I am, I am, I am. @halfeatenplums-blog - Tumblr Blog

10/4/16

I miss the way I used to sit in front of my laptop, carefully plucking words like cherries from branches until my sentences slipped like sand through my fingers. I miss crafting metaphors and seeing stars inside of you; I miss being a foolishly hopeless and naive romantic.

People warned me about feeling homesick the first few weeks of college, but I’ve yet to feel a twinge of homesickness in the traditional sense. I miss my parents, and my high school friends, and the privacy of my bathroom at home; but I’m not sick for them, and my missing them is not the slightest bit crippling. Rather, I’m homesick for the girl I used to be—the girl who used to listen to classical music and write, the girl who poured everything into her instrument, the girl who took walks at night with her dad and would gaze up, consumed by the stars and the feeling of wonder.

My mother told me to bring my instrument to college, because it would bring familiarity to a new place. I didn’t listen to her. I don’t know if I regret that decision; I certainly don’t have time to practice anymore, but I miss the silver against my fingers and the feeling of breathlessness. Music was such a big part of high school for me, and even though I thought I didn’t want it to define my college years like it did my high school years, I’m having second thoughts.

At the same time, I don’t want to revert back to my old habits and identity just because it’d feel more comfortable. I feel myself growing so much, every day. It’s nice to take a pause, glance back, and revel in everything that I once was; but I don’t think I’ll ever trade where I am now for something that already happened.

I’m not quite at home yet, but I’m sticking through the change in the hopes that my identity will someday morph into and grow along this new beast. I didn’t come to college wanting to stay the same; I came to be transformed into someone better.

nobodysflower

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe.

i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t.

“are you two… together?”

this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words.

“there are children here, you know.”

in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon.

i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with.

even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

85.

Rejection stings. A lot.

Because, no matter how much time you spend convincing yourself the weeks leading up to decision day that it’d be a miracle if you were even waitlisted, there will still be that sliver of naive optimism within you that presses against your chest and convinces you that dreams do come true. Because you spent the past four years imagining yourself studying proofs under heated palm trees and sprawled on top of artificially-green lawns. Because you made yourself believe that one day, you too would live in Enchanted Broccoli Forest creating vegan dishes alongside people you used to Facebook stalk. Because you pulled so many all-nighters in hopes of seeing that acceptance letter years down the road. Because you started reading the Duck Stop in the ninth grade. Because you spun all your dreams from hypotheticals and, for a split second, they were almost tangible.

Rejection especially stings after you realize that people just like you were accepted. People who you didn’t get along with. Even people who may be dishonest. And you try your best not to be bitter, or jealous, or think too much about it, but it’s human tendency to overanalyze and want everything that’s out of your reach. It’s easy to let your own envy put down the acceptances of other people; it’s difficult to swallow your hurt feelings and force yourself to honestly say, “congratulations, I’m genuinely happy for you.”

My Stanford interviewer and I had a discussion about letting anger and disappointments serve as fuel to catalyze greater things, and the best quote I’ve ever heard was about always making sure that something good comes from failure. I’ve always thought of myself as a relatively resilient person. But it’s different when you failed to achieve something you dreamed about for literal years; this failure tastes different than the failure of not getting the SAT score you wanted or the class rank you thought you had secured. It’s a billion times more sour.

I feel deflated and jealous and all sorts of ugly adjectives right now, but I know that even this feeling is transient and a year from now, I’ll wonder why I ever had doubts about fitting in at the school I’m now bound for. I also have so many things to be grateful for: incredible friends who have taught me so much, supportive parents who pushed me to heights I never would have otherwise reached, teachers who continued to believe in me after failed tests, a best friend who is alive and no longer suffering from anorexia, and grandparents who don’t know what in the world “Ma Sheng Li Gong” is and are proud of me just for being me. A safe home. An acceptance to a college that I’d be crazy not to be satisfied with. Motivation.

I am so lucky.

#p #stanford

74.

TODAY I GOT INTO MIT

#HOW DID THIS HAPPEN #p

I lost myself while trying to find a home.

I lost myself at the intersection of 8th and 34th, watching tall men drown themselves in taller cups of coffee and burden feather briefcases heavy with forgotten secrets. Eager twenty-somethings who come to find their voice but only learn to mimic the honks of yellow taxi cabs. Immigrants from the Midwest plains, the Gobi desert, immigrants who dreamt of skyscrapers that stretched into the stratosphere only to spend the rest of their lives making mirrors of the checkered tiles beneath them. Straw people

who continue mindlessly scribbling directions to 42nd street on folded napkins after a flood swallows their city and sweeps them off their feet. Red and white bobbers that nod their heads with the whims of the current, drifting aimlessly until a sea bass bites the bait. Bodies dancing downwards in a demonstration of momentum conservation as lifebuoys leap into the air and swirl around spires like rings around pegs. Somewhere, a drift net strangles thirty venti cups and a litter of discarded dreams. From a fishing boat, the ennui looks almost

blissful. I lost myself in the sea of corners, in the trembling horizon broken by ashen towers. On Park Avenue, an elevator carries an executive to his penthouse as a woman sells her mother’s beads from Jakarta for a penny a piece. In the sky, a pigeon soars to the foot of the emperor’s throne and asks,

What is the heaven below me like?

#drafts

29.

I am in love with the way I sometimes feel like I’m melting like candle wax below a flame past midnight, tucked under gossamer sheets in the middle of January and sinking into the foam mattress faster than I believed I fell for you. I am in love with receiving messages at 11:15 PM and being able to see you glance at me from my peripheral vision, eyes flickering faster than the images that blink across the film being projected on the wall. I am in love with how you unravel yourself like a ball of yarn running astray; the way my secrets tumble out faster than water cascading down waterfalls when I’m with you.

I am in love with us, but terrified of loving you.

#p #i need and want to start writing again but i'm terrified and i have a website to code #also need to talk to you

In Spanish class, we’re talking about la belleza--the beauty. Today, my teacher asked us what beauty is, then proceeded to have us comment on a series of pictures, arranged so that “bello” and “no bello” were back to back--a picture of a celebrity on the red carpet was directly proceeded by a picture of a man with messy hair, etc. When a picture of a French flag came up (to represent French, the language, not France, the country), everyone raised their hands and said something about it being such a beautiful language. ¿Por qué piensas que es una lengua bella? No sé, suena hermosa.

Then a picture of a Chinese flag came up, and the class turned silent. The only comment that was mustered by someone was “it’s...interesting.” And I am so, so angry and disappointed because we all think French is beautiful, yes, so was Mandarin supposed to be the contrast to that, a clear example of something that’s not as beautiful?

My teacher proceeded to ask me, specifically, what I thought was associated with Mandarin. Qué se asocia con el mandarín?

I know what my classmates associate with Mandarin--immigrants speaking broken English while buying apples at the grocery store, heavy accents, harsh syllables, people with small eyes and short noses. But my language is more than a mistake to me. My language is my grandmother calling me to dinner when I was a little girl, my language is my father being able to properly express his grief when my grandfather died, my language is my mother proudly talking about her country with friends, my language is my aunt braiding my hair during a sweltering summer in Beijing and whispering in my ears that everything will turn out alright.

My language is beautiful because of its plasticity and all the inflections and nuances that allow me to express more than I’ll ever be able to in English. My language is important to me because the syllables that flow from my mouth allow me to tell my grandparents about a world they’ll never get to experience in this lifetime.

Foreign ears choose to judge it and reduce it to a mere politically correct “interesting.”

It’s so easy to dream past midnight, when darkness obscures reality and sleep deprivation swallows your insecurities. You decide that you’d like to write a New York Times bestseller, or perhaps lead a crusade before you die. You let memories of rejection after months of toil slip from your mind; you convince yourself that failure is a moment, not a state of being, and one that you left behind in the past.

The harsh truth barrels down on you in the morning with the force of an accelerating train.

They say that writing is bleeding, picking at scabs, shattering yourself against all edges of the world and hoping to find some beauty in the pieces. They say that writing is pain, furiously digging up old artifacts until the metal of your shovel strikes against the depths of your soul and leaves a dent larger than the moon’s craters.

They tell me that sadness is good for my art, but I am tired of trying to stitch up torn tissues with broken metaphors and a blunt needle.

11.25.15

It’s so easy for me to romanticize obsession -- when you’re so completely consumed by something that you’re eventually asphyxiated by your own negligence of other parts of your existence. Nina Sayers drove herself to death, and Esther Greenwood spiraled into depression while attempting to achieve an unattainable perfection; but how beautiful their persistence was, how poetic (despite tragic) their stories were.

Moderation is never as enthralling as excess. Perhaps I think this because I have never been able to keep at something for very long myself.

11.22.15

I miss All-County already.

I miss the feeling of my heart skipping a beat when the director announced the chair test results for the last time, and the feeling of sitting first for the fourth year in a row. I miss how humbling it was to have the entire world – or the entire world in that instant, anyway – noticing you after months of never-going-to-be-good-enoughs. I miss being the object of envy and simultaneously feeling like an arrogant prick and on top of the universe. I miss black dresses. I miss six-hour rehearsals and declaring candy to be suitable sustenance during the thirty-minute dinner breaks. I miss standing up after solos and facing the crowd, half-smiling, vulnerable, and absolutely awkward, but in that moment, nothing else mattered besides the purple that flowed from the foot joint. I miss the conductor running back on stage and blowing us kisses. I miss the chills. I’ll miss the chills the most.

Maybe it’s the brevity that makes it all so incredible. It’s been a good four years.

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I am, I am, I am.