☂

so long, farewell

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:07:49 GMT

moved.

telopathique telopathique telopathique

College calls for a new beginning. I've shared some of my innermost memories and thoughts on this journal, dating from when I was a self-deprecating prepubescent waxing horrible, fragmented poetry (thankfully long since deleted) to when I was in a state of perpetual existential crisis to when I began to actually... well. Live.

But it's time to move on. The world waits at a precipice, and I'm starting over. That means a clean slate; you can choose whether to add me or not. For those who choose not to, no hard feelings -- thank you for everything you've given me, and I wish you well. ♥

life being what it is

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:52:24 GMT

Once, there was a young man who got into a horrific car accident. From then on he could still recognize faces, but wouldn't acknowledge them to be the loved ones that he knew. It wasn't amnesia. He would go to his mother's house and he'd say, "You look like my mother, you sound like my mother, you even smell like my mother. But I know you're not my mother. You are an impostor." He imagined that the world had created an elaborate conspiracy of clones to fool him. Because you see, your brain gives you a biological signal when you connect with someone. And without that signal, you can't recognize anyone -- even if all of the other signs tell you that the woman standing in front of you is your own mom.

At home I felt precisely like this. The valley had been filled with crowds of strangers, and often my throat clenched when I realized I had known these people my entire life. I just couldn't put two and two together.

during the interim

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 07:31:11 GMT

「인사」a fraction of memory

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:47:08 GMT

On Saturday night, nine of us constellated at the Cheesecake Factory to say adieu before diverging onto our vastly different paths this fall. I remember it in bits and pieces -- Tracy's bewildered expression at our boisterous birthday serenade five months too early (we still get points for our subtlety!), our hilarious charades routines: 'French baguette', 'Fortinbras', 'Queen Guenevere', 'sautéed' -- and perhaps most importantly, Leo's silly psychological experiment to convince passing strangers to look up at the sky.

While I think this an odd memory on all accounts, I also remember every fool that every other friend of mine has ever been. It's a mouthful and it happens. "Why not?" I say out loud, and even at your same gestures I cannot suppress my incoherent laughter. The goodbyes are inevitable at this point, like knowing precisely how a siren sounds before it does -- but even so, I am forfeiting the terror and sadness of nostalgia for the sanctuary of its excitement and love. We may say 'Never a novelty', 'Never an accident', 'Never a never', but I am glad we can still be surprised at life's magnificence in peculiar places. You all reached for my hand at different points in the past eight years, and my fingers are still entwined around yours.

the rememberer. aimee bender

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don't know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It's been a month and now he's a sea turtle.

I keep him on the counter, in a glass baking pan filled with salt water.

"Ben," I say to his small protruding head, "can you understand me?" and he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar and I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me.

He is shedding a million years a day. I am no scientist, but this is roughly what I figured out. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate time line of our evolution. He was irritated at first -- he wanted money. I told him I'd be happy to pay and then he cheered up quite a bit. I can hardly read his time line -- he should've typed it -- and it turns out to be wrong. According to him, the whole process should take about a year, but from the way things are going, I think we have less than a month left.

At first, people called on the phone and asked me where was Ben. Why wasn't he at work? Why did he miss his lunch date with those clients? His out-of-print special-ordered book on civilization had arrived at the bookstore, would he please pick it up? I told them he was sick, a strange sickness, and to please stop calling. The stranger thing was, they did. They stopped calling. After a week, the phone was silent and Ben, the baboon, sat in a corner by the window, wrapped up in drapery, chattering to himself.

Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.

This was not unusual. He was always sad about the world. It was a large reason why I loved him. We'd sit together and be sad and think about being sad and sometimes discuss sadness.

On his last human day, he said, "Annie, don't you see? We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart."

He looked at me pointedly, blue eyes unwavering. "Like us, Annie," he said. "We think far too much."

I sat down. I remembered how the first time we had sex, I left the lights on, kept my eyes wide open, and concentrated really hard on letting go; then I noticed that his eyes were open too and in the middle of everything we sat down on the floor and had an hour-long conversation about poetry. It was all very peculiar. It was all very familiar.

Another time he woke me up in the middle of the night, lifted me off the pale blue sheets, led me outside to the stars and whispered: Look, Annie, look--there is no space for anything but dreaming. I listened, sleepily, wandered back to bed and found myself wide awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to dream at all. Ben fell asleep right away, but I crept back outside. I tried to dream up to the stars, but I didn't know how to do that. I tried to find a star no one in all of history had ever wished on before, and wondered what would happen if I did.

On his last human day, he put his head in his hands and sighed and I stood up and kissed the entire back of his neck, covered that flesh, made wishes there because I knew no woman had ever been so thorough, had ever kissed his every inch of skin. I coated him. What did I wish for? I wished for good. That's all. Just good. My wishes became generalized long ago, in childhood; I learned quick the consequence of wishing specific.

I took him in my arms and made love to him, my sad man. "See, we're not thinking," I whispered into his ear while he kissed my neck, "we're not thinking at all" and he pressed his head into my shoulder and held me tighter. Afterward, we went outside again; there was no moon and the night was dark. He said he hated talking and just wanted to look into my eyes and tell me things that way. I let him and it made my skin lift, the things in his look. Then he told me he wanted to sleep outside for some reason and in the morning when I woke up in bed, I looked out to the patio and there was an ape sprawled on the cement, great furry arms covering his head to block out the glare of the sun.

Even before I saw the eyes, I knew it was him. And once we were face to face, he gave me his same sad look and I hugged those enormous shoulders. I didn't even really care, then, not at first, I didn't panic and call 911. I sat with him outside and smoothed the fur on the back of his hand. When he reached for me, I said No, loudly, and he seemed to understand and pulled back. I have limits here.

We sat on the lawn together and ripped up the grass. I didn't miss human Ben right away; I wanted to meet the ape too, to take care of my lover like a son, a pet; I wanted to know him every possible way but I didn't realize he wasn't coming back.

Now I come home from work and look for his regular-size shape walking and worrying and realize, over and over, that he's gone. I pace the halls. I chew whole packs of gum in mere minutes. I review my memories and make sure they're still intact because if he's not here, then it is my job to remember. I think of the way he wrapped his arms around my back and held me so tight it made me nervous and the way his breath felt in my ear: right.

When I go to the kitchen, I peer in the glass and see he's some kind of salamander now. He's so small.

"Ben," I whisper, "do you remember me? Do you remember?"

His eyes roll up in his head and I dribble honey into the water. He used to love honey. He licks at it and then swims to the other end of the pan.

This is the limit of my limits: here it is. You don't ever know for sure where it is and then you bump against it and bam, you're there. Because I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the tiny clear waves with a microscope lens and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, bloated and bordered, brainless, benign, heading clear and small like an eye-floater into nothingness.

I put him in the passenger seat of the car, and drive him to the beach. Walking down the sand, I nod at people on towels, laying their bodies out to the sun and wishing. At the water's edge, I stoop down and place the whole pan on the tip of a baby wave. It floats well, a cooking boat, for someone to find washed up on shore and to make cookies in, a lucky catch for a poor soul with all the ingredients but no container.

Ben the salamander swims out. I wave to the water with both arms, big enough for him to see if he looks back.

I turn around and walk back to the car.

Sometimes I think he'll wash up on shore. A naked man with a startled look. Who has been to history and back. I keep my eyes on the newspaper. I make sure my phone number is listed. I walk around the block at night in case he doesn't quite remember which house it is. I feed the birds outside and sometimes before I put my one self to bed, I place my hands around my skull to see if it's growing, and wonder what, of any use, would fill it if it did.

(...but why on earth should that mean that this is not real?)

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:46:43 GMT

It's these days that speak in the language of cool linens, sliding and folding tired limbs to fit within the confines of thinly chalked boundaries that stretch to contain the multitude of our dimensions. There is art in all angles, in the turning of pages as he says, This moment, right now; it's perfect. The light changes as we color our skins with masterpieces and translate our words into epics. It's now that our eyes devour brazen pathways, forge flaming tunnels through everything beyond, as the world recedes to become calm and quiet. Anticipating.

is this the place that i've been dreaming of?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:44:52 GMT

i need somewhere to begin

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:45:39 GMT

Right now I'm laying in my bed and listening to fireworks outside my window, explosions piercing the night like the denouement of taiko drums. It's slightly unnerving; as soon as colored firecrackers flash through my blinds, the resulting vibrations ripple through my room and send the sensation of tiny balloons popping in my chest. At times like this I feel like one giant plastic bubble wrap, rows of hundreds of thoughts and feelings ready to burst on cue. But the bubbles never pop at the right times, so then I devolve into a bizarre tangle of embarrassingly awkward moments and misaligned emotions.

I feel as if I have spent half my life apologizing for this.

「am liebsten erinnere ich mich an die zukunft」

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:46:26 GMT

switzerland

lucerne (german)

lugano (italian)

lauterbrunnan

laussane (french)

germany

münchen / munich

austria

salzburg

as the days keep turning into night

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:07:39 GMT

Summer has started off lazy and beautiful like Aphrodite rising from her bed of sea foam, smelling like a night's worth of passion in the flowerbeds, morning dew still clinging to her skin. It feels absolutely surreal to wake up in the mornings with sunlight streaming on the walls. To me, graduating high school has been akin to an out-of-body experience, a swarm of names from the speakerphones drowning out any semblance of nostalgia. Never have I felt so much like I am on the precipice of life -- I am entranced, my eyes at half-mast, grey skies heralding a universe of possibilities. This is every beginning I've ever known.

After the ceremony on Thursday night, Laura, Klayton, Minh and I went out into the city, traffic lights casting a sheen over passersby like looking through a pair of chiffon butterfly wings. We watched the midnight premiere of Away We Go and drove out to Jeri's Diner in Hollywood, battling heavy eyelids with chocolate soda and marveling at Hollywood's half-finished lots. At the break of dawn we returned to the valley and the Porter Ranch hills, trying to stay awake in the frigid 5am air. Falling asleep with the rising sun.

During our last dinner that Friday night, cooking Korean barbecue and signing yearbooks in colored ink about going our separate ways, I refused to believe that anything had ended.

Things to do this summer:
❏ Save enough to fly over to mei-mei in Texas
❏ Backpacking in Switzerland!
❏ Convince my parents to let me go on that road trip to San Francisco
❏ Use a bicycle instead of a car as means of local transportation
❏ Try something new every day
❏ Catch up on TV/movies
❏ Finish the third part of Debussy's 'Arabesque'
❏ Go to the Death Cab for Cutie/Tegan and Sara/The New Pornographers concert

I'm about to cross the second one off my list. This'll be exciting!

わたしはどんな呼吸をしようか?

Sun, 03 May 2009 06:14:51 GMT

Surprisingly, hearts just keep beating. Look around and you'll see millions of bones regaining human shape.

(i think i'll start it over where no one knows my name)

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:43:40 GMT

providence, rhode island

08 april 2009

In the end, I think I was always meant to be an art student.

It's been a slow process and a difficult confession to make, as I had spent three years trying to stow away the thought because of its sheer impracticality. But when faced with the prospect of perfectly fine universities that I once was so intent on getting into, versus the dreamiest art school in the nation -- the choice is so apparent to me that I don't know why I spent so much time insisting otherwise.

Still, the process of trying to convince my parents (more specifically, my well-meaning and financially conscious father) has been, for lack of a better word, difficult. Half of me is convinced he let us visit RISD simply to humor my hypothetical thoughts of how different my life would have been had we a few hundred thousand dollars to spare. But as we trekked up College Hill, marveling at the dormitories (a.k.a the most adorable renovated Victorian houses ever!) and looking at how strikingly similar the campus is to a classic university, I think it simply became apparent to my father that there was nowhere else for me.

boston, massachusetts

09-10 april 2009

In many ways, Boston seems a muted version of New York City -- not as exciting, but also not as cruel. We stayed at a hotel in the theatre district near Chinatown and spent two days exploring its different districts -- which, much like the New York burroughs, each has their own set of appearances and cultures.

Places we visited:

❖ Faneuil Hall
❖ Quincy Market
❖ Chinatown
❖ North End
❖ Boston Commons
❖ Harvard Square
❖ Newbury Street
❖ Prudential Center
❖ Fenway Park
❖ Cambridge / Porter Square
❖ Back Bay
❖ Massachusetts Avenue
❖ Museum of Fine Arts / Avenue of the Arts
❖ Boston Children's Museum

Boston's transit system, or the "T", is one of my absolutely favorite parts of Bostonian life. We mapped a route across the city using their color-coded routes: Back Bay to Cambridge, Newbury to Copley. When waiting on platforms we'd listen to street performers on guitars and harmonicas, clutching fistfuls of nickels to donate to their guitar cases while they strummed about youth and first loves. Perhaps because of its location or perhaps because of the fact that it swarms with so many young college students, the city retains a constant idealism in every sense of the word.

↓ Harvard!

↓ Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frank Gehry's building is the only part of MIT that appealed to me. XP Everyone nag prolixius to get her to post pictures of her future alma mater, ne.

♥

you are the ache i feel in every song

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:55:18 GMT

♥ where it all begins.

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:44:28 GMT

MEI-MEI: "Sometimes, I'd like to think that you and I are the ones who taught each other about love. Not romantic love -- but the love that comes from loving another human being, just purely and simply."

springtime in transit

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:39:12 GMT

(you are more than the sum of your sins.)

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:09:34 GMT

❝
"We aren't explained, you know, by a bad thing. Something terrible, when we're young, it can change us -- of course it can -- change the whole shape of our life. But it's still our life. Under our control. The bad thing that happened, it doesn't explain us. It is not an excuse for our life being all wrong. We can't just say, 'Well of course I'm unhappy, a terrible thing happened long ago.' We have a duty, to ourselves and to those around us, to deal with it and move on. Both are important. We have to deal with it, and we have to move on. If it is difficult, and if it takes time, well -- what else is a life for?"
❞

chaque fois que tu t'en vas

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:22:18 GMT

santa monica!

Laura, Minh, Klayton, Mackenzie and I decided (after around two hours of ruminating) to spend the day at the beach. It was a lovely, lovely time. ♥

♪ You! Me! Dancing! -- Los Campesinos!

(sometimes, you just have to let it be.)

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 07:22:10 GMT

I just feel so unbearably alone right now. I don't know why this is happening.

やった~!

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:38:37 GMT

GUESS WHO JUST FINISHED HER ENTIRE RISD APPLICATION (A.K.A THREE GINORMOUS 20-INCH PIECES) IN FOUR DAYS AND ONLY PASSED OUT ONCE!

last year's calendar

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:42:45 GMT

空はまだ微かに明るく　並んでる紅いランプの中
ラジオから流れるラプソング　｢愛してる」｢愛してる」
The sky diffuses into a dim glow
Behind a line of traffic lights
The melody of a love song pours from the radio:
I love you
I love you

ugly streams of consciousness

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 06:29:26 GMT

I.
When you ask whether I believe in God, what you really should be asking is, do the ends justify the means?

II.
Today, I had the inexplicable urge to strip off my clothes and streak in the rain. When I voiced this aloud, you smiled in understanding. Sometimes it’s best not to know why, you said; and sheepishly, I agreed. We walked to the park together, clothes on, and waited for the inconsequential edges of sunsets, the sprays of water, the gossamer webs tangled on our cheeks to be batted away. Impatience. Automaton.

I confessed: sometimes I have nightmares about piles of papers stacked like dead cells. Just dead, succinct and dry and nothing worth hoping for (or crying about). When I tire of myself, I lend simile and metaphor to my growing disenchantment.

III.
I never finish the entries in my moleskine. I swear to god. I look back at my handwriting and I am kind of mortified at the kind of crap I write when I'm not thinking about what I'm writing.

NOT DATED; various scribbles from october - january

x. "everything that rises must converge."

x. the colors flutter all around, so vivid and intense that one can’t think too deeply without imploding from the simplicity of it.

x. fragile like bird wings, dysfunction like pills and marijuana and fingers down throats in smoke-filled bathrooms. what they’re reduced to, what could be a statement if anyone was listening. later she is laughing down the hallway stumbling slightly in stilettos, not quite filling out her shadow as it smears, careworn down the wall;

x. THE HORRORRRRRR! oh mister joseph conrad, why are you so damn melodramatic!

x. real mortality. this ain’t no made-for-tv shit right here. a look in her eyes and all you can see is a craving for a cigarette. i can’t tell what’s real and what’s not anymore; you can say it’s my biggest failing. my shoes are tied and my t’s are crossed, and i feel five years old again – when Velcro was the biggest thing on the block and we rode our bikes down brick-laid streets for traction (a gallery of scars).

x. clark gable; "i was waiting for the cross-town train the london underground / when it struck me / that i've been waiting since birth for a love that would look and sound / like a movie"

x. you integrate just to find zeros, wondering where everything malfunctioned. too bad real life doesn’t come with warranties.

x. the three of talked and that’s all it was; just talk. but the real stimulation came from promise, all these things will be rounded out in a matter on months. these things will change and maybe some clean breaks with no blood, but it’s the tearing down and taking apart that matters. we’re looking in to see the cards even when we don’t know what they mean.

x. THEY'RE KEEPING ROMI PAKU! ♡ by jove, i need celebration guns!

x. a slow and steady release. wonderful covers. explainations of dubious morality, uncontrived. rare. it has everything to do with the music and driving home late at night that he seemed to understand. every person on earth is amazed to find their reactions are not unique.

Man, I have been in such a funk lately.

僕は鮮明なこの空の青さに少し戸惑って

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:44:59 GMT

I want things to fit -- to become a part of me instead of hanging loosely or orbiting vaguely around my presence. Nothing in my life has ever become mine to claim; goodbyes have been written like screenplays in my head, carefully rehearsed in well-lit bathrooms. People keep telling me that I seem to be shriveling or blowing away with every moment.

I suppose I suddenly feel so wry and cynical because there is so much that does not bare itself plain to the naked eye. All I see are transient ten-second observations. Nobody asks, Are you happy? Are you fighting some terrible tragedy or a certain hopeless ennui? Are you content? Can you sleep at night? Is this how you thought it would end? I suppose I am just tired of not knowing people at all and always bidding them farewell. Because honestly, I'm always bidding farewell. So much so that they're not even verbal; just a postscript amended after the fact.

(Vaguely NSFW.)

slow dancing in a burning room

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:53:16 GMT

I.
The underlying patterns of our lives are all in front of us now, nestled safely in the obscurity of careless documentation. There are large meals, large dreams, large lives that are finally steeping through with color, branching into spectacular designs and fashions that are only marked through the tracings of dialed calls hurtling grids into the atmosphere above our heads. We are loud and fearless and free.

I tell myself: it's only 'here' and 'there' - the measure of highway lines, the instantaneous crackle of larynx against telephone wires, the waves scraping against my skin. But I miss the solidarity of your gravity.

II.
I am so tired of fighting. Nowadays, I am just trying my best to not do anything self-destructive.

doughboy

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:45:11 GMT

Pieces of magic.

adieu

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:01:54 GMT

On the car ride back, I absently made a note of things to read about, like French literature and bidets and porcupine lovemaking. At the moment, I am undescribably comfortable with the texture of my new skin -- a perfect counterpart to my unease of late. The lines and boundaries cross and change so unexpectedly that it's hard to feel as if I know anything anymore.

Sometimes I wish I could separate every one of my emotions like yarn or string, segregate them into different parts of my body. I would keep sadness tucked safely and secretly in the back of my throat, bottle exhilaration in the ribcage, embed my resolve in the enamel of my teeth, suffocate fear in the tissue of my lungs...

There would be no more confusion.

things i want to say someday

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:20:54 GMT

I'll be your comfortable silences, the spaces between the words of your page. I'll be your steady rhythm when your heart skips a beat, your metronome by which to measure the validity of things. I will be all awkward bones, shaky hands and knowing smiles. I'll use my eyes as X-ray machines to beam through your breastbone for medicinal purposes. I'll be the ball of yarn that guides you around corners in dark hallways. I'll be that beautiful song playing on a phonograph that seems familiar the first time you hear it, the static electricity that fizzes through your veins, the eraser that undoes all of the sad parts you've lived.

And I will be your happy ending. Promise.

☂