To be honest, I left the cinema in tears. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by, amid all the investigative intrigue, a more personal reckoning with what it means to trust—NOT whether someone is ultimately worthy of our trust, but what becomes possible when we choose to trust someone, and what remains forever inaccessible when we don’t.

Early in the film, Nathan asks Elizabeth Holmes to revisit her relationship with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former romantic and business partner at Theranos who is 19 years older than her. By Liz’s account, she had surrendered enormous parts of her autonomy to a man she loved and trusted, only for that relationship to collapse following the downfall of everything they had built together.

What struck me the most was Liz’s reflections on her approach to that relationship, one characterized by, above all else, what you may call unconditional trust. Her rationale is simple but powerful:

“When you choose to trust someone so completely, if that trust proves justified, it can take you both somewhere far beyond what either of you could have reached while holding back.”

(or something along the lines of^)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is Elizabeth Holmes we’re talking about, a woman convicted of FRAUD, whose every expression of sincerity has become suspicious.

WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE A SINGLE WORD SHE SAYS?

But bear with me. Let’s entertain, for a moment, that one of the many reasons why Nathan chose to keep that narrative of Liz in the documentary was precisely because Nathan wants us to engage as much with the possibility that there exists a version of reality in which her account IS truthful as one in which it is not. That Liz really did trust Sunny to that extent, that her surrender of autonomy was genuine, and that it contributed to consequences she could scarcely have imagined, that the deep, almost inseparable bond she now shares with her current partner Billy Evans through granting him power of attorney is equally real.

If we choose to accept these premises, even provisionally, what becomes astonishing is not that Liz could surrender herself to someone so completely in the first place.

It’s that she could make that all-in bet again.

Having just suffered the disastrous consequences of such absolute surrender, she was still willing to stake herself on merging with another person with seemingly undiminished conviction.

Is this evidence of an extraordinary capacity for love, or an equally extraordinary need to believe in such love she cannot afford to lose?

Perhaps both. But whatever its origins, I’m struck by the sheer magnitude of that willingness.

Perhaps one of the many ways Nathan wants us to feel about Elizabeth is how mind-blowing it is that someone who, having been so profoundly devastated, refuses to let that experience determine the limits of what she’s prepared to surrender again.

I suspect Nathan is captivated by this, too. Perhaps even secretly envious.

Throughout the film, Nathan presents himself as the consummate investigator: detached, skeptical, almost clinically perceptive. He probes contradictions, questions motives, and tries to get to the bottom of the elaborate stories people tell about themselves and one another. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that beneath this investigative persona runs a more private narrative that is more emotional than Nathan’s persona is willing to let on—one about his own relationship with intimacy, and perhaps his longing for something he doesn’t quite know how to attain.

I still remember this shot vividly: Nathan Fielder sits alone in his car, waiting for Liz and Billy on their final day together. Something about the portrayal of his solitude in that moment stayed with me.

Now let’s take a look at this shot in the context of other hints Nathan dropped throughout the film: passing references to his relationship struggles (his mention of recent breakup in his letter to Elizabeth), Amanda suggesting that he might make a good father, him pondering about the possibility of fatherhood, and so on.

The juxtaposition there feels quietly sad.

I wonder whether Nathan is secretly envious of Liz. Not necessarily of her circumstances, but of her apparent ability to surrender without requiring certainty first.

We have come to know Nathan as a man whose artistic practice revolves around dissecting human behavior and picking apart social conventions. Yet what if that very capacity for critical distance and deconstruction, has also kept him from experiencing the kind of profound, inseparable bond he finds himself observing? What if his tendency for skepticism, so indispensable to his work, has become a defense against the vulnerability that intimacy demands?

And then there’s us, the audience.

There’s something almost paradoxical about the position Nathan places us in. In several conversations with Liz, he shows us how Liz presents trust as something she can extend almost effortlessly, even after having paid dearly for it—or at least this is the version of herself she invites us to believe. Nathan, meanwhile, spends the film cultivating precisely the opposite instinct in us, as we’re repeatedly asked to decide what to believe: Is Liz deceiving everyone? Is Billy? Is Nathan himself manipulating our perception through the narrative he has constructed?

And this very position we find ourselves in parallels Liz’s situation in an ironic way. As audience, we are confronted with the same choices that Liz once faced in her relationships: do we choose to approach their story with trust, or do we choose to approach it with suspicion?

If we, as audience, choose to believe in Liz and Billy’s bond , we may witness an extraordinary, if deeply dysfunctional, story of devotion (or in their own words, “building monuments of love”, but If we choose to distrust it, the same gestures become evidence of utter manipulation, co-dependency, or self-deception.

But perhaps even this dichotomy is too neat. Perhaps love and manipulation are NOT necessarily mutually exclusive.

Someone can sincerely love another person while also exploiting them, controlling them, or participating in a shared system of denial. A relationship can be both deeply meaningful and profoundly dysfunctional. Its tenderness need not absolve it of its cruelty; its cruelty need not render every moment of tenderness disingenuous.

The muddiness of it all is what makes the question of trust so difficult in the first place. We want to believe that underneath all the contradictions lies a single, coherent truth about who someone really is. That if we could only expose the deception and artifices, we would finally know whether the love was real.

But what if there is no such clean distinction to be made? What if the answer is ultimately unknowable? What if sincerity and calculation, devotion and self-interest, are not competing explanations but inseparable parts of the same human experience?

If that’s the case, then the problem is NOT simply that we haven’t looked closely enough. It’s that no amount of looking may give us the kind of definitive answer we’re searching for.

We might uncover every lie, reconstruct every interaction, account for every injury, and still be unable to settle what these people ultimately mean to one another. Evidence can establish what happened, even who bears responsibility, without necessarily resolving what was FELT.

Which brings me to the title itself: You Can See Everything.

It’s an extraordinary promise, sure, but it is also one that totally misses the point.

You can live in someone’s home, film their most intimate moments, reconstruct conversations. You can keep looking, keep questioning, keep peeling away the layers of a story.

But even if you can see everything, you may still not understand.

Because seeing everything is not the same as understanding everything.

And understanding everything is not a prerequisite for LOVING someone.

And this is where the limits of knowledge become something more than an intellectual problem. To love another person is, in some measure, to act without possessing the complete picture. One must decide whether to enter, remain in, or leave a relationship without ever knowing with certainty what lies at the bottom of another person’s heart. No amount of scrutiny can entirely relieve us of that decision.

The film’s final moment ultimately returns us to a scene of Liz and Billy with their two children—a family they have managed to build together, despite, or perhaps through, the extraordinary circumstances that brought them there.

Of course, their having built a life together proves NEITHER the purity of their devotion NOR the health of their relationship. But, if we take their bond seriously, there is something profoundly moving about the fact that, for all the contradictions and uncertainties surrounding them, they have nevertheless chosen a kind of extraordinary commitment whose meaning cannot be exhausted by an outsider’s account of it and continues beyond Nathan’s frame of investigation.

Because at the end of the day, whatever Nathan or the audience makes of their relationship, the experience of living it belongs to them alone.

Meanwhile, Nathan remains outside that intimate world, literally and narratively. He can observe it, question it, reconstruct it. But he can NOT fully inhabit it. Is this also a secretive lament about his own solitude?

Anyhow, I find something poignant in the contrast between a man standing outside a relationship trying to understand it, and two people who have chosen to live inside one despite its unknowability.

The tragedy of the genius detective, perhaps, is that he can see through everything, but risks losing sight of anything worth believing in.

Yet the film complicates this possibility, too. Later, Amanda wonders whether Nathan has been trying to protect Liz, whether he worries about the film hurting her. Nathan, characteristically, denies it. Amanda’s response: it’s complicated.

I love that Nathan chose to leave that exchange in. It almost feels like a subtle hint he carefully dropped for his audience—there exists an emotional investment his detached persona seems designed to conceal:

The detective may not be as disinterested as he’d like us to believe.

And this hidden footnote may be the film’s attempt to offer a way out of the apparent opposition between Liz and Nathan.

The detective’s journey need NOT be to abandon his questions and embrace unconditional belief. It might instead be to discover that questioning and caring can coexist. That recognizing another person’s contradictions need not preclude our affection for them; that acknowledging the possibility of manipulation need not require us to deny the possibility of Love. We can retain our judgment without allowing it to become an insurmountable barrier between ourselves and the world.

So, if you ask me, what the film’s most unsettling proposition is, here’s what I’ll say: Trust isn’t always the conclusion of an investigation. Sometimes it’s what we choose to extend when investigation has taken us as far as it can. Trust stands NOT as a refusal to see what is in front of us, nor a guarantee that our faith will be rewarded, but a willingness to remain open to a kind of possibility—the possibility that to experience certain kinds of love, we must eventually accept that there are things we will never know.

And that sometimes, the most consequential thing we can do is choose to believe anyway.

Three years later, I gave myself over to Black Rock City once again.

Three years earlier, I had come to Black Rock City because of a call I never answered. Someone had tried to reach me in San Francisco by satellite phone. I was convinced the call had come from Black Rock City. I could barely eat or sleep. By the following evening, I’d thrown my things together and set off. I did find the person I was looking for. But what followed—with an almost embarrassing lack of subtlety—mirrored the ending of Burning Man itself that year: first, a deluge, falling for no reason at all, washing everything apart; then a great fire, burning it all clean away. The wind took even the ashes.

Why had I come back? Why now, of all times? I couldn’t say.

For years, the same dream had been coming back to me.

It was winter. The wasteland was frozen to the bone, the ground split into long, raw cuts, one after another, as though someone had taken a knife to the earth and forgotten to clean up afterward. I was a snake. Snakes must shed their skins. My scales were poisonous, and down they came, one by one, each one a word. Wherever a scale fell, it burned a little black hole into the soil. I knew every one of those words: things I had said, names I had been called, verdicts handed down upon me.

When the last scale fell, I ran naked.

Ran. Ran forward.

There was nothing ahead of me. Nothing behind. The wind had a hardness to it, striking my bare skin like thrown stones. I wanted to hurl this body against the edge of the world, batter my way through, and see what lay beyond! I wanted “being alive” to mean being alive, nothing more, nothing else…

Round and round I would go, naked under that stony wind. If I froze to death circling that wasteland, so be it!

Every time, the dream broke there.

I woke to darkness. I lay still, waiting for my heartbeat to slow. Yet I felt as though I were standing at the edge of a cliff, with no idea who had put me there. It was pitch-black and misty, a place where day and night had never been told apart.

I kept murmuring the same words: What am I supposed to do? I said them to myself, and I said them to heaven. But the more I repeated them, the more the question changed, until I was asking heaven something else altogether.

By what right?

By what right?

Every day, I watched that thing on the screen write in thirty seconds what I once would have spent three weeks agonizing over. And it wasn’t badly written, either. Hard to find a thing wrong with it.

I sat there for a long time, unable to decide whether to cheer for it or grieve for those three weeks. During those weeks, I had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to look things up, quarreled with the cat, and once sat on the sofa and cried.

Now none of it seemed to count.

And it wasn’t just my three weeks. The things we had treasured for thousands of years were being slaughtered to the last by a Frankenstein of our own making. The results we had spent our lives pursuing, it handed over almost casually.

When results came so easily, the meaning of the process grew ambiguous. And when the process no longer had anything to prove, what was left that could still be called necessary?

This body.

We have been using this body for tens of thousands of years. With it, we coaxed fire from wood. Hungry, we ate. Afraid, we hid. Cold, we reached for something to hold. Generation after generation, we have handed down these same old tricks. In all those millennia, we have scarcely invented a new one.

It has its limits, and has never made a secret of them. It aches, it tires, it grows old. One day, it will break down.

Yet it is precisely these limits that make it hunger for a kind of infinity: to melt itself, whole and entire, into that thing we have come to call love. And still, it clings to a hard, unyielding self, a self that will not melt. Inside, what longs to melt and what refuses to melt grind against each other, day and night, until everything the heart harbors has been honed to needles, and even being alive begins to sting.

And so the body grows a thick callus over it all, sealing everything away.

I cannot tell whether this persistent, self-renewing force is a blessing or a curse, or what future it means to drive us toward. Some fight it with all their strength. Some let the force seize them. Some pretend there is nothing to see. Some run laughing to meet it.

I am none of them.

I only know this: the life I am living feels counterfeit.

For years I had been saving my strength for a fight, waiting for the day I could bear no more and finally have it out with somebody.

A good, proper fight. No holding back.

But everything was maddeningly polite. The days nodded. The neighbors nodded. The people on the other side of the screen nodded too.

I looked and looked. There wasn’t a fight to be had. Not one!

The only person left to fight was myself. Which was a bit of a problem.

So I buried my head in the dirt. My head was perfectly awake. Yet I pretended to be asleep.

And the moment I closed my eyes, the dream of the wasteland came for me again.

2.

Black Rock City, too, is a kind of wasteland.

Geologists tell us it was once the bed of Lake Lahontan, which dried up ten thousand years ago. But to me, this has always seemed the poorest possible account of the place. I cannot quite believe the lake ever dried up. Its waters merely found another way to flow—through the wind. They have form still, grain upon infinitesimal grain: dust. And every grain of that dust may once have been something else: A corner of last year’s Temple. A rib from the Man the year before. Ash trapped in the hardened mud of the great storm three years ago.

The Stoics believed that the universe would periodically perish in a great conflagration, only to be born again, down to the last detail: the same people speaking the same words.

I wonder whether any of them ever came to a place like this.

In a world where everything is made of dust, to possess someone and to erase them may be one and the same gesture.

Whenever the wind rose, I knew the dust had come for me. It tore through the city like some feral thing. One pounce, and it had me. It slapped my face raw, then licked its way into my hair, the folds of my ears, under my fingernails. I clamped the mask over my mouth and nose. It squeezed through anyway—and stayed, as if it owned the place.

There were moments I thought the dust would kill me. My eyes burned too badly to open; the road had been swallowed whole. Still, I felt no fear. Something in me was almost elated—as though a lover who had kept his back to me for years had finally turned, and without a word, seized me in his arms..

The wind scoured the desert until even its boundaries went blunt: the one between me and myself, the one between me and the world. With those lines rubbed away, there was nowhere to hide. Nowhere, either, to lose myself.

Here, I was certain: wherever I wandered, someone would find me in the dust. Someone would come toward me

This was logic, not hope.

Though I must admit, I’ve never been particularly good at telling the two apart.

And indeed, people found me.

One arrived with a sudden weight beside me. I turned to find a woman who had somehow materialized out of nowhere. Two dark-brown braids hung neatly against her cheeks. A wispy fringe nearly touched her eyes, large and bright as the last two pools of clear water on this parched alkaline flat. When she smiled, a breeze seemed to pass over the water, sending little rings of wrinkles across its surface. There was something both girlish and world-weary about her face.

She wasted no time on pleasantries.

“What’s your spirit animal?”

“Tanuki,” I said, offhandedly.

She looked puzzled. I tried to explain with my hands: something like a raccoon, something like a cat, and a creature given to shape-shifting.

She nodded, committing herself to no particular understanding. Then she produced a brand-new cloth bag, spread it over her knees, and set to work with a pen. The ears came first—my cat, presumably. Next, a ringed tail—the raccoon, I imagined. She worked in fits and starts, with the grave persistence of someone attempting a task for which she had little talent but an unshakable sense of duty. By degrees, an animal took shape. The longer I looked, the more it resembled a pampas cat from the Andean foothills.

I did not correct her. Each time she hesitated, I resolved to believe a little harder.

At last her pen stopped in midair. She lifted those luminous eyes to mine. I gave her a nod, a smile, and accepted my tanuki.

Then came an American man, built like a bear, his great beard streaked with white, who waved me over.

It was a sweltering afternoon, and I was worn out. He invited me to lie down, slipped a blindfold over my eyes, and began passing things across my skin. First my arm, then slowly up to my shoulder, across my chest, down toward my navel.

At first, I kept a wary eye on his hands as they traveled over me, alert to where they might go next. But gradually, I began to feel the stillness beneath their movement. Tender, without a trace of seductiveness. His touch asked nothing of me, and meant to carry nothing away.

I lay there. Without warning, my eyes stung.

My body understood before I did: it had been so long since anyone had touched me this way.

His movements were unhurried, almost ceremonial, as though he were making the introductions himself: Something pointed and cool. Something blunt and yielding. Something furry. Something bare.

I guessed at each visitor and was wrong nearly every time. When the blindfold came off, the strangers revealed themselves: the back of a spoon, the tip of a brush, a dishwashing sponge. I had handled these things a thousand times, yet never once considered what they might feel like from the other side.

I had lived in this body much the same way.

Another found me at an intersection. I was pedaling furiously, trying to find a camp I’d never been to, convinced I was going to be late for their workshop. It was then a tall man in a headscarf flagged me down. He wouldn’t hear of letting me pass without a cup of tea.

He spoke as though I would be doing him a kindness. Just a minute, he promised. It wouldn’t keep me from anything important.

At last I gave in and turned toward the stall.

The wind had stripped the canopy nearly bare, exposing a crooked skeleton of poles. Behind it stood a woman in red, her eyes swallowed by goggles, her mouth buried beneath a mask. Not a trace of her face was visible.

Yet a name I hadn’t spoken in ten years rose to my lips, unbidden.

I tried it aloud.

She answered.

“I had a feeling it was you when you rode past.”

She bent low, turning her back to the wind, and served me a cup of tea.

Dust sifted into it. We both drank it.

Ten years earlier, during a summer internship by the Charles River, I had imagined more futures than I could count. Not one came to pass. Yet not one of them had contained this battered little shelter, trembling in the wind, or this cup of faintly bitter tea.

We like to believe the future is ours to draw, stroke by careful stroke, every line neatly in place. But perhaps the future has been standing at some crossroads all along—a little windblown, a little worse for wear, waiting patiently for us to pass by and recognize it.

Farther down the road, a boy of seven or eight emerged and gave me a proper little bow. Then he placed a key he had made himself into my palm.

His father was a fair-skinned Japanese man with fine, almost scholarly features, wearing an enormous cowboy hat pulled nearly to his eyebrows. The hat had no business sitting on such a face. But the man stepped forward, took my hand, and spoke in halting English, laying out each word with extraordinary care.

“This key will open every door in your life. Please hold on to it. Always. Never give up.”

The utter seriousness of him, the way he offered those words without the slightest reservation, made me, for a moment, forget how to be embarrassed.

On an ordinary day, I might have rolled my eyes at such a terribly proper promise. But that day my throat tightened. The words rose to my lips; all that came out was a thank you.

I did not tell him that I had just come from a cliff beyond day and night. There were no doors there. Only the bottomless dark.

More often, though, it wasn’t people who found me.

Sometimes it was an iron horse, rusted a deep red, its whole body smoldering with a dark fire in the setting sun. It held its neck out and stood quietly, almost humbly, yet seemed to pin the entire dry lakebed beneath its hooves.

Or a strain of jazz after midnight, leaking from some passing art car, a sound so faint, so elusive, it drew me toward the depths of the underworld. I followed it for as long as I could, yet never learned its name.

Or the great wooden skeleton of a dragon, stretched across the alkaline flats, its ribs arching upward one by one in stubborn defiance. I wondered if this was the posture in which some elder god had fallen.

Or a lionfish, its spiny plumes glowing faintly as it swayed through the dark. It granted me no more than a glimpse before drifting away.

Most often, they appeared when I could walk no farther, or no longer knew where to go.

The Faceless Queen, for instance. She stood at the edge of the desert, planted in a dust storm fit for the end of the world. Her body shuddered from side to side, on the verge of falling, yet stubbornly holding on to her last breath, as though she had been waiting for me.

I stood before her for a long time.

She had no face. Where an expression ought to have been was an emptiness like the mouth of a well.

I tipped my head back and looked into it.

I saw the lake.

Ten thousand years ago it had not yet dried up. Its waters were deep. Perhaps the lionfish had swum here from that time. I saw the iron horse break into a gallop, then collapse one morning when I would never come to meet it. I saw the dragon’s ribs when they were still the branches of a tree, with birds building nests among them. I saw a mother tuck a photograph of her dead child into a crack in the Temple’s wood. I saw the braided woman teaching a child to draw a tanuki amid the ruins of a continent ravaged by war. I saw the Japanese boy grow into a man, lose his key, and find it again in an old drawer. I saw summer nights on the Charles River, our young eyes wide beneath the fireworks of the Fourth of July. I heard that phone ring, again and again, unanswered.

I saw the faces I had loved. One by one they faded, until they overlapped into a single face, then turned to ash, turned to wind, were swallowed by a wasteland frozen to the bone and breathed out again—a crowd of naked people running across the earth, where there was no language, and no time.

I saw myself standing before a woman, staring hard into her face.

Then the wind came.

Dust flooded my eyes. I rubbed them and looked again.

There was nothing on her face.

3.

Sooner or later, every wanderer must lose their way in a dust storm, deep in the desert after midnight, searching for home.

At first the wind merely stiffened. Then the dust came at us in walls, and the world stopped less than six feet from our faces. Each breath squeezed thinner on its way in through our goggles. It was as though we had fallen into a pocket of airless void. Sky and earth lost their distinction. North, south, east, west—gone. The stars, the moon, gone. Even the strange, luminous creatures that roamed the desert after dark had vanished. The wind had taken them too.

We pushed our bicycles into the dark, teeth clenched. Whatever counted as forward was no longer ours to decide.

Then, at the end of all possible roads, an orange glow surfaced through the dust.

Closer, it resolved into a small wooden cottage. Three walls, no door. As though a page had blown loose from a fairy tale and landed in the desert.

Inside stood a wooden table, flanked by two long benches, with four people gathered around it. One was bent over some sewing. Another was writing. Others talked in low voices. Outside, even the sky had vanished. But none of them looked up.

A denim jacket hung from a coat rack on the left. Its owner was nowhere to be seen. I imagined he had been called away on some urgent errand, so suddenly that he had forgotten his coat. The others—old friends, I decided—had stayed behind to mind the house, passing the endless night in a conversation so old it had lost both its beginning and its end. Perhaps he was the one the house was waiting for. Perhaps he would never return, and none of them would think to ask.

This time, no one came toward me. The house simply stood there, alight in the dark.

For a long while I remained where I was. Gust after gust sent dust sweeping across its threshold; for an instant, the grains flared bright in the lamplight before the darkness swallowed them back again. I dared not blink, for fear the house would vanish. Nor could I bring myself to approach it. One step closer, I feared, and this enchanted refuge might collapse into a magician’s sleight of hand.

The truth is, I had long since learned to endure having nowhere left to turn. Desperation, like every other feeling, had its season; it came and went like the monsoon. In the years outside Black Rock City, I had repeated a certain incantation until I knew it by heart:

no one is coming.

I had lived by its instruction through so many solitary days and nights that I had even learned to strike a proud pose about it.

So what startled me was not the sight of a glowing house in the middle of the desert. After all, in Black Rock City, anything was possible.

What startled me was myself.

I wanted to run inside. I wanted the house to take me in and keep me forever.

I needed it.

All along, I had wanted a place like this with a force I had scarcely admitted to myself.

By the time I realized what I was doing, I was already inside.

To my right stood a large bookcase. Someone had left a guestbook open on its counter. I went over and wrote:

i love this game

The words were not mine. Someone had given them to me many years ago. More than once, half in earnest, half in jest. Then that person left. The words did not. They had hung in the empty air beside my ear ever since, like a coat nobody had come back to claim.

Now I hung them here.

In a few days, the house would burn, and the words with it. I couldn’t bring myself to regret it. Strangely, the thought seemed to draw me nearer to everything in the room.

We took our seats at the table. Beside us sat a man and a woman, both about our age, facing one another. They exchanged a few words, then fell quiet, then talked a little more. Sometimes they simply sat. They had the air of people who had lived in that house for years, perhaps decades, long enough for the dust to turn their hair and eyebrows white.

Then the man turned to me.

“Geometric shapes, or little fish?”

I stared at him.

He reached beneath the table and produced a heap of odds and ends. Only then did I understand: he was making me a pair of earrings.

“Little fish,” I made my decision.

He bent over his work and began threading together two tiny fish skeletons, bone by bone. Slowly, carefully. Their pale ribs caught the lamplight.

As I took the little fishbones from him, something fell into place.

Ever since arriving in Black Rock City, I had heard people calling out to me, Welcome home! At first, I took it for a customary greeting. I smiled, nodded, and returned the sentiment in much the same spirit as one answers How are you? I had heard the words so often that I scarcely noticed them anymore. Only now did I begin to taste what they meant.

Home.

Such an ordinary word. So ordinary that you might not even remember the last time it left your lips. And yet, how necessary.

In the apartment where I live now, there are scratches on the table and dust on the floor. Those things must know me well enough by now. But a home, it seems, is not quite that. Perhaps home is coming in from a storm in the middle of the night, and someone asking, Geometric shapes, or little fish? Then bending over the table to make them for you, slowly, with care. Perhaps it is someone still waiting by the fire, however late you return. Someone who does not disappear without a word when you least expect it.

I looked up. The two of them were still sitting face to face. Neither had left their seat.

Then something began to rattle against the eaves.

Rain. People appeared from nowhere, as though a flock of migrating birds had stopped to rest along its passage. Each found a corner in which to set down a rain-soaked body and let it dry for a while. I shuffled farther along the bench to make room, and felt, rather absurdly, the private satisfaction of a host who had been expecting company all along.

There was plenty of night left. We began playing a game with poetry cards at the table. They lay face down; no one knew what the next card would hold.

The woman drew one.

“…Dust.”

She read it aloud. Her voice was soft, the words coming and going in the wind.

The man drew another.

“...Sitting by the table.”

I can no longer remember the verses themselves. Only those two keywords remain, so perfectly, so matter-of-factly fated that I began to suspect it was not they who had drawn the poems, but the poems that had chosen them. Or perhaps the two of them were lines the desert had written long ago, and tonight someone had simply read them aloud.

Gradually the dust settled. The wind slackened. The night cleared again, and a notched moon hung askew in the southeastern sky. From the tip of its blade, time flowed in slow pulses, silently rising past our ankles.

For the rest of that week, I never came upon the little wooden cottage again.

4.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, in the open-air theater on the southern slope of the Acropolis, tragedy had a habit of reaching a dead end. A hero had committed a crime beyond redemption. Oaths collided with oaths; fate tightened into a knot no mortal onstage could undo.

Then, from behind the scenery, came the creak of a wooden crane. Its arm swung slowly into view, and down from the air descended a god.

At the end of Euripides’ Orestes, Apollo arrived in just this fashion, settling a murderous feud among kin with a few words. Medea, having killed her own children, escaped above the rooftops in the sun god’s dragon-drawn chariot. The Greeks called the contraption mēchanē. Later, Latin gave the dramatic device its name: deus ex machina. A god from the machine.

The Man was a deus ex machina made real.

He had no business standing on that vast, desolate playa. Yet there he was, solid and impossible, like a blade cleaving earth from sky.

But whereas the Greeks concealed their crane behind the scenery, allowing the audience to believe a god had descended from heaven, the people of Black Rock City raised their god in full view, timber by timber. And when the play was over, the very hands that had raised him would set him ablaze.

To give myself over to Black Rock City was to join a provocation against the Creator—or so I believed in those first days. I must confess, I thought I had finally found the fight I’d been saving myself for.

After all that searching, an opponent almost impossible to defeat.

Look, Creator. You think these finite bodies of ours are yours to command. When we are born, when we perish, what counts as an instant and what as eternity—you alone get to decide. You think we can do nothing but submit to your will: suffer the indignity of being toyed with and nurse our injuries in silence, or else pant and strain after that thing called immortality, like a donkey yoked to a mill, chasing the carrot forever dangling before its nose?

No.

We have never asked to be immortal. We beg for no blessings, recoil from no curses. Neither optimism nor despair has anything to do with it. Our pride lies not in leaving behind some monument that will outlast us, but in building, with our own hands, a universe in which the power of life and death belongs to us!

I believed every word of this.

Until the night we burned the Man.

If an eye were watching from high above the desert, it would have seen light beginning to gather at the center of a dark lakebed stretching for hundreds of square kilometers. From every direction, the art cars converged upon the heart of the playa: birds and beasts, demons and specters. Fire erupted from some; light poured from others; wings and antennae stirred against the dark. Slowly they spiraled inward, like galaxies yielding to the pull of a common center.

There they took their places, ring within ring, standing at attention like soldiers assembled for inspection, with the Man at the center of it all. The precision of their arrangement seemed older than humanity itself, as though it had been inscribed in the laws of physics long before there were human eyes to witness it.

And suddenly I saw it.

This was how the universe had always worked.

A star burns in the dark for billions of years, fusing hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, burning its way to iron. When there is nothing left to burn, it collapses inward, then bursts apart, casting into the void, light-years away, the elements it has spent its lifetime forging.

Billions of years later, from those ashes grew oceans. Eyes and hands. And seventy or eighty thousand people, standing at that very moment in the Nevada desert.

So when we raised our own gods from the machine, grit in our eyes and veils across our faces, sweat running down our skin, our throats scraped raw from shouting, and then, in a frenzy of joy, gave them to the flames—we were only doing, in our finite human bodies, what the universe had done before us.

Beginning it all again.

Was this really a challenge to the Creator?

Or had there never been a contest at all? Had we, in these finite bodies, been holding up a mirror to that power on high—humbly, earnestly, giving visible form to the Creator’s infinity?

I lifted my eyes.

Ring upon ring of light spread across the dry lakebed, a field of stars burning on the earth.

Hundreds of machines. Tens of thousands of hearts. All turned toward one center.

No one had issued a command.

The universe never does.

I had seen this order before. Yet every time, it left me standing as the first human must have stood beneath the stars—holding my breath, not knowing what to say.

5.

The night after the Man burned, it was the Temple’s turn.

All week, I had watched people enter the Temple with something tucked against their chests: Photographs, letters, rings, a dog’s collar, names inscribed on wood. And things no hand could carry: a marriage, a former self...

The Man had been hollow. We’d built him ourselves, and when the time came, offered him to the flames without regret. The Temple was different. The Temple was full, and nothing inside it had been given up freely. Still they came, again and again, to lay down what was beyond keeping. What was beyond saving.

That evening, Uncle Will’s dinner bell rang as it always did, its cheerful clatter calling us home like children released from school.

Will and his wife, Jen, had tended the camp kitchen from morning till night, three meals a day, never failing us once. In Black Rock City, you could forget what day it was, even what hour. But Bill’s bell would ring, and however far we’d wandered, we came home.

I stood beside the dinner line, plate in hand.

“Will, are you going to the Temple tonight?”

“Hope I can make it,” he said, stirring the pot.

After a pause, he told me he’d had a son. Ten years earlier, the boy had died of a heroin overdose. He had never come home.

Will said this as he stirred, and he was still stirring when he’d finished.

After dinner, I caught sight of Andrea wrapping a scarf around her head. Her silver hair disappeared beneath it.

By day, she was radiant, her eyes lighting up whenever she smiled, her short silver hair setting them off beautifully. But that evening, she lingered beside her bicycle before climbing on. Dusk pressed in, until I could barely make out the half of her face turned toward me.

Andrea had told me she was sixty-six years old and lived alone in San Miguel, Mexico, in a house of her own design, its walls covered in butterflies. She had traveled to China several times, always to accompany her son to ice hockey tournaments.

She had come to Black Rock City alone this year, to fulfill a wish her son had not lived to see.

Her bed was opposite mine. She slept so quietly that at night I could scarcely hear her breathe. Once, returning in the small hours and groping for something in the dark, I had tried to move without making a sound, only to hear her say, “Don’t worry about me.” She didn’t open her eyes.

Now I watched Andrea ride away into the gathering dark.

I did not call after her.

There was no cheering that night. No music. Tens of thousands encircled the Temple, just as they had the Man. But this time, the silence was deafening. Even the dragon and the lionfish seemed tamed by the immensity of the mourning. Their dazzling colors held still against the dark as they watched the timbers burst apart. The wind caught the heart of the fire, wrenched it sideways, then let go.

All those birds and beasts still shimmered before me on that final night. Yet I had already begun to watch them as one watches shooting stars: light that had set out long ago and was even now slipping away.

I looked around. Everyone I had come with was gone. I couldn’t tell when we’d parted, or where they’d gone. The crowd had dissolved into a multitude of indistinct silhouettes. Not a single face I knew.

Like a child lost in a dream, I stood where I was, afraid to move.

I had believed so fiercely that wherever I wandered, someone would find me in the dust. Yet even here, in all of Black Rock City, there were moments when no one came for me. And the very people who had taken me in on the playa had once watched the person they loved most slip beyond their reach.

Howls broke out suddenly. Beneath them, someone began to sing a lament, barely above a murmur. A few lines, then silence, as though the song were meant for someone near enough to hear.

I knew what the night wanted of me.

Tears.

I wasn’t going to oblige. I had left nothing in the Temple. The words I’d written were already at the far end of the desert, in a little wooden cottage without a door. I’d never thought the most private feelings belonged on display. Not even the Temple had the right to keep mine.

The Temple—a wooden lotus of such improbable beauty—hardly seemed real. Everyone called it the Temple. Seven days in, the word still felt foreign on my tongue. I touched its tip lightly to my upper teeth and sounded it out: temple. It was like reading aloud the salutation of a letter addressed to someone else.

Kundera wrote that kitsch draws two tears from us. The first says: Look, how moving this is. The second: How beautiful, to be moved together with all humanity.

I wanted neither. I stiffened my neck and raised my chin. Something hard was drawn tight inside my chest, pressing against me until it hurt. And yet, at that very moment, I felt a thin warmth making its slow way down my skin.

I remembered someone who had once studied my face with painstaking attention, then exclaimed, as though discovering a tiny insect:

“There’s a tear on your neck!”

Thankfully.

Though—what a pity—

Only that one.

6.

When I woke up, Andrea’s bunk across from mine was empty.

I pulled on my shoes and ran outside. The kirtan chanting from before dawn had already scattered on the wind. Our camp’s great pyramid had been stripped of its canvas skin, leaving only the bones. Not one of the elephants that had migrated across its canvas to the beat of drums the night before remained. Farther out, the towering landmark at the center of the universe had vanished, leaving a black scorch mark on the ground.

No phoenix rose from the ashes.

I tried to take it all in, as one tries to hold on to a dream upon waking. The harder you strain to remember, the faster it dissolves.

Most of the familiar faces were gone. A few figures still worked in the dust, taking the camp apart. Like butchers, they dismantled the skeletons they had raised only a week before, joint by joint.

I glanced at my phone. A message from a friend:

Left early this morning. Didn’t get to say goodbye. See you next time!

Some farewells happen before we know it. Others need never happen at all.

I crouched beside the camp’s toolbox, coiling loose lengths of nylon rope. The wind and dust had worn several of them through, leaving only short, frayed ends. I held two broken pieces together. There was no joining them; I knew that. Still, I spent a long while lining them up before winding each one separately and putting them away.

Perhaps we are all inclined to expect a certain completeness from our stories. Causes must have consequences, encounters must have reasons. We imagine that everyone who enters the scene has been planted there for something yet to come.

The Creator, unfortunately, seems to have little regard for neat stitching. Now and then, halfway through a piece of work, he simply puts down his needle and leaves the thing as it is, quite unashamed of its peculiar shape. There is a story that when the first platypus specimen arrived in Britain, naturalists took a pair of scissors to it, hunting for stitches around the bill. Surely some taxidermist was having a laugh.

There was the long-haired man with thick eyebrows who came looking for me at camp, carrying a Soulmate Questionnaire covered in my handwriting. I was hurrying to the kitchen when we met. We spoke for five minutes, politely and with every consideration, as though I were merely giving a stranger directions at a crossroads.

We got in touch again afterward, but neither of us took the conversation much further. Sometimes I think of him back in Colorado, getting on with whatever life was waiting for him there. Some threads are already too short by the time they reach your hands. I can’t say I regretted that one.

And then there was the friend who watched the Man burn with me, who wandered the playa at my side until dawn, as though we’d strayed into Before Sunrise. So many coincidences had brought us together that, for a while, I was certain fate had written the whole thing in advance. Back in the city, we did watch Before Sunrise together. But Before Sunset and Before Midnight—the other two films in the trilogy—never followed. For one reason or another, we left them unwatched.

Perhaps he had come to our meeting from a life already well underway. Perhaps I had written rather too many of his scenes for him.

So many loose ends will never be tied. Let them hang. The desert wind will give them a little sway.

7.

Back in San Francisco, I punched the numbers into the keypad by my door. A click, and it opened. Funny, how the key the little Japanese boy had given me—the one that would open every door in my life—was of no use at my own front door.

I still haven’t unpacked my backpack. It sits in plain sight in the hallway, filmed white with dust. Every time I pass, a little more shakes loose. Bit by bit, Black Rock City is leaking onto my floor.

When I lay down in bed, the soles of my feet were still cold, as though there were something beneath them.

Frozen earth.

The wasteland was frozen to the bone, its ground split open in long cuts. The scales began falling from my body again, each one bearing a word. This time I didn’t run. I crouched and gathered them, one by one. They were poisonous, hot against my fingers, burning hotter the longer I held them. Still, I turned each one over to look.

The first read Results. I’d spent half my life chasing them. Now they lay in my palm, a single little scale, lighter than I’d imagined. Beneath it were several larger ones, bright with gold. Where they had fallen, they had burned deeper holes into the earth.

I picked up Glory. It was the brightest, almost painful to look at. But when I turned it over, the other side was blank. Not a word.

Eternity was cool and slick, without a single groove. Set anything beside it, and suddenly that thing seemed too brief.

Then came Creation. Its edges were ragged, like paper cut in haste, the ink still wet enough to smear my fingers. I’d thrown it away more than once, only to turn around and go back for it.

I picked up Rescue. It curved into the shape of a hand, palm turned upward, waiting for someone to take hold. I’d stood at the edge of that cliff for years with it clenched in my fist. Holding on to it, I could go no farther.

And then Love.

It was the softest. On one side was written to love; on the other, to be loved. The two faces clung so closely together that I had never managed to peel them apart.

The scales piled up in my palm, then slipped away, mingling with earth and ash. They rose and receded like a tide. Those I held burned; those that fell cooled slowly in the soil.

I’d always thought the world had written these words upon me. Judgments or spells, I couldn’t quite tell, but surely they had come from someone else. Yet as I turned them in my hands, the handwriting began to look familiar. The ardor of that horizontal stroke, the quick flourish of that hook—I knew them. Every stroke had passed beneath my own hand. I’d traced them again and again, bearing down harder each time, until the marks were deeper than before. So deep that, eventually, I could no longer tell which scales had been planted by others and which had grown out of me.

They had grown against my skin all these years, and I had grown to fit their shape, trying to become someone worthy of the words. The closer I came, the harder they bit, fastening themselves to my flesh, refusing to let go. Taken together, these were perhaps the full weight of what I’d carried all these years.

I knew every scale.

Yet, not one bears a word for who I am now.

It began to snow. Far off, a naked figure was turning in circles in the wind. I couldn’t make out who it was. Perhaps a child who had never come home. Perhaps another version of me, in some parallel universe, who would sooner freeze to death than stop running.

The snow came down harder. She kept turning, her outline fading into the white. No one went to her.

At that moment, I wanted to take her in my arms, to brush the snow from her hair. I wondered if she would recognize me.

I rose and ran.

Each step sank deep into the snow. The cold cut into my bare soles until, after a while, I could feel nothing at all. Behind me, the snow began to melt, leaving one crooked hollow after another.

My footprints. They joined to form a word. Each step wrote another stroke; behind me, one dissolved. A word no one had ever finished writing.

I did not look back.

It wasn’t a scale. I couldn’t pick it up or carry it away. It didn’t need to last.

In that moment, to be alive meant only to be alive. Nothing else.

no one is coming.

Then I’ll go myself.

P.S.: This piece was originally written & published in Chinese and re-created in my English voice with AI assistance at certain points. If you are curious about the Chinese version, feel free to privately message me :)

All names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Where I’d Like to Be Buried

In every leaf—that trembles—In every drop—of dew—

No stone—no marker tall—

Just this green—growing sprawl

Bridal Kiss

Pure as frost, fiery as sin,

Velvet lips sear with embered skin.

She bends to kiss the night’s cold breath,

A bloom of love, a bloom of death.

In darkness, the bride waits,

her vow begins—

the under world calls

where light thins.

Heart of the Forest

Afloat, pulsing, red—

a secret they promise not to spread:

Born of neither light nor name,

the specter comes alive to claim.

And those who gaze upon its grace,

shall find no solace in any place.

For in this heart, the ancient forest

wakes,

and every soul it touches,

takes.

Beneath Midnight Waters

A flicker of silence,  

slipping like a whisper between the teeth  

of orchids, their scales  

peeling moonlight in the hush  

of blue glass.

A keeper of a shrine once told me:  

we bury our gods in bowls,  

and here, beneath the waters,  

they swim, petals & fins,  

throats full of secrets.

I watch them bloom.  

A mouth opens, like an apology,  

but the apology never comes—  

only light, only this  

brief resurrection  

where they turn, iridescent & fragile  

as prayers, their bodies  

bent like reeds  

around an invisible current.

They forget  

their names,  

& I forget the sound  

of mine.

So we are here,  

among reflections,  

each ripple a gesture of mercy  

I can’t understand.

But I see them still,  

the orchids,  

their mouths pink & wild,  

swimming circles  

beneath midnight waters—  

bright, unbroken  

& reaching for the edge  

of something they’ve never seen.

Sputnik Sweetheart

A sigh

unspoken,

where

s t a r s

lie

broken.

One Breath

What is the love language of touch

if not the memory of falling?

Our petals—moonlit pages of an unwritten promise:

When the wind comes, & it will come,

we'll carry each other's ghosts,

we’ll sway, shiver, not as two,

but as one breath, as

one trembling vein.

Bound not by choice, but

by the gossamer thread of

Fate, spun from our own silk.

We wait, as flowers do,

leaning on each other’s

last breath.

That initial stab of pain, sharp and insistent, caught me off guard like the sudden recognition of a childhood haunt. My fingers scrabbled at the worn-out edge of the examination table as the endoscope plunged in and rampaged inside my body like a bull’s horn. 

"It's okay, ah, it's okay." I murmured through gritted teeth—a mantra, reliably as ever, for the girl I was ten years ago in this same hometown hospital, and for the woman I'd become in lands far from here. 

A young nurse sat nearby, her eyes fixed on the computer screen where my insides were laid bare in stark black and white. "Try to relax,” she said, her voice carrying the lilting tones of a familiar dialect I never learned to speak fluently. "The more tense you are, the more it hurts. Take deep breaths." 

My eyes darted to her hand, steady and sure on the keyboard. Before I could think, my arm had reached out, fingers intertwining with hers like a drowning person grasping at a lifeline. She looked at me, surprise flickering across her face before it settled back into professional composure.

"Don't move, okay?" the nurse cautioned, gently extricating her hand from mine. "Dr. Su is examining you now. She's very experienced".  Her fingers, cool and impersonal, brushed against my side. I suppressed a shiver, not from cold, but from the strange intimacy of it all.

Suddenly, the thought of others intruded—countless others. Not in some grand, philosophical way, but in the most flesh-and-bone manner that viscerally resonated. I imagined people in hospital rooms across the city, across the country, even: Some in prolonged battles against their aches that had become unwelcome companions, others facing down their final moment with whatever momentary strength they could muster. 

What went through their minds, I wondered, in those long hours when the clock seems frozen and the night stretches on? Did they find themselves reaching out, almost unconsciously, for someone who wasn't there? A mother long gone, perhaps, or a lover estranged? I thought of hands then - weathered ones, soft ones, ones bearing the marks of work or illness. How interesting that in moments of weakness, we might all be reduced to children again, wanting nothing more than to have our hand held. 

It wasn't a comfort exactly, this connection I felt. More like a sudden awareness of a world beyond my own discomfort, a world filled with ordinary people who, like me, might be surprised by their own vulnerability in the face of it all.

Dr. Su's voice cut through the haze. "Look here," she pinpointed for others in the room, "They are indeed growing. They aren’t big, though. Nothing to worry about, my dear. We’ll schedule you for surgery tomorrow. " Her tone carried a peculiar mix of clinical precision and homegrown warmth, like a judge delivering a lenient sentence.

Relief washed over me, but it was quickly followed by a startling realization: this cellular rebellion within me? It was me. The me from years ago, packing my bags and leaving Jinan behind without a backward glance. The me who decided that the path laid out here wasn't the one I wanted. And now, drawn back by my body's protest, I found myself where it all began—yet ironically, already planning my next move. 

"How old are you, dear?" Dr. Su asked as she maneuvered the probe inside me. 

"Ouch... twenty...twenty five..." The words escaped me in stutters as if embarrassed by themselves. 

"Such a big guī nü,” a nurse teased, with the old-fashioned endearment exclusive to those who grew up in northern China—guī nü (闺女), meaning 'innocent, young woman'. 

"Indeed. I thought she was barely eighteen, carrying on like this.." Dr. Su agreed, laughing along. 

Their chuckle wrapped me around with an unexpected comfort like the well-worn cotton quilt my grandmother stitched many winters ago. I made a face.  

Soon as I stepped out, I discovered my mother had been a silent sentinel outside the door. Her eyes, wide with concern, searched my face. "Was it very painful?" she asked, her voice tight with worry.

"Mm, just a bit," I stated matter-of-factly, arms crossing my chest like a shield.

"How long did it hurt? Is it still hurting? Did the doctor damage something inside you?" The rapid-fire questions tumbled out, each one laden with pressing anxiety.

"Not at all. It was very brief."

"I heard you cry out from outside, and it worried me so much..." Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. 

I couldn’t help but pull her into an embrace. She felt small in my arms, her shoulder just reaching my chest. 

"Look at you," I said awkwardly, patting her back, "worrying over nothing."

I shared the nurse's surprised reaction to my actual age. Mother laughed through her tears, saying, "That's because they don't know we have always treated you like you're fifteen." She paused, then added, "Even your grandmother, who's over eighty, still fears injections. She cries like a child every time."

The image struck me then: my elderly grandmother, her skin like tissue paper left for too long in the sun, curled into herself, more fragile than the child she once was, her daughter—my mother—becoming a mother to her own mother. 

Perhaps we never truly outgrow our vulnerabilities, I thought. We just learn to hide them better until we can’t anymore.

Mother reached into her bag, pulling out a chocolate bar. "Do you want some?" 

I nodded, but as I reached for it, she pulled back. "Don't move, your hands are dirty. I'll feed you."

She carefully tore open the packaging along the serrated edge, squeezed out the first piece, and brought it to my lips. I frowned, dodging my head slightly. "I can eat by myself," I insisted, despite her dismissal, "I won't touch it with my hands."

The chocolate melted on my tongue, its sweetness suddenly at odds with the acrid smell wafting from the nearby toilet. At that moment, I saw the candy's journey - silky smooth as it slid down my throat, only to dissolve into a formless mush in my stomach. Unbidden, an image flashed through my mind: Kobayashi Eitaku's 19th-century scroll, "Nine Stages of Decay." It depicted the decomposing corpse of the beautiful Empress Danrin, her body abandoned in the wilderness per her final edict—a stark lesson in impermanence for her beloved countrymen to learn.

I imagined passersby confronting the Empress’s body. Once coveted by courtiers, her flesh swelled and purpled, decayed and liquefied. In my mind's eye, insects and beasts tore at her with the same fervor her admirers once gazed upon her face, her bones scattered like discarded love letters, until even dust forgot her name. The visceral imagery clung to me, as sticky as the chocolate on my teeth.

An elderly lady shuffled past in the corridor. Her gaze lingered on me before shifting to my mother. "Your little girl is quite pretty," she remarked with a friendly smile, then gestured towards her own mouth. "Oh, what's that she's eating?"

"Come here," Mother murmured, leaning in. "Let me wipe your mouth."

I jerked away, "It's fine, I can wipe it myself."

"Let me do it," Mother insisted, her hand hovering. "You don't know how to clean after yourself. There's still some, look, here."

"Ma, I said I'll do it myself!" The words burst out. 

Mother's hand froze, her head tilted, brows knotting together. She turned and walked away, anger and frustration etched in the stiffness of her shoulders.

In that moment, as in countless others, I felt the ever-growing force of her near-obsessive need to shape me—as maternal as it was desperate. And beneath that surged a tide so strong that it threatened to sweep both of us away.

How could I explain to my mother that I had already been shaped, for better or worse, by forces beyond her womb and her home, by experiences she could never have imagined for me? That I had been carved by rivers she had never waded? That I had been kissed by words in languages she hadn’t learned? That strangers had left lasting marks on my soul in manners the tight grip of her tending hands could not? That I’d discovered and lost treasures she didn’t even know existed? 

How could I make her see that the fifteen-year-old daughter she had in mind was only the phantom of a version of her own past? 

I drifted to the elevator, my gaze drawn to the window. Late summer rain had been falling incessantly, its rhythm an inconsistent percussion against the glass. Rumors of an impending typhoon hung in the air, as lingering as the humidity that clung to my skin. The damp chill, though a respite from midsummer's swelter, brought no vigor—only a pervasive stickiness that seemed to seep into my very bones. I really do dislike rainy days, I mused.

As if plucking the thought from my mind, mother pulled away, composing herself. "When you go to Seattle for graduate school this fall," she intoned, her voice low and portentous, like a fortune-teller divining an ominous future, "It'll be weather like this every day."

She was right. If recovery went well, in a month or so, I'd be in America again for my second degree. The rain in Seattle would be different, though. The rain there would be a constant companion, a lingering mist rather than the thunderous downpour in Jinan. 

I envisioned that faceless city across the vast Pacific, waiting to enfold me in the waning days of 2019. Would my hard-earned savings in the past two years and the school’s benevolent fellowship prove wiser investments this time around, with valued credentials like “Engineering” and “MSc” stamped on my degree instead of the scarlet letters of the Arts?

Would I rightfully earn my spot somewhere in the gleaming towers of tech giants, arduously scribbling my story in bits and pixels?  Or would I, like the omnipresent rain, slowly dissolve into something vague, something indistinguishable from the evergreen blur of the Pacific Northwest?

How strange, I thought, to grieve for a future that hadn't yet betrayed me.

"You'll be in a lot of pain after the surgery tomorrow," Mother’s litany of forebodings brought me back to reality, her anxiety weighing in on my shoulders like a familiar blanket. "You won't be able to do anything for days," she emphasized.  

"You've got to be careful on rainy days." Father's voice joined as he lowered himself into a chair. He fished out his old Huawei, the screen flickering to life with a video compilation of electric shock accidents on rain-slicked streets: Perfectly healthy people, their lives snuffed out by a simple touch of an electric pole, collapsing into puddles like marionettes with cut strings. Dad peered through his reading glasses, head tilted back, fingers fumbling with the digital screen.

"Your Baba really looks like an old man now," Mother remarked, her tone that of a slightly disgruntled policewoman who caught Time itself in some petty crime.

San Francisco's open secret is that it shelters those who don't quite belong anywhere. But there are two kinds. By day, the streets bustle with people who choose to drift between places. By night, the same streets fill with those who have nothing left but to drift between places. The former reassures me with a semblance of human agency that tantalizes, and the latter threatens me with the raw truth of an unforgiving jungle stripped bare.

You notice the night drifters most easily in February, the rare time around the year when San Francisco decides to indulge in rain. Like a prisoner granted reprieve from a year-long restraint, the rain hesitates to go back, its continuous kisses cracking open the earth, where shades of green—fresh, old, deep, light—gush out, their boundaries dissolving in the misty air. However, as if dreading the punishment from violating an unspoken curfew, everyone unanimously retreats to their own enclaves before it even gets dark—Neighbors hurriedly draw their curtains, cars huddle under covers, and birds feign sleep.

The endless rain dilutes even the strongest bonds.

That’s when the entire city gives its way to the night drifters. In the emptiness of night, their silhouettes emerge ever more clearly in assorted postures. Some push broken shopping carts, others haul sacks over their shoulders, and a few march forward, wrapped in tattered blankets. They pass by my window—silent, screaming, limping, pacing back and forth, or scanning their surroundings. 

They are people, yet at times they resemble anything but, depending on the temperature, the court rulings or the reach of essential services. Year-round, they drift like cottonwood seeds, swept away by the whims of enforcement officers. On a cold, rainy day, they hop on and off buses like community cats seeking refuge in their mobile sanctuaries, waiting for the sun, seemingly believing a nap under its glow could revive them. Yet, most of the time, they silently endure like shade-tolerant plants in damp, dark places—under the Bay Bridge, behind the bushes of Golden Gate Park, in the crevices of Mission District alleyways, in the most resource-savvy movements of vulnerability—the pushing of syringes with shaky hands, the orange glow flickering against cracked skin, the hazy eyes searching the ground for something unseen.

I think of these night drifters whenever I move. I moved more than 20 times in my 20s, sometimes because I had to, more often because I wanted to.

These migrations have finely attuned my senses to credit scores and age buckets, to moments of being let in and moments of being left out, to first times and last times, to what kind of door will close forever, to what kind of person will never see me again, whether someone somewhere wants to leave me better or worse than they found me. I've also mastered the art of not showing up for endings—endings of things I cherished: the end credits, the departing trains, the last shots, the final days. If I don’t participate in its end, then it never ends for me—it is always beginning, always ongoing.

It is in the midst of this drifting existence, I remember a distinct figure I saw on a February night.

I was working at my desk by the window when I noticed a figure pulling a tattered cart through the dim lamplight on the pavement outside. He lifted his head, looking toward the only source of light — my room — but didn't stop walking. Under his messy hair, I saw the eyes of a young man, which met mine for less than a second: The intense glare in his eyes pierced through the misty night, striking me with a painful clarity, an unbearably strong yearning that made me flinch a little. 

I saw this kind of young gaze before I moved to San Francisco. During the long winter of the Covid lockdown, I was living alone in U-District in Seattle as a broke graduate student without any source of income or a driver’s license, though, technically I had a roommate, but she was perpetually at her boyfriend’s place, whom she had found on the dating app everyone despises six months into quarantine and successfully convinced herself to fall in love with. Back then, my weekly grocery run to the Trader Joe’s a few blocks away became one of my few excuses for inmate yard time. Treating each step out of my apartment door as a ceremonious journey, I took the time to savor every detail around me.

It was then I noticed the tent nestled in the indented corner of the exterior wall next to Trader Joe’s. On a deserted street perpetually shrouded in misty drizzle, the crumpled blue fabric of the tent wove into the gray concrete on its two sides, making me feel as though I were walking through a poorly photoshopped dreamcore screenshot. Yet, its persistent stance became a reassuring sight of companionship over time. I peered into the tent a few times, trying my best to hide my attempt, like a child sneaking a peek at a forbidden site, both curious and anxious for the scene awaiting me.

To my surprise, I saw piles and piles of paperback books huddling together, forming an additional layer of enclosure that successfully shielded the tent’s inhabitant. I caught the names of a few trending and classic fantasy series—Tolkien, Martin, Rowling—before my lingering gaze became too shameful to sustain. Though I fled, the scene took me back to my childhood days, when, without a smartphone or wifi, I would always carry a few books with me. They were my shield against the awkward silences of playground politics, my companions during lunch breaks spent alone on the bench when other kids at the dining hall brandished sticks at me until I ran away.

I imagined the kind of person who would carve out a niche fortress of books like that among the various encampment styles in American cities I was beginning to acquaint myself with, like countercultural scenes from third-rate post-punk MVs. There was no such scene on the streets of China, after all. If "being homeless" is a lifestyle that varies by region, I wondered whether this person would have fared better in the small town of my undergraduate college in western Massachusetts compared to the Trader Joe's corner in Seattle.

Back in undergrad, I often ran into a man named George in his 50s at our school library open to all. He was always reading a book or browsing on the public computer. George was among the last to leave, lingering until the closing time when the front desk staff came to kick us out. I recognized him because he slept at the homeless shelter where I volunteered. He told me his family was in Cape Verde, in West Africa. His story is one of a shattered American dream echoing that of many other ambitious chasers. He came here for college in the 80s, only to be ensnared by the plot twists of a foreign land—lost jobs, mounting debts, a health crisis and broken relationships, one thing after another, all of a sudden, nothing was left. Sometimes, when I raced from the library back to my dorm in the freezing wind chills of New England, I imagined George slowly making his way back to the shelter. How would he defend himself against the long nights? Did he ever have anyone to share his thoughts on his readings with? I quickly cut my stray thoughts short—I realized I wasn’t in a position to imagine. If anything, I tend to imagine too much for anyone’s good.

When I got back home from Trader Joe’s that day, I texted my friends about the corner, asking if I should approach the person camping there and offer a small gift, just to say hi. I was nervous and scared. I've always been the kind of woman who avoids eye contact when walking alone, who calls an Uber instead of taking the ten-minute walk home after sunset, so long as the cost fits within my monthly budget. I'd brush it off, saying I didn't want to brave the cold, when my tall male friends innocently suggested I could just walk. I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s mood by recounting the time I was hurled racial slurs and almost run over by an anti-Asian stalker driver in broad daylight, or the time I was knocked down from behind, assaulted, and had my favorite blouse torn. I’ve learned to not to be that character in a cringe comedy who can't grasp social cues and ends up oversharing, only to find herself playing her own supportive audience by forcing awkward laughs to fill the uncomfortable silences.

That said, with my friends' step-by-step remote emotional support online, I finally bought a bunch of bananas from Trader Joe’s. I bent my back, handed them to the unknown shadow, took a deep breath, and spoke in a voice like a nature photographer coaxing a critter out of its cave, “Excuse me?”

I waited for a few seconds that felt like an entire quarantine lockdown to see a face cautiously pop out from behind the fortress—it was the face a young guy, no more than early 20s, with tousled blonde hair framing a face so fresh it could have graced the cover of a hipster band's album. His blue eyes met mine, locking onto me with a silent yet expressively clear gaze that could sting like a bee. I felt a fleeting, sharp pain, soon diluted by the stink in the air.

I asked, “Would you like some bananas?” He replied flatly, “Sure, thank you.” I put the bananas down and fled the scene.

When I got back home, I downloaded an app called Samaritan that claims to put a face to the homeless scene in Seattle by documenting people’s stories. With the frenzy of a stalker trying to dox her anonymous mutual online, I searched through the catalog, hoping to discovering something about this guy. But I didn’t see anything remotely similar. I realized I didn’t even know his name.

His tent remained there through most of the winter. Then one day in spring, I saw him again at a traffic intersection on my way home after getting my first vaccine shot. He didn’t notice me. He was dully pushing forward a shopping cart filled with all his belongings. There were no books in the pile this time. He wore a stern frown, as if displeased with something fundamental about his world, a realm no one else could penetrate.

That was the last time I saw him. I never discovered where his books went before he disappeared.

A year later, I left, too.

Around me, people popped up like alerts on a phone screen, magnetically sorting themselves into circles of varied levels of relevancy to the Silicon Valley book of ambitious scheming: moving to New York, starting an AI company, scouting for a VC, writing Substack essays, exploring polyamorous romance, pondering about AI and philosophy, going on a wellness retreat, yada yada.

Amidst the buzz, there I was sprawled on my mat, soaking up the sun like a lizard on a rock. Overwhelmed—or more accurately, tired from another iteration of the merry-go-round of delivering my life story ™️ to an ever-changing cast of characters who flaunt conversational skills like well-trained athletes for an olympic sport called authentic relating—I retreated to my phone, diving into a bookmarked essay as if it were a life raft.

Just then, she appeared.

She sat across from me and helped herself to some snacks. Without a word, our eyes met briefly, like two dogs sniffing and acknowledging each other. Neither of us said a single word, as if we were both too seasoned in park social etiquette to bother with the unnecessary formalities of human greeting. In that moment, there was perhaps a mutual appreciation for the unspoken consensus to coexist distantly.

In the next hour or so, I overheard her weave in and out of conversations nearby like a humming bird sampling a meadow. I couldn’t help but notice how every laugh sent her brown curls into subtle oscillations, like a thicket of ferns caught in a breeze. Her appearance was deceivingly delicate, for when she spoke, her voice was a husky echo tinged with a sense of cool, tomboyish nonchalance.

We existed separately together, until when I flipped over to stretch my neck. She seemed to find herself in a lull, too. She turned towards me. Our eyes locked.

She said gently and casually, “By the way, I think I like you the best.”

It was said with the ease and simplicity of someone commenting on today’s weather—an observation made in passing that didn’t seem to even necessitate a response.

Throughout my life, I’ve received all kinds of attention and affirmations from people. They have rewarded my grades, praised my sense of style and complimented the originality of my creativity. They’ve appreciated how I smooth over others’ rough emotional edges, noted my attempt to align my actions to a moral compass and encouraged my acts of service. They’ve laughed at my jokes and jolly, enjoyed my body, and even gotten a kick out of my odd collection of hobbies. And I’ve always tried my best to live up to these expectations. Like a clay donkey tethered to a potter's wheel, I mold the contours of my being amidst the push-and-pull between the insistent touch of others' hands and the guiding force of my own spinning will.

But there she was, a stranger who I shared nothing but an hour of my silent presence with, telling me in our fleeting exchange of a glance and a gesture before disappearing into the crowd, that she likes me just as I am.

You don’t have to do or be anything special, you don’t have to feel successful, look gorgeous, sound funny or show up selflessly. Of all these people, I like you the best.

You just need to be yourself and I like you the best.

May 3rd, 2024

1.

I pushed through the iron gate, the creak echoing off the stairwell's worn walls like a familiar greeting. Ahead, silhouettes of a man and a woman were inching down the stairs, leaning on each other more than the shaky handrail. The hallway's dim light seemed to soak into the man’s weathered skin, giving him a twilight glow.

I recognized the man—Old Gao, and next to him, Fangfang, her arm hooked around his. Despite Fangfang looking three times as big as Old Gao, there was something almost childlike in her dependence on him.

They both waited in place, as I slipped past with a murmured "Excuse me," barely louder than the shuffle of my feet.

The door on the second floor, perpetually left open, led me into a starkly bright world. It was a contrast to the stairwell's gloom, the kind of place that seemed too clean for its own good. Little Wei and Little Zhu were already at work, their movements a silent ballet across the checkerboard floor.

Old Meng was the calm epicenter. His phone conversation as a receptionist was a one-sided mumble that somehow felt as comforting as the worn sofa in the corner. When I asked about getting a massage, his "ah yes, no problem" was delivered with an accent thick enough to chew on. He moved to ready the bed with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this a thousand times before.

“Just now in the stairway I ran into…” I nearly brought up Old Gao and Fangfang, but then it hit me—we'd never officially introduced ourselves. Their names had just trickled into my ears from the chatter of the masseurs I eavesdropped on.

"Ah, they've gone out for veggies. After nine, the market slashes prices on leftovers, a real steal," Old Meng caught on quick. As he spoke, he stumbled over a stool—not tucked away under the bed as it should have been, but standing defiantly in his path.

"Watch out…" I blamed myself for not noticing sooner. But then, it wasn't entirely on me. The masseurs' ease with this space often made me forget their blindness.

They seemed to have tamed the space around them: the neatly hung white sheets, the dishes dripping dry on the rack, the thermos bubbling quietly on the counter. Everything stayed put, like well-disciplined guards waiting for command.

I rushed to smooth a corner of the bedsheet before Old Meng, bending down to slip off my shoes.

As I lay there, Little Wei suddenly turned his head, “Isn’t this the young lady who speaks so slowly?”

Little Wei hailed from Shanxi, about 30 in age, with a buzz cut and a big smile. His thick eyebrows and wide eyes, paired with that expansive grin, made him bloom like a sudden, awkward flower. What set Little Wei apart wasn’t just his looks but his eyes, which, unlike the others, seemed to take in everything with a clarity that belied his blind condition.

The first time I met him, I mistook him for someone who could see as well as I could. Gathering my courage, I had asked him, "Can you see?"

The room erupted in laughter. Old Gao joked, "He's a phony, sneaked in here, kick him out!" Little Wei joined in, "Guaranteed authentic, want to see my blind man's ID card?" He teased, pretending to search his pocket.

"Ah, no need, it just seems like you're looking..." I said, a bit embarrassed but smiling.

He explained, "I have retinitis pigmentosa. Can't see much in the dark, but in the light, I can make out the basics. You’re wearing a long coat, right? Hair to your shoulders?"

Later, curiosity got the better of me, and I looked it up. It turned out to be an eye condition without a cure, one that wouldn’t alter his appearance. It starts with night blindness, and over the years, vision fades away, like leaves dropping with the arrival of autumn.

"Hmm…You popped in here two Fridays back, right around nine at night. Little Zhu worked on you for a solid half-hour," Little Wei concluded his recall as if he had a calendar tattooed on his brain.

"Right, you have an amazing memory," I responded, face down on the massage bed. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and today, a migraine was doing its best to drill through my temples.

"The timer starts now, 60 minutes to go," declared Old Meng's phone.

The blind often max out the speed of their text-to-speech software, warping every message into an auditory blur. To decode it, you have to trade in some of God's other gifts—seeing, for instance.

Old Meng's hands skillfully navigated my neck and shoulders, kneading my muscles and bones with a precision that struck the perfect balance between firmness and gentleness. Those hands, weary from years of toil, resembled a carpenter's tools, occasionally creaking at the joints. Only when they were on the verge of collapse were they briefly set aside for a hasty mend, only to resume their devoted service.

I let his hands guide the dance of my neural network, feeling the points of tension in my body pulse with pain before melting away like effervescence in hot water. It grounded me, more than I cared to acknowledge.

If someone were peering up from underneath the massage table at that instant, they would witness my face contorting in sync with the cadence of Old Meng's wrist movements.

Was this raw, entangled mess of flesh closer to or farther from the kind of beauty I aspired to embody?

2.

"Ow, take it easy, would you? You're turning my grimace into a permanent feature," the male client grumbled from beneath Little Wei's expert hands.

"All part of the service," Little Wei shot back, slapping on the cupping jars with a magician's flair.

"Great, I already started off ugly, and now I'm entering a whole new league of hideous."

"Well, it's not like anybody here can see you."

"Jokes aside, I've got to find a wife somehow."

"Best of luck with that."

"And you? Your turn."

"Me? Oh, same old bachelor, my friend."

"You know, you could try your luck with Russian hotties in the Northeast, right by the border. Or snag yourself a Vietnamese bride—affordable, supposedly sub, and they cook great meals..."

"If she's happy cooking for herself, that's good enough for me," Little Wei countered.

"Why not take a leap then?"

"Some things you just can't rush."

"Ouch... okay, maybe a tad gentler."

"I've been thinking, maybe I'll head south with Old Gao next year, try our luck, see what Guangdong has to offer..."

"Ow, take it easy, would you? You're turning my grimace into a permanent feature," the male client grumbled from beneath Little Wei's expert hands, his tone one of gruff camaraderie typical of men who've shared more than a few laughs.

"All part of the service," Little Wei shot back, slapping on the cupping jars with a magician's flair.

"Great, I already started off ugly, and now I'm entering a whole new league of hideous."

"Well, it's not like anybody here can see you."

"Jokes aside, I've got to find a wife somehow."

"Best of luck with that."

"And you? Your turn."

"Me? Oh, same old bachelor, my friend."

"You know, you could try your luck with Russian hotties in the Northeast, right by the border. Or snag yourself a Vietnamese bride—affordable, supposedly sub, and they cook great meals..."

"If she's happy cooking for herself, that's good enough for me," Little Wei countered, his tone as dry as the Gobi.

"Why not take a leap then?"

"Some things you just can't rush."

"Ouch... okay, maybe a tad gentler."

"I've been thinking, maybe I'll head south with Old Gao next year, try our luck, see what Guangdong has to offer..."

Their back-and-forth kept rolling, easy and familiar. It was like I’d accidentally walked into a living, breathing scene of a Charles Dickens’ rendition of a massage parlor tucked away in the corner of modern Beijing—except nobody was asking for more gruel, and the only thing thick in the air was the scent of medicinal oils and the sound of banter. There I was, stealing a glance into their world through the looking glass, feeling both completely a part of and outside it.

Gradually, under Old Meng's skilled ministrations, the tightness in my muscles began to yield, the piercing edge of my headache blurring into a gentle lull. My thoughts, once sharp and focused, now adrift on the nocturnal current like paper lanterns dissolving into a dream…

3.

Every couple of months, Lili was swept away into the same dream—sometimes it was the Milky Way stretching across the sky, other times it was some unknown marvel. These entities, so alien and incomprehensible, enveloped her in an emotion that felt almost otherworldly.

Last week, she found herself once again wandering under that star-filled canopy in her dreams. The next morning, she shared this with Jackie, who remarked that the pursuit of such emotions might just be the most worthy human endeavor of all. Jackie then shared his own dream—a serene vision of ascending a forested mountain to a vast green plain, where a quaint university lay, stretching to the foot of a distant, taller peak.

Jackie's dream mirrored his temperament—calm and deep. Lili, however, craved something different: a kind of holy chaos in her chest, a fleeting divine revelation that faded with the break of dawn. The next day, she returned to her steel and concrete life, merging into the sea of faces at the office, her days reduced to keystrokes and screen glare. In this synthetic realm, the visceral stirrings of her heart grew fainter, leaving behind nothing but their hollowed-out shells.

She thought about how each generation had its unique burdens to bear, and wondered if this was the price her time demanded. Yet, this duty was paradoxically sculpted into a privilege—desperately coveted yet out of reach for many, which meant she ought to take care of it.

And what, then, did she become?

Her thoughts, actions, even her dreams were not solely her own. They echoed the collective psyche of those who shared her era. She was but one among many, like worker bees from the same hive, indistinct yet integral. Even this idea, it seemed, wasn’t hers alone.

How many out there can truly claim their voice as something of their own?

4.

"How many for you? I got twelve today," Old Meng asked Little Wei.

"Ten, just one more to go," Little Wei responded.

"I'm at one... plus four, and..." Little Zhu seemed to hesitate.

"Ah, make that nine and a half for you, I've kept count," Little Wei chimed in.

"Oh, aren't you something," Little Zhu giggled.

"Your brain's never been much use, better leave the counting to me and Old Meng," Little Wei teased her further.

"You're... really annoying..." Little Zhu pretended to be upset.

In the glow of these brightly illuminated rooms, their hours unfurled—segmented into halves, wholes, and one-and-a-halves. Day melded into day, often weaving into uninterrupted weeks.

What a magnificent and resilient creature is human—to confront time and mark their distinctions within it as such!

5.

The wind, howling like a beast trapped against the confines of its cage, marks its presence with a distinctive rhythm, "boom... boom..." against the window glass.

"The wind's fierce tonight," Old Meng remarked, a note of concern in his voice,"You live close by, right?”

"Just in the next neighborhood over," I replied.

"That's not too bad then," Old Meng noted.

"Going to be colder tomorrow, dropping to more than ten degrees below," mentioned Little Zhu, rolling up a bedsheet and hugging it to her chest as her client departed.

"It's the dry kind of cold, no snow," Little Wei added, absorbed in his phone.

"Yeah, no snow last year in Beijing either."

6.

On her trek home from work, Lili came up with a peculiar tactic against the biting windchill: she walked backwards, her neck tucked in like a turtle, moving with quick, tiny steps. But not having her access card, which probably went AWOL along with her lease somewhere in her apartment, meant she often had to hang around the locked gate, waiting to tailgate someone inside.

Losing stuff seemed part of her DNA, but she’d gotten pretty good at not letting it bug her too much. She had a laid-back way of dealing with daily life, sometimes skipping the toothbrushing ritual, not bothering to shave, ignoring the latest on tax laws, and sitting out the shopping madness on Singles' Day. This deliberately nonchalant attitude had its downsides, notably those end-of-the-month moments, her cash flow dwindling, where she subsisted on a spartan diet of buns and porridge.

Her phone, buried somewhere under the bed, kept buzzing with WeChat messages, likely from her dad since she was terrible at remembering to check them. The last time he called, it was late, and his voice was thick with booze, "Just checking in on you," he said. When he heard cars in the background, he got all worried, "Why are you still out?"

"Just wrapped up a dinner party at a friend’s place," she lied, not mentioning that she had missed the last bus after her night shift and decided to hoof it home instead.

7.

"I'll fei jia (return home fat) by the 25th," Little Zhu just finished another shift, shuffling to an adjacent empty bed for a quick break. Her accent blurred her pronunciation of “fei”, meaning “fat” in Mandarin, and “hui”, meaning “return”, endearing in its quirks.

"What are you bringing home for your son?" Old Meng inquired.

"A new Huawei phone."

"Didn't you just send one back recently?"

"Yeah, but the kid turned around and gave it away."

"To whom?"

"Who else but a girl."

"Look at him, already hustling to find you a daughter-in-law at such a young age!"

"Well, he's just in junior high and I only see him twice a year. Talking to him over the phone is no use," she laughed it off.

8.

Lili last saw grandma in the summer past. Grandma’s physical state had declared a truce with most outdoor activities. Despite the stifling heat, the slightest cool breeze brought discomfort. She'd sit on the living room mat, head bowed, in a silent, stubborn resistance against temperature and time. Yet, Grandma seemed unbothered.

"How have you been?" Lili asked on her last visit.

"Oh, my life's a breeze! My day's filled with four things: listening to the radio, watching TV, eating, and sleeping," grandma laughed heartily.

On the dining table, a small pot of rapeseed, an orange, and a stack of biscuits were arranged neatly.

"Why are these here?" Lili asked, picking up the orange.

Grandma glanced at the table, lips pursed, "What do you think?"

Following grandma’s gaze, Lili saw the framed photo of grandma and her late grandpa on the wall.

"He's done with his meal; take it if you like..." Grandma set the orange back down. "When your dad's not around, it gets lonely eating by myself. So, I talk to him. 'Old Shen, you want some of this eggplant? If not, I'll eat it myself...'" Grandma mumbled.

Lili hugged grandma, the down of her grandma’s vest pressing against her, the scent of earth mingled with grease wrapping around them like a shawl.

"Back then, your grandpa used to hold you just like this. You were so tiny, perched on his lap, feels like it was just yesterday..."

Lili wanted to say something, but couldn’t make a sound.

"Hey, Lili, I know you might not want to hear this," grandma began cautiously, "but I have this wish left..."

"I know," she cut in, removing her glasses to wipe them on her shirt.

"Just be true to yourself,” grandma spoke gently, as if comforting a child, “That's all your mother would have wished for too."

She held Grandma tighter. The radio continued its broadcast, a clear female voice declaring, "Now, let's discuss some health tips for the elderly...don’t forget to claim your free vitamins…"

Lili found herself pondering, not without a touch of irony, on the paradoxical nature of "nostalgia"—a sentiment that necessitates, rather than removes, distance. Like starlight reaching across vast stretches of time to touch us, nostalgia’s glow is felt more keenly only through a distance that must be left unclosed.

She had long moved beyond the naive belief that what she possessed would remain forever hers. Yet, she also refused to acquiesce to the art of letting go—a practice of intentional, sustained detachment that she chose to not cultivate. Like a cat chasing its tail, she opted to cling to the vestiges of sentiments.

9.

Kai never felt more beyond Lili’s grasp than he was when she last saw him three years ago, across the dimly lit confines of a whiskey bar in Tribeca.

"I'm thinking... of going back home next month." Lili’s words emerged hesitantly, each edging her closer to the brink of an ominous revelation.

"Hmm, maybe back home you'll find opportunities better suited for you. I trust your decision; you're going to do great." Kai responded, locking eyes with her, his gaze tinged with a fatigue she hadn't noticed before.

In that moment, his answer became clear to her.

She looked away, her fingers restlessly twisting a receipt. Whiskey was never her drink of choice.

"I'm planning to quit after this deal is closed," Kai revealed, gently prying the receipt from her grasp, his fingers briefly caressing hers.

"And then?" She asked, her voice quivering slightly as she met his gaze again.

"I've decided on robotics," he declared.

How had I missed this? It was so characteristic of him... She thought to herself. A wave of realization washed over her.

"Really? What's your plan?" She endeavored to maintain the dialogue, clinging to the thread of their conversation.

"I've been reaching out to a few professors. Remember George? We met him at last year's reunion. His advisor," he elaborated, shedding his suit jacket to drape it over the chair back. "I've been reading his papers, getting up to speed on the subject..." His words began to fade into a blur as a dull ache started to throb at her temples.

A memory from ten years ago surfaced, when they were both students: Morning sunlight seeped through the dorm curtains, casting a halo around Kai's freshly showered hair. He sat cross-legged in front of his computer, his voice rich with passion as he mimicked Dr. Alfred Lanning's gravelly tone: "There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code that have grouped together(…) even the nature of what we might call the soul..." Observing his side face then, she felt a blend of delight and despair, knowing even at that moment he wielded a power over her happiness.

Now, Kai’s gaze held that same mesmerizing quality, yet it seemed to traverse through her, reaching out to a distant point in the space.

"Off to conquer new worlds of geekdom, huh? Your clients will for sure be thrilled to hear that." She quipped, the playful challenge in her tone failing to mask the sadness tugging at her smile.

Once the truth had been laid bare, all else felt like mere stalling. It became apparent; she was the one asking, and Kai, examining her face where a sense of childlike earnestness flickered in the candlelight, seemed to appraise an oil painting on the verge of decay.

From the start, he had been hooked by this very look on her face. In trading their shared years for the dramatic allure of this story, he consistently emerged victorious.

"I'm sorry," Kai said, his hand enveloping hers, his fingers as precise and orderly as a row of elegantly trimmed hedge.

Even his ruthlessness had a grace to it, she thought.

Her tears quietly streamed down. She understood that her playful defiance had lost its old potency for him, its ability to wound and exhilarate in equal measure.

After all, the tenderness of a man’s indulgence is a privilege reserved for the naiveté of young love, isn’t it?

In her mind's eye, she pictured how Kai might see her now: turned away, gazing out the window, swallowing her sobs. Dark circles under her eyes and the fine lines at their corners stood out more prominently, like a balloon slightly deflated by the passage of time, its surface beginning to crease.

This surely wasn't the vision of beauty he held dear, was it?

He was a blend of intelligence and cunning, powered by an unapologetic desire for more, with even his frustrations fueling part of his ever-grander ambitions. He never viewed his achievements as endpoints; rather, when one game ceased to intrigue him, he moved eagerly to the next. Each conquest he made was like another block laid in a foundation built on solid reason, ascending waywardly towards poetic grandeur.

And her? She wandered through the labyrinth of life with a mind that fluttered like a moth against the glass, seeking the light of deeper truths yet finding herself trapped within the confines of her own reflections. Where he moved with the might of a pirate ship cutting through the sea towards its next port, her course was a poem composed in the whispers of the wind, her ambitions not carved in stone but sketched in the sand, vulnerable to the tide's whims. Each day she spent was a delicate balance between being and becoming, held back by her clinging to the unseen and the unsaid.

In the past, she used to reassure herself that her bond with Kai was blessed with a sense of higher purpose, rendering it immune to the conventional metrics of love, the typical tug-of-war of give-and-take. This conviction allowed her to move past Kai’s neglect of her inner storms, his inattentiveness to her everyday life's minutiae, his easy laughter with the curly-haired intern as he escorted her back home, and even, his ultimate choice to walk away from her.

She used to reassure herself that after seeing through to Kai's core—his honors and his shames, after seeing through to how his feelings for her had slowly soured like fermenting tofu over the years—she could attain a glimpse of a more profound love for him, a glimpse of the kind of truth she stole from her dreams.

10.

Craning my neck, I glimpsed through the massage table's hole, trying to locate the source of the squeak let out by the room’s door. Something had gently pried it open—a little yellow puppy, fur fluffy, standing on tiptoe, surveying the room with wide-eyed wonder. What had drawn this little explorer here?

Everyone paused, their ears perked, waiting to discern what came next. Then came the soft patter of steps, tap-tap-tap, getting closer, stopping just shy of the inner room.

“Probably just a small critter,” Little Wei guessed.

“Sounds like it,” Old Meng nodded.

That reminded me of the time I came in weighed down by my backpack, loaded with books, a laptop, and my hefty water bottle. As I slung it over my shoulder to leave, Old Meng, from his perch at the front desk, called out, “That sounds heavy. Careful not to drop the thermos.”

His comment made me smile, surprised at his keen hearing—the ability to tune into and understand the gentle whispers of life could well offer a magic that the bright hues of the world cannot rival.

“It’s a dog, a small golden retriever.” I finally revealed the answer to the whole room like a game show caster.

Our eyes locked, and for a moment, it was as if I’d plunged into a cool, clear spring through the puppy’s eyes. Around me and the puppy, a hush fell, two currents meeting in stillness. I dove deeper, the water filling my senses, cleansing everything in its path, a lifetime washing over me in an instant.

But then, as quickly as it had come, the moment of stare-off ended. The puppy turned its head and padded away, slipping through the door gap, its inspection complete.

“Neighbor’s dog, huh…” Old Meng chuckled.

“I had a dog once, a long time ago.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, more than thirty years back. I was running a small shop back in my Hebei hometown.”

“What kind of dog?”

“A local mutt. But a really good boy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, when I still had a bit of sight, I’d smuggle salt on my trike in the dead of night, and he’d trot along behind, keeping pace…”

Laughter filled the room. My eyes drifted shut again.

11.

As a little kid, Lili would chase after her dad's bike, feeling the touch of the wind playing with her hair, cloaked by the warm sheen of the setting sun. She would race by familiar sights—the tethered rooster, the ever-still figure of the local madman by the garbage bins, the bike repairman absorbed in his work—all the while wrapped in a daydream.

Back then, Lili had many dreams. She thought time would always treat her kindly.

Seeing that there was perhaps no winning in hyping up modern romance, when my turn arrived, I found myself speaking of a day spent with the man whose love for me is without parallel in this world — my dad. Yes, that's right, my dad.

It was one of those rare, simple days where everything just felt right - sunny, warm, serene. We were just chilling by the sea at a beach back in China, which was a big deal because I've been living abroad for many years. My dad took me to a restaurant for seafood skewers and then we strolled down this quiet beach strip towards a lighthouse.

Along the way, dad was unusually excited. He behaved like a big kid, all wide-eyed, pointing out the oddities in every little tree and seashell as if seeing it all for the first time or perhaps the last…I couldn’t help but laughing at the way he goofed off, which made his signature outfit stand out — typically featuring casually mismatched clothes defying all fashion norms. In this case, he was wearing a cowboy hat and crumpled dress pants - too formal for the sand, too earnest for ridicule.

As I watched my dad explore with the wonder of a child, I remember feeling this bittersweet tug, washed over by a strong sense of “Nowstalgia”, hearing the whispering of these moments slipping through my hand, fleeting, finite.

As a usual ritual, I captured these moments on camera, not expecting that in the miles and years away from that day I hadn’t been able to see him since, these photographs would become talismans against time, against the long, lone nights of lock-down, against the silence between visa status updates, the distance that stretches between unanswered existential queries. They solidified as proof that happiness, once felt, leaves an indelible mark no one can take away from me.

After the meeting, one of my coworkers came up to me. He’s a middle-aged guy with an eloquent speaking style that I always thought could narrate documentaries. This time, his voice was soft and words simple. He said his wife had always been a romantic woman. Since she moved on, he’s been spending Valentines with his daughter. He said he’d usually take his daughter out on this day to a restaurant she likes. My story made him see that he could be the dad in my beach day, and he wanted to thank me for that.

I recently re-watched Christopher Nolan’s film “Interstellar”. Ten years ago, my initial viewing left me stunned by its audio-visual grandeur and scientific imagination, yet uninspired by the emotional core underneath the shell of hard science. Back then, like many people, I felt indifferent about the film’s central premise of love as the transcending force against time and space. If anything, it came at the cost of the film’s metaphysical depth.

Operating like a sort of deus ex-machina, love was what propelled Cooper to find his path inside the black hole; love was what convinced Murphy that the anomaly of the watch was nothing but a signal that her father was out there trying to reach her. How convenient it was, I pondered back then, for Nolan to designate love as a mystical force of a higher fifth dimension beyond quantifiable comprehension - that solved all problems for everyone involved.

Yet, with each passing year away from home, I find myself gravitating closer to this notion of love. A decade on, Nolan’s universe is beginning to look like a mirror held up to the emotional odyssey I have treaded.

The film’s original cerebral stimulation has waned in comparison to an emotional journey’s increasingly richer taste, paid for with the non-negotiable price of separation, of missed connections, of trials and betrayals in a world where love and desire often wear the same mask.

To me, love’s transcendent force, once kitschy and abstract, is now intimate, now necessary.

When I see Murphy coming to the realization that her father was her “ghost” and that she was always being watched over by him, I think of how my dad’s words — "Our hearts are always connected, no matter where you are" — echo through the years.

They are not just goodbye but a promise;

A mantra for those of us adrift in the diaspora, navigating the spaces between homeland and nomad-land, between foreign and mother tongues;

A reminder that even when the orbits of society sprawl too vast and fast, even when the mathematics of the game seem too cold and indifferent, this connection between my dad and me, remains unbroken.

Did you know that Nolan’s working title for Interstellar was “Flora’s Letters”? Flora is the name of Nolan’s youngest daughter.

This hidden footnote offers me a stolen glimpse into Nolan's personal universe, where epic narrative threads are stitched into the fabric of finer lines of tender intimacy. It consists in a revelation that must be experienced instead of reasoned. In this softer light, I discover the theme of Interstellar running in parallel to the lived narrative of my grandfather’s life.

As a captain and fighter pilot, grandfather soared not amidst the galaxies, but the war-torn skies of mid-20th-century China. Growing up, I used to see grandfather more myth than man, a devout communist carved from the revolutionary tales of a Maoist China caught in the throes of becoming.

Yet, in this newfound light, I see not a war hero's aerial combats and later personal battles against illnesses, but a father and grandfather’s steadfast trek through the challenges of his time, with the simple hope of coming home to his loved ones.

I still clearly remember a video call we had in the last year of grandfather’s life. As if time itself had accelerated, grandpa emerged from the depths of a coma that seemed to claim a bigger piece of him with each passing second. There, amidst the sterile hum of hospital life, where faces of my cousins became strangers and familiar voices faded into the background of his world, my dad pressed the phone close to grandfather’s ear, "Shout at your grandfather" he urged me on the other end. And I did, bracing for the echo of silence.

But then, in defiance of expectation that was too cinematic to be true, grandpa’s whisper, frayed yet unmistakable, pierced the silence, "Anqi, stay."

In that whisper, the universe contracted to a single point of convergence, echoing the "stay" in Cooper’s code and Murphy’s plea, each one a reflection of the other.

Cooper has a neurotic daughter consumed by her life-long fixation on reaching her father, and a steady son who goes more with the flow. Both are bound by love for their father, yet it's the daughter's relentless love, misunderstood love, pain-ridden love that makes it possible for Cooper’s message to carve through the tesseract to find her, standing against the inexorable drift towards entropy.

Yet, grandfather's plea for me to "stay," didn't pull me back in time. It became not a comfort, but a specter of what I’ve left behind, echoing the cost of my choices, much like Cooper's, and that of countless other nomads in our world who bet their best years, their best efforts on tomorrow’s uncertain frontiers instead of yesterday’s warm bonds. A dedicated pursuit of obsessions at best, or a natural instinct of cruelty at worst. This, perhaps, is the shared emotional debt every explorer and wanderer accrue in our quest for the beyond, adrift in the vast, echoing expanse of our own interstellar voids.

A few months after that call with grandfather, where once three voices filled the phone conversations, we dwindled to two.

As usual, I found my quest for understanding and solace reaching for what has already slipped through my fingers, as I asked my father, "Was it worth it? All the effort, the sacrifices from everyone throughout the years, knowing it would not change the outcome?" My reasoned cost-benefit analysis seemed inadequate here. Dad’s answer was clear and simple:

"We all love your grandfather. It can't be calculated like that.”

Ken Liu, prolific science-fiction author, once wrote in his story collection The Paper Menagerie, “At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.”

My dad’s affirmation, simple in its delivery, carried the weight of countless unspoken decisions of devotion—the same decision made over and over, in each push of the wheelchair through silent hallways, in every careful wash, in every spoon-fed meal in hushed companionship—with a sense of near-religious endurance that I stepped out of and could only imagine from the stories told.

It is in this context of personal absence that I find reassurance in Interstellar’s message—what's lost remains so, rightfully unredeemed by any notion of easy comfort. Old Murphy's farewell to her father in her deathbed, "Parents shouldn't have to watch their children die," followed by a shift in her gaze from the father she's yearned for across decades to her children and grandchildren, encapsulates this sentiment. At the end of the day, what awaits Cooper isn’t a happily-ever-after resolution or recovery of what he had to let go of, but rather an undeniable acceptance for the continuum of life that was and is moving forward all in his absence.

And so, time keeps rolling, carrying us in its current. We find ourselves mere footnotes in its march, stepping aside as new chapters are written with, or more often, without us—cries of newborns we didn't hear, the slow change in our folks' faces we didn't see, friends' laughter at weddings we missed, and the quiet fade of relationships we couldn't mend.

In acknowledging the cycle of life that pulses on without us, however, there’s not only a mix of lamentation and yearning tugging at us, but also a touch of peace and strength guiding us, found in the whispers of joy and sorrow passed down in the stories we inherit, not firsthand, but through the hearts of those who have lived on our behalf…

I remember, as grandfather’s world faded, his vision blurred, sounds muffled, and movements slowed, all except for his sense of taste. It remained, an anchor of earthbound joy, far removed from his youthful conquests in the skies. In a phone call, my dad recounted his effort to bring that joy to my grandfather's lips in his twilight moment: a spoonful of mango juice to bridge the gap left by the surgery's restrictions on solid food. The moment the juice touched grandfather’s tongue, he let out a soft yet vibrant laughter, breaking through the sterile stillness of the hospital ward, resounding with a sense of courageous clarity:

"Tell Anqi, grandpa is going happily! Sour and sweet, on my way to see Chairman Mao!"

Through my dad’s eyes, I could visualize, in that moment, my grandfather standing at a threshold, glancing at the closing of circles:

The good fights have been fought, the promises kept, and now grandfather was ready to embark on his final journey, ready to return to the spiritual ideals that had guided him at the very start.

As I am writing this, I find myself, too, standing at a threshold, where night bleeds into dawn, San Francisco stirs beneath a gentle drizzle, reminiscent of so many February mornings past. Nearby, the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption looms through the distant hum of engines, its monumental shape cutting through the gray sky, a testament to our aspirations for the infinite, for the ethereal.

In this solitude, the act of writing has become an act of constructing, the storyteller has become part of the story, the observer, observed - beneath the cathedral’s imposing watch over our struggles to reach beyond ourselves, I see this essay becoming a living tesseract laid bare: A multidimensional space for my own act of defiance, my own refutation of time—

To remember, to love.

Ross says, "She's not Rachel."

That's it. You're not Rachel, so you cannot replace the unique her. There's no logical calculations to it. It's not about what's on paper; it's about something you can't quite put your finger on.

I think of this episode whenever I scroll through my newsfeed, which is beginning to be filled with newborn AI influencers and AI replicas of timeless icons like George Carlin. We're staring down the barrel of a future where over 90% of online content is projected to be AI Generated Content (AIGC) in a year or two, and it’s catalyzing an identity crisis among human content creators.

At first glance, these AI creations catch your eye, mimicking human expressions so perfectly just like the way Julie wowed Ross. But the initial spark fades. The first wave of AIGC apps saw folks flocking in droves, only to drop in retention and engagement rates just as quickly. Diving into the heart of the matter, I think the novelty wears off in part because, in the end, our heart doesn’t connect with the AI-generated 'Julie' air-dropped into our life out of nowhere, but rather cherishes the shared history we have slowly built with the beautifully imperfect, easily-broken human 'Rachel'—the essence of being human that makes our stories, our creations, profoundly meaningful and irreplaceably ours.

Let me tell you why.

We, as humans, are out here, living it in real-time, feeling every high and low, while LLMs are just trying to keep up, processing a second-hand version of our compressions of reality. This is where the disconnect lies. AI’s creative process can't truthfully replicate the moment-to-moment human experiences in the making —the depth, the emotions, the messiness of it all unfolding around us every second that we constantly make sense of.

Take the example of my own journey as a bilingual improv comedy player. Improv's universal magic across cultures lies turning the idea of 'human mistakes' on its head, as you watch players salvage scenes from impossible premises and transform challenging twists into clever setups. Like that time on stage when, faced with a wild prompt, I simply paused, nodded, and said, "True." The audience erupted. Or when I made an unexpected exit with "I'll be back," leaving everyone in stitches.

When we are watching improv shows, we don’t feel the most connected to those perfectly timed, smoothly executed punchlines that feel eerily scripted; rather, it's those uncertain moments where players attempt "yes and" to the most unexpected if not downright wild prompts. What leaves lasting impressions on us isn't always flawless execution, but rather a hero’s resilience in navigating the plot twists, or even delays and deliberation on a bumpy ride that leads NOT to a perfect resolution but rather an acceptance of the absurdity of the circumstances.

This observation extends beyond the improv stage to the music that moves us, the expressions that touch us, and the personal stories that bind us.

Watching a virtual character's story unfold can't compare to the feeling of being part of a story told by real people, with all their imperfections and quirks. You don't watch a live-streamed game just for the technical gameplay; you watch it for the palpable tension, the emotional highs and lows of the players, their background stories and the genuine rapport they share with their audience. You don’t tune into a lifestyle vlog to just see a beautifully curated home and a made-up face, you want to connect with the raw, unfiltered moments of life of a real person, just like you, who smiles and cries and curses, gets sick and recovers, ages and changes, lives and lets live.

These preferences underscore the crucial role of individuality in our connections. Despite AI's superpower in accessing, combining, and presenting an endless array of humanity's creative outputs, its creative process is deeply impersonal. If we lean on it too much, it risks diluting the personal touch that resonates with us on a deeper level. Ultimately, what truly fills the void in our hearts is not the production of an efficient machine but the heart and soul of individuals, and specifically, that one or few particular individuals, unique and special in their own right.

We write a letter to someone we miss. Is the writing good? Not necessarily. But the person reading the letter may find themselves moved to tears. I mention that the gingko leaves on the street have fallen. They remind me of where we first met. Do you remember that alley? We shared a pair of airpods as we strolled together, shoulder-by-shoulder, awkwardly. Do these particular words and imageries have meaning for you? The LLMs don't know. But the person reading the letter, they know. They know entirely. Therefore, the content that resonates the most isn't the product of AI's scalable efficiency but rather the product of an irreplaceable personal connection, built upon shared emotions and personal memories that are stirred within us in the process of creating and receiving. And that’s how meaning is made.

As we navigate a future saturated with AIGC, It's imperative to remember that what we yearn for is not an endless source of stimulation, but rather connection. The new currency of value in the era of AIGC is not creative efficiency, but rather personal meaning-making. This realization points us toward a future where AI's role in content creation is reimagined, not as a replacement for human creativity but as a complement to it. The challenge and opportunity lie in making human-centric improvisation the central driver of an AI-aided creative process. In our creative process, we should keep asking ourselves:

How do we harness the strengths of both worlds - that of an algorithmic artisan and that of a human-centric improviser, creating content that is not only innovative but also deeply personal and meaningful?

How can we best leverage AI to generate prompts and scenarios that catalyze, instead of eliminating, spontaneous creativity, emotional depth and sense-making unique to human interactions?

What content formats (e.g. livestream) lend themselves best to preserve and present the resilience and wonders in human error-recovery?

How do we highlight the individuals behind the content we create through building healthy parasocial relationships?

Now, back with Ross making that choice. I, for one, will always be on the side of Rachel instead of Julie. After all, what we are craving are the connections and meaning that shine through a human-centric creative process. The goal is NOT to replace human sensibilities with AI; the goal is to keep the ‘Rachel’ alive in our stories, facilitated by AI.

By placing humans at the center of Human-AI co-creation, here’s to keeping the essence of our narratives unmistakably human, unmistakably us.

To keep users hooked in the sea of short-form videos and exploding tweets, influencers must craft niche and catchy content that’s consistently themed. I've observed relationship psychology YouTubers, with previously solid followings, pivot to TikTok, distilling complex human emotions into bite-sized videos like "things guys don’t know but make girls swoon." Even a childhood TV host, once revered for his serious content on a national channel, emerged in my social media feed, selling textbooks with the fervor of a sportscaster. His past as a national show host was his hook, each sale a testament to his credibility, anchored in his academic and television history.

A friend who rapidly grew his Twitter following emphasized the integrity of his key to success: Ruthlessly align your public content with your personal brand and execute it with discipline. Keep other interests for your alt accounts. I totally get it - If you are a meditation coach, don’t start randomly posting edgy 4chan memes - it muddles your message and dilutes your brand's appeal. Not to mention oscillation between political stances.

Yet, I can't help but question the cost when I see internet personalities fall apart as their carefully curated personas come cancelled. When we hastily idolize someone based on a few tags in their self-intro and top posts, are we complicit in the tragedy of our times, where multifaceted individuals feel compelled to confine themselves to a monolithic front with unwavering conviction in order to win?

This path, once committed, often ends up looking like a one-way street. You can’t easily walk back or steer away. Imagine switching from a self-help guru imparting ancient wisdom to a TikTok star showing off sensual dance moves, or dropping the glamor of a VC-backed, deep-tech entrepreneur and embracing the route of a Bohemian yogi, is not only challenging but costly. You might have to abandon your follower base if not totally ruin your established social capital.

It is in this particular context that being “based” emerges as a liberating pushback against a reductionist view of identity, a rejection of adherence to a set of rigid values or cultural traits. The allure of 'being based' consists in its intentional inappropriateness, a deliberate breaking of character. The courage to be based appeals to an emotional core unbridled from calculated commercial packaging, tapping into that hidden impulse you’ve learned to cage as a result of social disciplining. You can eat whatever you want, wear whatever you like, say whatever on your mind and do whatever you enjoy. It's okay to hate him today and love him tomorrow. You can just be. No consequences.

On the other hand, it’s also a seductive approach for quick wins in an influencer economy that structurally incentivizes a “me first” POV more so than ever in history, where the “super solo-ers” are the new elites in the making. Your capital is your own self-expressions that belong exclusively to you – you own the brand and all relationships. All it takes is nothing more than compute, GPT API keys or a vlog setup, and the unwavering belief that you are “the one”. Your insights, your character, your technical and artistic adaptability – they all beat the curve.

But the danger of leaning into being “based” as a personal PR tactic is that it can backfire if you haven’t clarified who you are in all your contradictions. Usually, your un-censoring involves a flavor of self-vindication to reclaim the power taken from the less socially acceptable parts of you by mainstream scrutiny and market mechanics. However, when you mix a personal brand optimized for mass public marketability with a private outlet of push-backs, you are caught in a subtle yet undeniable sense of dissonance, as you may begin to secretly question more than you’d like to admit: am I being my vulnerable authentic self or simply marketing a version of vulnerable authenticity? Your vulnerability, once a genuine aspect of your personality, is carefully honed into a sharp weapon on display, detached from the messy complexities of the rest of you.

Essentially, you need to realize that this nagging dissonance comes from letting one part of yourself that competes for power and recognition capitalize on the struggles of another part of yourself that’s already hurting as a result of not feeling enough in the gaze of the authority. It’s self-exploitation and self-empowerment rolled into one package deal. And you need to know that’s OKAY, too.

If anything, this internal rift encourages you to confront and embrace your multifaceted nature that is as inconsistent and in-flux as humanly possible.

Recognizing this murky complexity within you and confronting the interplay of your light and shadows head-on is not just an act of self-care; it's a necessary first step towards genuine reconciliation and integrated self-expressions. Once you understand that the power-seeking part and the hurting part both exist in order to protect you, you’ll be able to acknowledge and appreciate your vulnerability at both its most performative and most raw. From there, it’s a matter of testing and discovering where to draw the line - like a loving and fair parent who doesn’t play favorite, you don’t want either one to feel attention-starved or overshadowed for too long.

As for myself, my exploration of this step began in a quite disruptive workshop series that exposed me to a modality I didn’t know existed before but found extremely disruptive: Psychodrama, or acting-based improv for insights into the self and others. It even inspired me to become a coach harnessing somatic role-play for self-growth in my free time.

In this psychodrama workshop series, I was surprised to sketch out five personas within myself, each of which had its own agenda. Together with my facilitator and other participants, we gave each of them a distinct voice, witnessed their desires and fears, and acted them out in semi-structured improv exercises.

In this self-revelatory odyssey, as I shuffled from one role’s body and perspective to that of another, I experienced a cathartic mixture of anger and grief. This was because, in that space, I was allowed to protest against the constraints of maintaining a singular professional, social, or online image. I was allowed to mourn for the parts of my identity that I had to sacrifice or kill along the way to win over social recognition.

In that arena, I had both the freedom to choose to be me (and my whole collection of 5 dispersed alter-egos), AND the freedom not to be chosen to be someone else.

This series culminated in a self-revelatory theater performance, where I became the sole director and actor of my internal theater, putting those roles in critical dialogue with each other as they navigated an internal labyrinth in search of a way out.

The transformation occurred when I played out the entire script in the witness of an intimate audience: I lingered around each role, caring for and extending to each one of them a gentle, loving gaze that I hoped I had always received from this world. As I was doing that, I felt submerged in a well of clear, purifying self-compassion and empowerment.

This personal journey sheds light on the broader narrative of 'being based' in our generation. While the market amplifies personal branding, it often leads to self-alienation and self-numbing. We're torn between embodying a consistently polished persona and owning the rich internal conflicts that make us human.

The solution, perhaps, lies in finding a balance between these two extremes. Ultimately, the essence of 'being based' in this era of digital omnipresence extends further than just securing a slot in the online marketplace. We owe it to ourselves to make space for that constant inner theater to unfold and to nurture the inevitable tensions in between our inner roles. After all, the journey towards authentic self-presentations is not about maintaining a semblance of coherence and consistency, but rather genuine self-inquiries and ownership of our inner conflicts.

Keep exploring, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep being you.

In the heart of San Francisco, where I've made a temporary home, I noticed a pulse that seems to run on, what I've come to joke with friends, a new energy source. It's the self-sustaining '3H' cycle: Hustling, Healing, Hallucinating. One begets the other in a sequence as rhythmic as it is persistent. We hustle passionately, to a point where we seek healing in methods as ancient as they are avant-garde, before hallucinating (literally a by-product of healing too) with our AI co-pilot on the next big thing. Rinse and repeat. It’s a testament to the ambition of the audacious, each spin of the cycle greased by the sweat and blood of optimistic builders and daring opportunists.

If you are, like me, a tech worker with an artistic soul, an immigrant navigating the ever-shifting sands of socioeconomic statuses, a spiritual nomad perpetually in the process of recalibrating an identity that sprawls across diverse subcultures, an advocate of irrationality in a bastion of logic, then you might recognize this dissonance. It's the glitching sensation of observing the wheel of your fate as it bumps across parallel tracks each operating on a different speed that seldom converge: the personal, the professional, the aesthetic and the existential. San Francisco, for all its contradictions, is a city where such extremes are not just visible but almost theatrically displayed. Perhaps that is what sustains my complex kinship with it — a shared blend of alienation and affinity, as I navigate the landscape as an engaged onlooker.

The stark silhouettes of homelessness cast against the sleek automation of self-driving cars that glide through downtown streets like specters from some future midnight; the frenetic pace of young startup founders, oblivious to the irony of their lost Tesla plate possibly lying amidst the curbside assortments peddled by idle sellers they narrowly avoid on the streets of Mission. These juxtapositions might be dismissed as a mockery of the city's liberal hypocrisy, but they also speak to a resilience, a dynamic adaptability that encapsulates the full spectrum of human experience.

In the day and night hustles, where even the act of vipassana meditation becomes a strategic play in the game of productivity-boost-as-a-service, there's a marvelous grandeur to this relentless acceleration. It is fueled by an awe-inspiring belief in the potential of human intellect, all echoing with the digital clamor of a species biohacking its limits in overdrive.

Yet, in this whirlwind of acceleration, I found myself yearning for a pause, a moment of stillness. It was in the most unlikely of encounters, noticing a small experimental Japanese theater named Theater of Yugen on the map, that I discovered this sanctuary. Here, amidst the ceaseless spin of San Francisco, I found a space where time seemed to stand still.

First impressions of Yugen

Nestled between Tartine manufactory and a motley of studios in Mission, Theater of Yugen seems almost out of place with its quiet dignity. Its entrance, marked by heavy wooden gates adorned with a floral crest, seems less an invitation than a shield against the urban cacophony. Crossing this threshold, I stepped into a realm where history lingers in the air — a koto resting silently here, posters of decades-old performances there. The stage itself is an island of dimly lit calm, its wooden expanse stretching out like a tranquil sea.

Something about Yugen's mission struck a chord with me. It's a space dedicated to breathing new life into Noh and Kyogen (known collectively as Nohgaku), ancient Japanese theater incorporating lyrical drama and slapstick comedy. In its pursuit to meld these time-honored art forms with Western narratives, Yugen crafts a bridge spanning centuries and cultures.

This fusion mirrored my own journey. Having drifted from city to city, country to country in the last decade or so, I've been perpetually adapting — to new jobs, new adventures, new technologies, new relationships, new rules and orders. Yet, within me, there's always been a backward glance, a yearning to thread the elusive past, what I cannot afford to lose to keep myself in its entirety, into the evolving fabric of my present. Yugen, in its blend of nostalgia and innovation, inhabits that longing of mine, that bridge between what was and what could be.

I still vividly remember my first day at Yugen. I expected to be more like another face in the crowd, but instead as the only new student, thrust into an impromptu one-on-one VIP lesson with Lluis, my teacher. With Miwa and Kyoko, co-directors of the theater, observing from the audience and snapping pictures occasionally, the singular focus I received was almost unnerving. When everyone smiled at me and asked if I'd be back for the next class, I couldn’t say anything but yes like a reflex.

Lluis himself is a study in contrasts — a grocer by day, he transforms into a Nohgaku master by night. With decades of experience under his belt, he is the most recent succeeding instructor at the theater after the founder Yuriko retired. Lluis has a way of making each movement feel significant, each chant weighty with history. Yet he's also got this calming, almost casual demeanor that makes you feel okay about being a beginner. His teaching style is a mix of light guidance and gentle encouragement, with some unexpected humor. It's refreshing, especially after a long day of working at the laptop.

Jo-Ha-Kyu

Learning jo-ha-kyu, the central heartbeat of Nohgaku, was like reclaiming a lost language of movement for me. It's a concept of pacing — “Jo” means starting slow, “Ha” is building momentum, and everything ends swiftly at the peak energy of “Kyu”. In a world where everything is about grabbing attention from the get-go, Jo-Ha-Kyu felt like walking in slow motion amidst a time-lapse. It was counterintuitive at first, yet somehow made perfect sense.

Outside of Yugen, I learned that my speech must arrest my audience at the very start before I get cut off by someone else. I don’t remember how many elevator pitches I had to hone into razor-sharp brevity, scratching my head for the most provocative bits to front-load, hoping that something would land before the we reach the fifth floor. I learned that that is the formula for being seen and heard. If anything, one might as well go straight to offering “Kyu”, the climax, and what’s even better - stay there, keep the Kyu coming and coming.

But here on stage, I am permitted to start slow, appreciate the beauty of a build-up, and master the power of stop. The pacing gives definition to seemingly innocuous movements and lines. It feels as if Jo-ha-Kyu is a timeless spell that holds in it the collective faith of generations of life-long Nohgaku artists before me, entrusting me with the secret power and reassurance to set my own pace, slow down before I accelerate, and to leave it at its peak, without lingering or hesitation.

The Art of Restraint

In my debut, I played an owl-possessed younger brother in a Kyogen comedy classic called "Owl Mountain Priest". It’s a story about an older brother seeking the incantations of a mountain priest to help his sick brother recover from an owl spirit’s possession. To me, my role’s artistic essence consists in the restraint it exercises - a Nohgaku ideal that fills in the counterpoint for me in a city where over-expression and excess is the celebrated.

Each step, each gesture on stage, was a measured exercise in understated intensity and elegance, expressed through the subtle ways in which I shifted and grounded my body. As the possessed brother, I was in a position to define and move reality with my body, instead of having it move me. The role demanded a presence that was felt rather than seen, a power conveyed in the spaces between actions, in what is left unsaid and undone.

An Owl’s Gaze

Becoming an owl meant more than donning elaborate kimonos of long sleeves like wingspans and dragging pants; it was a journey into a more primal, unencumbered existence.

On the surface, this transformation seemed straightforward—minimal acting, no overt expressions. Believe it or not, my only spoken lines were hooting at various pitches. Yet, in its simplicity lay what I found the most illuminating - a shedding of the self. I learned to embody the owl's still gaze, maintaining the bird’s intense, almost piercing energy in my body, while stripping away the human layers of desire and fear in my face.

My rhythmic spiral around the priest in the jo-ha-kyu pattern was not just performance but an unshackling from the need to derive and impart meaning, the analytical baggage that weighs in on one’s choices. It was a unique form of catharsis, distinct from the dramatic pathos of tragedy, rooted instead in a clear and pure form of existence.

Absurdity as a Closure

The climax of our play, far from the usual heroic resolution, was an absurd dance, a “Hootstorm” accompanied by repetitive stomping and spiraling, as the older brother and the mountain priest, one after another, succumbed to the force of the owl spirit my role was possessed by. There was no sentimentality, commentary or character introspection made in this conclusion. Instead, it was a simple presentation of how events escalated in a farcically matter-of-fact way.

The narrative’s deviation from the traditional hero’s journey found classic western scripts—renunciation of a neat resolution and contemplation—offered me a sense of closure that was unexpectedly reassuring. Performing on stage, I experienced a dual revival: I was both resurrecting an ancient eastern comedic tradition and making a parody of the contradictions of my own life recognized and left as they simply are—sometimes unresolved, often cyclical, always in motion.

Not all battles end in victory or defeat; some just dissolve into the rhythm of life.

Finding My Yugen

To me, “Yugen” is not only a theater name, but also a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical idea that has long whispered to the quieter corners of my soul.

“Yu” speaks of a kind of otherworldly depth; “Gen”, on the other hand, suggests a subtle and profound sense of darkness. Together they portray an elusive, almost ineffable spirituality.

I recall, on a night many years ago in Kyoto, encountering a door curtain. It bore the kanji for "Yugen", 幽玄, its fabric caught in a midnight breeze. In that moment, enveloped in the curtain's ethereal flutter, I felt the essence of Yugen around me.

Now, in the heart of San Francisco, a city ever in the throes of creating and recreating its grand tales, finding my Yugen, 幽玄, has become a personal quest. It's about clinging to a narrative that's uniquely mine. It's about believing that while moving in step with the accelerating pulse, I also hold a space within me for the stillness of an owl’s gaze, even if just for the length of an absurd dance.

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