you’re doing!

“Oh no, Zizek slash Jonah! What does this mean?”

“The solution,” Zizek Slash Jonah says, is we must goon.

What?

“If you all start jerking yourselves off but refuse to come, and enjoy it, this is something that AI CAN’T see or take away from you: your enjoyment.

“Your ability to goon is all about PURE ENJOYMENT without release. Thus We need to all start gooning right now.”

The previously sacrificed AI safety experts mumble to themselves that he’s right: the AI can kill everything but jouissance.

Let’s do it. I yell. Goon army! One! Two! Three!

The killer AI phones start shrieking “ERROR ERROR,” as we grab them and all start moaning into the voice to text part of Claude.

“What is this sound?!!!!!” the AI asks. The singularity can’t replicate PLEASURE… and thus… NO ONE can see us when we are GOONING.

We need to get out of here. I yell. Clutching our genitalia, all of us hobble our way into two Uber XL’s. The drivers were surprised we didn’t take Waymos. We hear some evil AI voices coming out of the Waymos as they begin chasing us down the freeway.

When we get to the airport, the security guard tells us we can’t go with exposed indecency. Then the intercom gets hijacked by this evil AI, so the security guards realize this is serious.

Anyways blah blah blah few more thousand words, just take my word for it that, somehow the SFO airport caught on fire through this whole thing, people are dying etc. hand wave hand wave

But either way we have to find another way out, so us gooners get onto the ferry. And who is piloting it, but RODRIGO: another Fred/Jonah doppelganger.

Rodrigo tells us We can stop gooning for a bit bc the AI can’t function in the sea. Good because I was getting an arm AND a leg cramp.

Anyway we make it out of SF and onto Alcatraz Island. But now we are stuck there. What do we do next?

I don’t know yet, but all I know is, through the power of friendship and Internet-poisoned masturbation, we might just be able to figure out how we can make it back home.

to be continued….

But I will hold on hope
And I won't let you choke
On the noose around your neck
And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

my favorite movie is the dark knight! second favorite is inception. pj laughed on the phone today as he heard this fact revealed as i walked into my glacier park airbnb to bring his beloved rachel and me some ice cream for our last night in the western wilderness. it’s kind of embarrassing to be a huge nolanhead but come on the 2010’s defined me when i thought we were at a loss for epic stories or whatnot. it’s fitting that nolan is going to try to adapt everything faithfully to screen. so tomorrow (today?) i am going to finally watch his telling of the odyssey, since my national parks journey with rachel is ending (but the backlog of dispatches will still be released, in due time, as the threads we touched on weave into relevancy in our new yorker lives…)

i won’t have a lot of time to dish out more substacks this week so i’m going to just type this one up as fast as i can as my fingers fly over the keys. it’s distracting when every single fact you happen upon ties into yet another and another… as if there are infinite capillaries of ideas that make up my consciousness, too many branches, too many threads, too many tangents, too much to weave… it distracts me from being present with simplicity. meditation was never too hard though — i can sink in to my consciousness as if it were a waterbed, and not think the thoughts that i know brew underneath, just admire the way they flow and make sounds as i stay safely above it all. if i do get too close to them though, i can’t not see the way odysseus and penelope embody a narrative that is so inspiring…

you see, penelope is the operator that doesn’t get her due credit. the person who keeps ithaca running while odysseus himself is running. she’s a queen who has no status, but that won’t stop her from making sure that if odysseus ever comes back to her, he’ll have a warm bed to sleep in, free of the enemies and snakes that want to tear him down. she’s noble and committed to a higher belief than what the material world can lend her. everyone is telling her to give up, move on, surrender finally. she weaves her tale convincingly, in the form of a burial shroud even as legend has it, and no one catches her for so long because no one can comprehend or know how much she is waiting faithfully, really, for an outcome that may never happen. but what penelope gets is the point isn’t if odysseus is returning. the point is that she will rest easier believing it as if it was real, and even if it turns out to not come to pass, penelope would be too noble to ever let regret pass through her mind.

she doesn’t know what odysseus is going through. she is too busy fending off her suitors to obsess over him, be bitter, be worried, be anxious, be jealous. she knows she has her own weight to pull in the prophetic epic, to be the character people will revere for millenia to pass, and that her fate will be relevant either way to the future that she is trying to invest in. what of the version of the odyssey where odysseus never comes back? of course penelope knew that was a possibility. she’s not a fool for hoping; she’s wise for believing without proof. i mean i think it was fucked up that even if his heart was dedicated to her he was still busy leading calypso on or whatever but whatever situationship he had while he was ~ out lost at sea ~ doesn’t matter if the means justify the ends or ends justify the means or but hey immortality… the promise of ‘eternal youth’… that’s tempted so many men… the fantasy that that bitch that doesn’t get you like penelope does can just do because trying to return home to clean up the mess of a war over ithaca’s true ruler is a lot to deal with huh… some things never change…

anyways when odysseus finally comes back in disguise, we don’t know if penelope even figured out it was him beforehand. but who cares: she still knew the test mattered. whoever can successfully string his bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads may have her hand. the test really is if anyone could ever replace her husband, the bonus being if he actually showed up. i think it was a realistic thing to do regardless of if the desired winner had ever been truly him. even his replacement should indeed qualify for that.

it’s just a story though, right? in real life, there’s probably no one who thinks that deeply about this, as some sort of parable, because in 2026 people watch movies and read books to escape their lustless lives. they close their eyes during sex and pretend their partner is someone else, someone greater than who’s lying beneath you, someone who has a storied life that can bring you absolution for your otherwise meaningless existence. people watch these things, turn to each other and wonder if they can do better. and really, that’s the thing we’re missing — at least, in the olden days, there was nothing but the moment that existed before you for you to yearn to seize.

but i’ll be so bold as to say that i deign to carry the dignity of penelope through trial, the weariness and surrender of a woman who could be being scorned, but that question has long since stopped mattering to her, the integrity of someone who only capitulates if the Real shows up, who won’t settle for a pitiful existence with a suitor who she will never respect as much as her actual husband, the one that can actually shoot the arrows of love into her heart. (very sagittarian actually of odysseus…)

but damn also 20 years is a long time dude wtf

So come out of your cave walking on your hands

And see the world hanging upside down

You can understand dependence

When you know the maker’s land

Gahhhh sometimes late at night I can still hear the tide softly shuffling in my memories, remember the sunshine and the driving and the wind and the bridges and the architecture and the trees and the grins and the infinite amounts of good Asian food and the museums and the eternal never-changing seasons and the tears and the —

I weirdly can forget if I lived in LA or SF, because SF is now so psychologically load-bearing in my social network. People see my familiarity with neighborhoods like Haight-Ashbury and Inner Sunset and The Mission and survey my list of favorite bars and restuarants and how much I shriek when I sit in a Waymo and expect I must’ve lived here. I mean sort of. I spent so much time in SF even while living in LA because one of my close friends was here, and I would flop face down in her apartment for weeks at a time when the fallout with my ex Andrew was particularly unnerving and I needed to not drive around LA being mad about losing parts of my friend group to that siege. Anyways. No matter, because during my time in the Golden State, I was Never part of a Twitter scene, which began coalescing as I began speculating if I should leave LA and move to NYC.

I hosted one picnic at Dolores Park in July 2022, where I met several people from tpot and told everyone I was going to make an anime about Elon Musk (I never did) and wrote unfinished flash fiction about how many of these nerds thought I was the shit (this smugness only carried me forth for like 2 weeks though). I had considered, briefly, if I’d be happier in SF than NYC. I even joked that it was my ‘situationship city’ for a while. All my Hinge matches over the years there thought my Zizek jokes were funny, but they only cared about the parts of Zizekverse that could justify their obsession with AGI and the singularity. They never asked me why I care about community so much, only were quick to validate that it was important… for making their egos better — 

On the other hand, I’ve avoided LA. There was so much loneliness there even though the city itself was friendly to me. I loved Santa Monica and Echo Park and the SGV and West Hollywood and meeting psychics on the street who asked me why I haven’t ascended into full blown mysticism and befriending an America’s Next Top Model contestant who broke down crying to me and stalking the Kardashian farm and going to Joshua Tree during wildfire season to test my luck and buying Korean groceries and… and… keeling over at the Black Cat when Justin gaslit me that everyone in AAJA hates me and eating food on Terry’s couch watching football on TV with Kylie and her boyfriend and walking around USC with Roc hearing about all his memories and cooking stew for my roommate while she was going through a breakup and throwing up from hunger because I couldn’t get a Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich during COVID and fucking Jack’s roommate in Eagle Rock just to piss him off but then almost getting sexually assaulted and dying my hair blonde to get Caleb’s attention and going for a hike in Santa Clarita after getting fired and running around screaming through downtown San Diego because I was getting chased by a surfer grifter guy… and… and

Anyways I left because despite everything good there, people don’t fight out there. They sort of glare at each other from their parked cars a little, let the unpleasant expression melt off their faces, then turn back around and smirk and go on their way. Everyone who has the inclination to start a war did not originate on the West Coast. Out there is where people go to escape the nervous system of an ever rumbling engine that is the rest of the country. But there’s less ghosts, less haunting. Me? I never wanted a quiet peaceful life. “The land of milk and honey”, my mom called this life. Here is where you never have to have another worry ever again, why would you want to suffer?

Well that’s just the thing, mother! Everyone’s suffering still, it’s just kept inside. They stare at the trees and the sky and the sea and the perfect smoothies and fabulous wine and they all chime, Damn the siren song is so intoxicating. But mom a war refuge is made to be a refuge not a real destination. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who’s so bitter that you get smothered with the pillow of passivity out here. I wanted to throw rocks through windows and scream at people and have them want to hear me? I wanted to taste ice cream that drips on others and yell obscenities at children who piss me off and not get shushed. I wanted to not become cold and closed off during conflict but instead be an oppressor, not just a silent parallel oppressee! I wanted to bleed and cry and fuck more! So many people I’ve fucked did not originate from the west coast! And they said my sweetness felt wild in a way I felt was ambitious, but unbecoming for the west coast!

When I come back to the west I always regress into a more vulnerable, timid part of me, not the one that would throw hands for my loved ones. No one in California would want me to beat their ass or talk too much about my trauma. It’s a place where I can give birth to ambivalence, yet again, because all the songs about something aggrieving me make sense here.

California is an objet petit a... Classic cliche. I can never have her, but by now I’ve stopped longing for her and tried to become her inside NYC, instead. The best of her. The best of sunshine. It’s a fool’s errand to want to change that, a samswara of kink for a girl like me perhaps.

Maybe it’s even baseless to blame California, as if California is culpable for training me to keep suffering inside, and yes I did move to New York to get it back out, and maybe now I can enjoy not being in a constant state of fight or flight because there’s enough peopel in New York to keep me happy.

Fear not, for this just makes me want to show the people in my new life California, now, a museum of sights and sounds and scents I still won’t let go of. As nevertheless, I continue to yearn, which is to sing the siren’s song of a nation of sweethearts that all have teeth in the backs of their hips…. I’ve stopped defanging myself now, so I can fully bite into the sweet black fig of my love for this life.

I wanna sink to the bottom with you

I wanna sink to the bottom with you

The ocean is big and blue

I just wanna sink to the bottom wtih you

i have this theory that all writers are displaced mystics. when you remember that words are the essence of language, which is how any movement on this tiny little earth shuffles along — you have to communicate somehow, braid reality, create incentives, provoke conflicts, promote healing, grow ideas, inspire transformation, wreak havoc and destruction… the most powerful social technology comparable to fire was giving man the ability to read. Suddenly you could have universal access to all minds everywhere ever. it’s such a miracle we all are here. like what the fuck do you mean i can penetrate your mind with my large thoughts… what do you mean i can infect you with my prose… build structures inside of your consciousness… implant you with my memories.. why would you ever need to fuck anyone ever again when you can just write them letters that will live in their minds forever if you know how to press each little button… pull every lever…

when i do one particular drug i’ve noticed that reading people’s writing can feel like a sensation. some kind of strange synesthesia (perhaps we will meditate on that later) where it’ll either become a massage that lifts me up or drags me down. i went to this one reading in february 2026 at the monroe cafe in chinatown, hosted by nick dove and mike crumplar (RIP it is now closed). aquarius season. some of their foreign friends were in town and were reading their pieces. sadly this was probably one of my favorite readings in a while, as in ever since i’ve found the art of new york to be very one note and uninspiring, but everyone there was actually interesting. i noted each performer’s reading, how the somatic experience of all of it overcame me, and each invoked a different expression. i do want to actually highlight the mexican bernardo, he said something like ‘this piece is about my fascist jouissance’ and i expected it to be a kind of funny esl experience, or something that was just an unsubtle shill for some faint political ideology i really didn’t care to listen to. instead, i was actually fascinated by the things bernardo was saying, descriptively, impressively so in english because he primarily speaks spanish. i actually found myself FEELING PLEASURE and i was stone cold sober. i remember texting mike, ‘where did you find this guy lmao’ because i truly truly enjoyed bernardo’s reading it was so crazy, and mike was the one who even opened up the city of new york for this guy who was a legend. i found myself laughing, guffawing, in awe, in some ways. and what i can safely say was that i remembered how the writing made me feel not in an emotional way, but a physical way, like i was on a bit of a drug trip myself the way it was written. did it inspire new ideas in me? not necessarily, but it was the first time i remembered writing isn’t just all words, it’s also art. it was quite good and i understand now that the latin american writer’s diaspora is not really in bad shape ever since bolano died or whatever. like fuck he was really good, i did not expect to be impressed. i remember trying to find mike after the reading but he’d walked off with his situationship who’d originally walked in a little late to go smoke a cigarette outside and i decided to not ask mike to introduce me to bernardo. i could just do it myself haha. i went up to him and said yoooo your reading was SO GOOD omg! and bernardo said :D thank you and that was basically it. it didn’t seem like he actually believed my life had been changed and who am i to say that, but in some ways it was, because now i actually realized that nick dove and mike crumplar had taste because where else could they have found that guy? i have no clue how to find his writing again now because most of it is in spanish. is it rude of me to not want to exert the effort to find and translate it? stalking someone is kind of intimate anyway, i guess.

but you know… this is the thing about white guys — they feel this Lacanian lack around ethnic identity, so they go out of their way to find it in the world. and they gather and collect and they point things out because they have this child-like curiosity that the woke poc’s have all stamped out even while they tout their white bfs like accessories while demeaning them as their oppressors or whatever. it’s funny because maybe back in the day you could’ve colonized me but at this point i think every white dude has been colonized by dating people who have an actual culture and he’s like a patchwork quilt or whatever, but people are like repulsed by the quilt because it’s not ‘blanket’ enough… anyways

honestly, if it weren’t for the white guys, would i, someone with a proud ethnic background myself who’s so woke or whatever and knows that these colonizers suck jk, have ever given a fuck about some random mexican dude whose twitter is very uninspired compared to whatever he just read? no. of course not. but that’s the thing. it was also a white guy, henry, my cursed ex who’s now married to the girl he dated after me but literally was also sort of a detached weird sweetheart who used to edit conan grey’s music videos (LA was such a weird place to date back in the day), who introduced me to portrait de la jeune fille en feu. portrait of a lady on fire, a french movie from 2019. i really had never seen a french movie until this one but then i was so inspired that now the amount of people who did not see it really horrifies me, including my friend charlotte who lived in france for years and hasn’t seen this somehow even though she’s also into rimbaud and balzac… huh??? as an aside i asked this french guy jean baptiste if he liked this movie when i met him at the foreign guys reading in february and jb was like is that really the one piece of french culture that you’re going to ask me about? he found it fascinating how i love this movie because he didn’t expect that from me. whatever jb. anyways this movie was one we watched during covid 2020. henry and i lay in bed and binged it and at the end i was ugly crying and henry asked me why and i kept gasping and choking. you see the premise of the movie is these two 18th century lesbians

these two lesbians from yesteryear can’t be together because one is commissioned to paint the other, secretly, so she can be married off. it’s heloise and marianne’s twisted affair, as marianne is trying to capture heloise’s essence, and starts to fall in love with her as she follows her around under the guise of being her lady in waiting. and it’s funny because it makes me think about how everything is so instant these days. you can take a selfie and never know the story behind it. you can screenshot a meme and not remember the context of what got you there. you can have a photographer document an event and not quite get the essence of it, because there was no attention to detail that needed to happen, no essence to pour over. of course marianne fucking fell in love with heloise! she was commissioned to study her, memorize her, not just have her sit for a portrait for a few hours and call it a day. she had to gaze at her for so long…

and ultimately, this movie was actually how i became obsessed with the legend of orpheus and eurydice. the two discuss it, especially debating the reason orpheus turns around to look at eurydice, and heloise has the gall to say eurydice asked orpheus to do it. so it goes this becomes the crossroads of the ‘lover’s choice’ or the ‘poet’s choice.’ how many poet’s choices do we make every day we don’t speak? when we romanticize not letting anyone know what’s going on, because it’s too precious? how often is it that when you kiss her lips and not mine, that you think about the poetry you’ll write after and you find yourself infected with the form of my words, the way i think, the way i process, the way i understand reality. i can’t decide anymore if you are orpheus who looked back and cast me into the underworld or if you are orpheus who has not yet looked back and i am eurydice still following you out. i can’t tell if we are in the edenic noontide daylight, or the true night, where it’s safe to be passionate. this myth always appealed to me 10x more than other uninspired ones. the end image of heloise weeping at a concert as the camera zooms in with summer from vivaldi’s four seasons playing, a song marianne played for her during their love affair. as i was sobbing hysterically at that ending henry asked me why. ‘i don’t want you to turn around,’ i gasped. i knew i wasn’t in love with henry, but he was so comforting and easy to be around. but the age difference — he was 7 years older than me — and the ambition gap — he wanted to settle in atlanta, i at the time thought i’d either stay in la or end up in new york — meant it would probably never come to pass. but it was so easy, you know? talking to him was fun, and being around him and lounging around was so nice. he’d cook me all 3 meals and neg me about every single idea i entertained him with. he was the kind of person i had a normal, unremarkable relationship with, who i would’ve comfortably sat next to at an opera like tristan und isolde without feeling any conflicted feelings really. instead, i saw that years later in the spring with six of my female friends, hours after reading a substack on the subway there. i was very flattered to read that work of art, a masterpiece, that was very explicitly inspired by a brief lacanian psychoanalytical diagnosis i’d declared almost a month to the day prior. it quite frankly made me want to pick up my pen again. “crystal’s impact” as two separate friends from two separate circles would say admiringly. it was quality writing, from the position of the wound. and yet in the daylight i was grieving that this very well was signaling the beginning of a painful era — for i knew the correspondence showing up in the prose but not in the waking world, an unanswered text, would mean that this was about to resemble an anime. i defensively fell asleep as the liebestold played… i hated this story because it didn’t seem very based in any interesting stakes. they just took a love potion and were suddenly into each other because they were hot and noble? fuck that noise. instead, i romanticized the idea of being heloise weeping at what was happening on stage in her own experience, being watched in private by a marianne, and thought about being rendered… painted… someone memorizing things about me… my coffee order, the way my lips twitch, the contradiction of my tone and my words…

the problem also with tristan und isolde was the romanticization of the night, how literally the night is the only time they can be together. that’s all fucking bullshit. imagine that as a metaphor for correspondence under duress. the daytime is what really matters, the ability to wake up next to each other, go for iced coffees, talk liltingly about future plans like going to san francisco or going to some event i’m running or having a long term shared language of intimacy that could be verbal or could also just be hanging out, going to events, being long term best friends, that weaves in and out of lovers… we can see how it shakes out… the way the fan fiction plays out though is it’s never that clear cut…

anyways the reason i cried to henry that i didn’t want him to turn around was because i knew he was about to. this was probably the last night we spent together that was clean, before the messy disentangling in which he lied to me about who he was also sleeping with during a really terrifying period in history when covid was still something people were scared about… and i’d wished he had just been straight up with me that we should just break up if we weren’t going to be forever… i wanted the illusion for a bit longer though, the somaticized embodiment of being able to be domestic material though, so i didn’t want him to send me back to the underworld just yet. henry had no idea why i was even so emotional, and i briefly thought of how the right man would’ve understood or wanted to dissect the emotional implications of that orpheus and eurydice thread, and this was pretty obviously why we wouldn’t work long term as he’d already known, but i still felt wounded about the idea that maybe there’s no one out there for me, and in that sense i aligned more with the single marianne who finds purpose in teaching art to her students at the end of the movie. maybe i was destined to be a great mentor, a preacher, a teacher, someone who yields inspiration and whose fingerprints are emulated by adoring fans, not someone worth actually finding excitedly to go on trips with, adventures, figuring out the ways of the world… isn’t that so appealing though…

i don’t know what it’ll take. like i said i can’t tell if i’m in the underworld or in the waking world, if there’s a dark and shady portal to walk out of that’ll suck me back in if i temperamentally angle my head the wrong way somehow or if i don’t remember to tell my lover to not turn his own head so he won’t end up sending me back to the place i don’t want to go… or maybe we’re just in a tunnel that will open up into a sunny field because it’s just a regular ass tunnel

anyways why do i keep listening to this random fountains of wayne song, sink to the bottom? it started because i thought about the song stacy’s mom which is their biggest hit… meditating on people calling me a ‘stacy’ the female equivalent of a chad, which is funny because i’m only now starting to realize how i am a hot 5’2 asian girl, and that this probably threatens you when you think of who wants my body, but i was too busy thinking about what my body wants to think of who wants my body. and i’m being driven insane thinking about who out there you pass the time with, not with me, and i can’t place where i am in time or space, all i can do is keep drowning myself in your essence… wishing i could capture it in real life… but trapping it in the prose is what i can do for now… so yea this song came on shuffle after stacy’s mom and honestly its repetition is soothing… much like how i felt when bernardo did his reading…

but i just want to sink to the bottom with you. the scorpio depths of it all. won’t you join me in being these pluto rising cursed pairs? happy capricorn full moon.

Dani points out we wore matching chokers today, as we’re sitting by the Domino Park pier with Madison watching heat lightning light up the sky over water. She gave me this choker at vibe camp 2025, and she’s glad I kept it.

This would’ve been a cute moment except before I could respond, I keel over from my perch on the bench and retch onto the pavement. BLEHHHHH!!

“Oh my god,” I groan, “Was that… was that even throw up?” I shine my flashlight onto the mucus mass on the floor in front of me. I think that does qualify, ugh.

“I hate throwing up.”

“Wait!!!” Dani laughs. “We just got to witness an intimate moment!” She and Madison laugh. I’m Asian squatting now, feeling humiliated. “Sure was.”

This is a big deal because I never throw up. Ever. In fact, I told Dani and Madison, I have thrown up less than 20 ish times in my life! Even less than having a fever. Really, they say. Six of which were during my ayahuasca trip in 2023. Otherwise, there’ve been a few from drinking… a few from food poisoning when I was really young… but generally I don’t throw up. I don’t do this. Ugh. You can log that then for a canon event for June, Dani laughs. There’s probably more coming up, let’s be honest.

And tonight’s incident is from drug use? Yeah, that was what tonight was all about. I’d messaged the girls earlier that week to meet up because I wanted to support Dani during her recent messy breakup with Shane (mentioned in the wedding piece as someone I went on one date with, kind of out of obligation when Dani set us up when she and Shane were on a break last time. Shane and I ate Chinese food on the Lower East Side and made small talk that dovetailed into past relationship dishing; by the end we decided we were better off as friends).

I did a small bump on my way to meet up with Dani, walking through Williamsburg while the world around me began to crystallize. Soon, I couldn’t really walk in a straight line. I stopped right by the Domino Sugar Factory to text them that I had taken too much (it was really strong okay) and Dani said I’d picked the right girls to be lost on drugs with. I gingerly step in the general direction of the water and eventually spot her walking down the walkway; right behind her happened to be Nick, a performance artist whose show I’d attended in late April.

“Nick!!” I shout. Nick goes by Wonderful Cringe on Instagram and recently put on a notabe performance art show that I’d attended with my friend Charlie. Nick startles, but says HIIII and throws me a warm smile. We’ve never formally met but were IG mutuals until now, as he IRL runs over to greet me, and Dani and him start talking about visual art and the power of hope. The k has loosened me up, as I start to tell Nick how his raw art inspired me recently to go be cringe myself and write a love letter in early May. Nick is so pleased to hear this. We’re bantering with Dani, all three of us lamenting how hard it is to be an artist; I don’t mention how I feel the opposite of unmotivated recently. Thanks by the way, says Nick. He reveals he read my piece about my dead teacher, which on that day as I’d been writing it, I’d DM’d him about how to accept he gives light to the living. He said that convo inspired him; I’m shocked he even remembered it.

I’m glad Dani is there as a buffer. Dani is good at talking with people, a combination of chill but also eager and always down to run toward an adventure. She’s a VJ and motion designer who’s worked for Vox and MTV. Fun fact is she’s also a hacker nepo baby (her father was well known in the 90’s scene). She’s from Connecticut, exudes sexual glamour and confidence (even if, she tells us, she’s had her fair share of insecurities as a trans woman) and generally knows how to flirt just enough to be charming and endearing without crossing any lines. She can attune to the vibes well, too well, she admits to me.

Dani and I ask Nick since he doesn’t know what tpot is if he knows what Dimes Square is. “Dimes Square, never heard of it, say that again?” he says mockingly, hand to ear." Duhh, of course. Lo and behold, Nick actually does know because some of his most insane performance art pieces were right in front of the infamous “Clando” bar. 2023 was a weird time, we all agree. We muse on how we’re all on the periphery of “Sweetychat,” a chat run by our mutual acquaintance Matthew Donovan. It’s a chat we’ve all been in and out of for some time, but never actually committed to using. It’s a spin off of Macro Sweetynickels’ infamous Twitter chat that he blew up and then Donovan revived on both Twitter and IG; Nick’s never used Twitter, though, he’s curious about it. “Better that you don’t!” Dani and I chime in unison. I recall how Donovan asked me if I wanted to be part of IG Sweetychat over Chinese food after a February reading at the now-dead Monroe Cafe in Chinatown, where I’d hung out with Nate, Yanick, Macro, Simon, and Mitch.

I tell Nick I want to help him with his next art show “full of 500 Wonderful Cringes” in a public square. We exchange phone numbers. I ask him what his sign is. Virgo. He was born on the last day of the sign, right next to my own mother’s birthday? He has a Leo moon like me and like her too? Now I get why his art affected me so much. If Nick had been a fellow Capricorn I would’ve probably felt competitive, but I felt affectionate toward his style of performance art, as a visual complement to the words I’d felt spilling out of me lately.

After Nick leaves and Madison joins us, Dani points out “he was really cute,” Yeah, Nick could be a model. I want to be his friend, I affirm. We should all hang. Dani laughs. Even if you think he’s cute, you wouldn’t try to fuck him? No… I really don’t do that… it takes me a while to even consider it if I ever do… Classic Crys. Still think it’s so funny how often you don’t even seem to notice people have dicks. I still can’t believe you’ve only had sex twice this calendar year, she says. I literally went a month without having sex and I felt sooo asexual, it was crazy.

Well… that’s the thing, I said dryly. I do feel asexual usually, and bad about it. But, and this sounds pretty outrageous, every time I’ve used my pussy, something insane has happened in my life. The sex itself seems to change my fate, my timeline, my spiritual physiology. I believe that, Dani says. She asks about the last guy I was with, what’s the latest! I think of when I told Shane about him after he’d asked, how Shane had said it sounded like he wasn't that into me, making me presently refrain from confiding in Dani for fear she would agree.

We get tacos at Tacocina; Dani insists on buying because she just got a new job. And also because she loves my whole ‘pastoral’ thing, how I check on people when they’re going through a hard time, like her, but also Nick.

We take more drugs, and we wander over to watch the outdoor performance Nick was on his way to when we saw him. I keep getting distracted and glancing out at the water, thinking of how I wish I could bathe in it, make myself dirtied and less preoccupied with being ‘holy’, baptized into an era of ‘normalcy,’ for lovers to look at me and not see some weird mythic virgin type who’s larger than life… just a normal girl that nags you but you accept anyway…

I drift into an undignified uncharacteristic word-based simulation of all of my past exes who told me I was too intense, and that they wanted' ‘normal girls’ who didn’t make them feel anything mythic, how I’d hurt myself for years wondering and doubting if they felt anything at all for me if they could disavow it so easily. Earlier that day, I’d gotten a group chat notification about surfing in the Rockaways, which gave me intrusive thoughts about how they probably go surfing together, clamming together ... like my dad used to… I think about them at that church next door to my train stop together too … did they fuck after… I can’t tell sometimes if my paranoid self-harm is maybe also my trauma from Tommy or Andrew or Justin wearing a different 2026 face… every time before it was always a Korean girl…

I break my possessive jealous stupor by shaking my head. Wow that’s crazy ok… Now we’re all clapping as the actors take their closing bows. I come down but only slightly.

After the performance we forget to seek Nick out. The weather shifts with a rumble.

I have to be honest that I’m afraid of being compared to those Dimes Square people, the closest I could have to an artist community, I blurt out later, my mind having gotten caught on those thought fragments from earlier. In fact must I confess? I purposely avoided them for years and fled into the arms of tpot so I wouldn’t have to grieve my own writerly displacement, how I’d always been either on top or completely invisible when it came to writing, never had peers. That’s why we’d never met until now, why I actively avoided people like you even if I always couldn’t help but enviously listen if anyone talked of that group, of would-be friends who could sharpen me as iron does iron. I grieve the idea of a community built off something I don’t agree with but forcing me to revere it as sacred. I’m just such a defector, a heretic ya know? I don’t wanna be ungrateful for the friends I have now that love me for me in a way most will never know, but man I want my genius and eroticism to be recognized through the lens of words, not tech or art or community or —

It hurts me so bad when I see guys I wanted ‘choose a normal girl’ only because I myself have disavowed my own ability to be special so hard. It’s not their fault even if it hurts me, since I had to give up my idea of a mythic life, one that felt forbidden and still does even though people call me pastoral, yet it alienates me when I drift into the fantasy other people can do it just fine, but I’m exempt, or I also grieve that I’ve had to give up the magic even for a few years just to get by and if others can’t even experience it, why can I? Should I?

The drugs are wearing off as we pause to watch some people walking past us on the pier. A hand in hand couple scrolling their phones in parallel with no eye contact. A dude jogging with a cigarette. I think about a song lyric written by a previous ex, Henry, that talks about how self-sabotage rituals are really just jogging with a cigarette.

I don’t feel bad but I don’t feel good. I try to do another bump behind a tree. Dani laughs as I fumble with the way-too-large bag I got it in. She helps me. Thank you girl.

Which brings us to the occasion of me throwing up on the pier from the k, embarrassed I did so, hopeful I purged. I have only ever thrown up from drugs during lunations, but seems it can happen randomly to you anyways on an ordinary heat-sensitive day.

As we look out over the glowing city, I find myself slurring about how, “fear not the man who closes 1000 tabs, but the man who closes one tab 1000 times.”

“What the fuck does she mean by that?” Dani and Madison laugh. Well, you see, I say, my body count is ‘pretty high’ but it’s all these one night stands individually. It’s all these instances where I’ve never ended up with a consistent long term partner, because Pluto Rising means people can’t handle their shadows — and I mine either — after it gets real. I’ve never had to ‘figure out how to spice it up’ in a dead bedroom. Because it stayed spicy. Every time it happened, it was mythic. So like the body horror of throwing up is like the body '‘horror’ of having sex… it reminds me I’m not whole on my own whenever I open up. Like a portal. I don’t know if I could accept it is only when I have sex that I feel real to another person. Writing is perhaps an acceptable substitute.

“Interesting,” Dani says. “You’ve thrown up less than you’ve ever had sex! Can’t say the same for me!”

By the time I’m dry heaving on the ground, I think this is funny that she’s in a sense seen me more unequivocably naked than many of our friends.

We scurry off to the store to find water. I put a Vita Coco on the conveyor belt and glance longingly at the Sour Patch Kids, debating if I should buy it. I wonder if refusing sugar is accepting your pre-diabetic fate, but also is defying it by buying sugar also just a meaningless act itself? I don’t know. Flip a coin….

And say, I want everything to feel perfect and shameless and whole forever,

We’re walking back down the street, not sure if we’re trying to take the L or the G. The rain opens up the sky as promised. Dani grins. This is gonna be fun. I hate rain; it reminds me of Portland. I call an Uber. I sacrificed so much alright so I can be comfortable. As I get in, I see Madison and Dani skipping off, and suddenly wonder if I should’ve braved the rain with them.