stories ± joy

This is what it means to dream.

[joiefully]

23 april 2025

i thought there was something gorgeous about my writing, fueled by anxiety and scaffolded by depression. something beautiful about the torrents of language that seemed a constant companion. "i used to be a writer," i say, with the same sort of air one would say, i used to run marathons but now i don't so really i'm capable but i just choose not to.

i would be lying if i said i didn't miss the fervency, the flow state, the sureness of my identity, the ability to hop into an alternate universe and wallow in emotions that were mine but not mine. in loving those parts of creating art, i thought my art to be good. i thought my sadness to be poignant and rich with potential.

i will not be mean to myself, but it is nice to know that after all these years, i can say with more certainty that though there was something gorgeous about my art and therefore my depression and anxiety, i like being happy more. the type of beauty that's created on sunny days when optimism is not forced is much more worth it.

hello world!

[joiefully]

march

despite having committed to de-prioritizing writing this year i find myself

typing

a lot!

mentors nagging me, gently

you have 2 hours

we’ll check in midway

instead i paint

mixing blue aqua and black

cheap acrylics

until i think it’s something like yves klein’s color

and i draw women’s bodies

which i show to andrew when he comes over the next night

i hate how the front desk calls me to announce that he’s coming

“they don’t even do that with my groceries anymore,” i tell him when he comes in

“why do you announce yourself to them?” i ask and he kisses me on the cheek

this is too familiar for me

and it’s too manufactured

when i walk down to get coffee the next morning

i make sure my hood is up

but andrew comes over again

and front desk calls me again

i simply sigh

i blame it on his spontaneity

i blame it on whiskey and marijuana

i blame it on the naked bodies i’ve been sketching

there are so many andrews in my life it has become a joke

in our groupchat

my andrew, who is really suze’s andrew

maybe: andrew

philly andrew

andrew yang, not the politician, on clubhouse

i’ve matched with the most andrews on hinge, run past the most cornell apparel on my runs

and despite all of these things i learn about brooklyn

i can’t figure out

my anxiety

who will i be in a year from now? a month from now? a week?

you’d be surprised. i know i am

[joiefully]

i think

about his hands a lot. the knobs of his knuckles, the slenderness of his fingers, accentuated by the bumps of his joints. the tenderness with which he would touch me. 

on my inner wrist, along the fine creases where the hand joins the arm, up and down the river delta of veins that, unbeknownst to him, are murmuring at the thought of closeness. then the most honest part of my body; no matter how much i’ve tried to resist, the lines of my palm have announced that i would love, and love, and love. these unwanted tattoos, he traces.

now finally. the tips of his fingers, resting gently at the the soft valleys between mine.

in those months, the thing i longed for most was to hold his hand. one time, he sent me a video of him stroking smee, and i watched it over and over, seeing the way the back of his hand had paved smooth paths in the cat’s orange fur. when he flipped his hand to pet it, i looked carefully at the veins extending all the way his forearm, and i imagined tracing them. the ridges against my cheek. 

the lines on my palms say nothing about being loved back, being loved back, being loved back. 

[joiefully]

063020 diary poem

framed through the glass doors, a grown peach tree. in its trembling, unkempt leaves  i remember—  i once asked my father if it’d bear fruit by the time i was done  with high school. 

now i’ve graduated from college and from the two odd years after, which seriously warrants another degree, for how much growing feels like being tug in two directions. i go to bed excited for the next day, whose hours hold  promise of a future i catch glimpses of: the color palette of my new portfolio, splashed on a piece of artwork hanging up in a new apartment, the heat from the body of a faceless man. i wake up only to fall into the arms of coffee, suddenly uncomfortable with the human parts of living, the unromantic parts—powerpoints. the appearance of my morning face in a zoom meeting room. browsing facial serums made from marine exopolysaccharides.

another coffee, then, as i appreciate these sweet, succulent years,  and the knobby, green peaches.

[joiefully]

That’s it!

My goodness, it’s not that difficult.

I now know why I dislike you—it’s your grand conceit, in the ways you’ve always tried to make yourself the main character of other people’s lives. As though their grand suffering from life’s condition—drawn from decades of a family history you don’t even know, from people you’ve never met, from the seeds of a self-doubt planted long before you ever came along—as though all of that could’ve possibly been attributed to little, little you.

[joiefully]

Marley & Clark

Maybe if she decided to write about Princeton days, he would appear. Just a minor character. A minor character who could’ve become a major one that night at Reunions, which was the weekend of partying that happened when all the alumni came back. On the second night, she remembered, she ended up out because a friend had gotten a shot of whiskey inside her, and then she was running, running, running to find people she knew, who would accept this fake version of her, the girl who was not too weird for partying, the girl whose personality owned up to her sometimes-pretty face. She found people to cling onto, all drunk, and as they hobbled around through the tents, grass soaked with beer, eyes stinging with sparkling wine when Crew popped the bottles, Marley would always be on the lookout for people. People she knew. It was a fear of being left alone, though she must say she minded slightly less when she was drunk and when she had her phone in hand. Clark was evidently slightly drunk, and it seemed at least that he wanted to see her, if he was still replying to her vague messages.

It was by the 1979 Tent, where some of her friends were mixing mojitos, that she found him. She remembered gesturing to the mixed drinks, remembered him coming close, and she remembered guilt. She pushed it away.

Later that night, he would call her a grandma. They had fallen on some half-deflated trampoline that the university had set out for the children of the alum. Drunk out of his mind, his head would be on her lap, for some reason, and she found herself nervously caressing his hair for the sake of something to do. An incredibly intimate thing to do, given that they had never really had a full conversation.

“How are you feeling?” she whispered.

“Comfortable,” he said, nursing his impending hangover.

“My thighs are too soft,” she said.

He told her to shut up, in the awkward but well-meaning manner in which boys dealt with women’s body image issues. Did her hands ever make it from his hair to his face? She wanted him to go, to leave her be; she didn’t know what she wanted to do with him. With Clark right there in front of her, it almost felt like she had been thrusted in the position of some main character figure she had been manipulating, and now she had little idea what to do. Confidence was a hard act to keep up all the time.

[joiefully]

Mother’s Day 2018

The biggest fight I ever had with my mother, I remember all too well because I loved the words I used. I’m not sure in what language I ended up cursing her off, but the sentiment was so strong, so clear, so sincere, that if you had asked me to spit it out in Ancient Greek I probably would’ve been able to do so. When you are lying on your death bed, I said, either before or after my tears, I will look you in the eye and still hate you for this. There was an eternity in those words, because if I were to hate her in her process of dying, then I was most likely going to hate her when she died, was dead, and remained dead. A person remains dead forever. But I still find the logic absurd; why should it matter how I feel when she is the one on that sweet cusp of breath and death? Forgiveness doesn’t make dying easier if the person doesn’t ask for it. Maybe forgiveness is what makes living easier, but that’s for the living to decide. No?

The words were what I wanted. My God, how I loved the weight of those words, the taste of iron, the sound of a shriek. But nothing hurt me. By then I had had years of practice of getting to my demons before anyone else did. I would sit with an uneasy heart and tell myself to spit—a challenge to write down the words I was most scared of. If I could write down those words, then I knew that nothing was ever going to hurt me.

What is the scariest thing in the world? I once asked Monica.

Hope? she answered.

A woman with nothing to lose, I said; and I thought that was me. I thought my mother had much to lose—at the top of her list was pride. But something pathetic like that doesn’t quite hold up in a story, though, so I can’t remember if I stood there letting her take a good look at me or if I turned to leave, if we had physically fought or if that happened later. I knew I would never hurt her with my hands, because listen to me—I am a woman who sharpens her words every night. Yet despite this overwhelming conviction of invincibility, I want to tell you: I apologized. At a certain point, I realized that threatening her with deathbed estrangement wounded her pride more than it did her, and that she still wasn’t going to understand my eating disorder. I got tired and I began crying.

Like waking up after blackout, the next thing I remembered was that I was on my knees and the Persian rug was making rough prints on my skin as I begged her, “Just please, just please.” I am not sure what I was begging for. Maybe for time to stop, or for time to be returned to me. But anyone who has ever begged before knows that it doesn't really matter what you’re asking for. It’s the fact that you’re on your knees and you suddenly go from someone with nothing to lose to someone with everything to lose that’s the most painful.  

[joiefully]

A dream on my 23rd birthday

I never actually witness the killing. I just see a lot of blood. A suitcase sometimes, or even a cardboard box, though by all measures of logic, a cardboard box is not watertight enough to store a human body. In my dreams I never figure out who has died, or who has killed them, though I get the sense that it is often a woman who has become victim. 

Instead, it’s always about the fact that I have found these sad, cardboard vessels for human bodies, contorted or destroyed in multiple ways to fit inside a pizza box. I know that sooner or later I will be incriminated for a crime that I didn’t even do. 

I never ever open the box. The worst is that I am always forced into the position of finding ways to get rid of the box, to do it quickly and safely so that I don’t get blood anywhere, so that I don’t get caught. I wonder why I choose to involve myself with boxes that have been stained red. Why don’t I just run away? I don’t know. I get the sense that there is no choice, even in dreams of my own creation. 

It’s a dream that comes back, in various iterations on different sets. Sometimes it’s a casket, sometimes all I get is seeping blood from behind a closed door. 

Sometimes I wake up freed. 

Other nights, I’m caught. 

On those nights I reach towards my nightstand and don’t open my eyes until I’ve turned on the lamp. I survey the room, waiting to see if anything has changed, whether my bathrobe has taken on a human form. I start humming, out loud, the piano theme from the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 2. I roll my eyes back and forth, left to right, to forget.

[joiefully]

A Bit From The Sweet First Summer

One of the best things about Beijing was the biking. Back in the States, she did not have the need to bike and therefore did not own one; and the last time she had really biked was when she had visited San Francisco during a holiday, and one of the Things to do was rent a bike and ride along the Bay. Despite how wobbly she had been, not having ridden a bike since she was perhaps seven, it had been her favorite day—cruising along, parallel to the two strips of blue that ran all the way down the coast, save for the bright red Golden Gate Bridge that seemed to redefine the meaning of color. 

In Beijing, they had bike-sharing services that people often used for the in-betweens, when bus services were too slow or inconvenient. There were multiple brands of bikes all clustered around subway stations, and you would open up an app on your phone, scan the QR code that was located on the back-wheel. The first time she had ever ridden one of the Mobikes, she felt as though even grandmothers were more stable than her, which wasn’t so surprising given that old people in China had always managed to stay fit. Then quickly, bike rides became the highlight of her day. She had that sense of propelling herself forward, as with running, except with biking she went even faster and there was a greater sense of a seamless movement forward, down the streets, past the pedestrians, like she was experiencing life at an accelerated pace. 

Some evenings, she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to stop riding her bike, even when she had already arrived at home. It seemed shameful to stop in her tracks. Everything in motion with remain in motion until a force exerts itself upon it.

It was hard finding the perfect bike amongst all the orange Mobikes, yellow Ofo’s, teal Didi bikes. But when she did, she knew. The seat would not be too low or too high (for you couldn’t adjust the seat on all of them), the handlebars would be intact with a cushioned handle, the basket compartment would be big enough to fit her carry-all. And the bell. She didn’t realize how much she liked bells until she started riding her bike. The best bikes were the ones that had the cleanest bells——where just a soft adjustment of the palm would allow the sounds to ring clear——ding-ding. Sometimes she would ding the bell even when there were no people around her, simply just because she enjoyed the sound of it against the wind. She was saying hello; and with each ding, like that day in San Francisco, the colors of late summer trees would become greener than ever, and she could forget, really, that she was now in a city where sometimes it was dangerous to breathe.

She was seeing everything for the first time. Beijing was the right decision.

[joiefully]

Excerpt, “Preamble”

It rained the next day. And then the next. The tail-end of a tsunami had come to Shanghai. Many words to describe it—a typhoon, a monsoon, a miserable trek to work. Maisie wore platform wedges to elevate herself off the wet ground, but there would still be splotches of street water on her jumpsuit. On these grotesquely swampy days, they had huddled under an ugly umbrella from 7/11, brought on the way to work, solely for its utility. The 7/11 here sold not taquitos or Slushees but things like pretty Japanese chocolates, stern-looking German beers, and Korean facial cleansers.

“Zev, do you read horoscopes?” Maisie asked.

Xavier didn’t answer, so she continued. “My horoscope, this morning, said that Saturn is currently 45º away from where Pluto was when I was born. I don’t know what that means, but I suppose that’s why it’s raining.” 

He lit a cigarette. All the smells were amplified when it was wet.

“This umbrella,” he said, “reminds me of the little coats Scottish terriers wear.”

Maisie looked up at the plaid pattern. “It reminds me of shortbread tins.”

[joiefully]

Something I Don’t Dislike

I love you. I, I love, love, love, I love, I love you, you. you. I love you. Rosemary repeated these words back to herself, not quite speaking, though not quite whispering either. She felt the syllables, one by one, a great effort in the back of their throat, jutting forward on the tip of her tongue, before retreating back shyly behind her teeth, and then a quiet purse of the lips, ready for a kiss. 

The more she repeated the words, the more foreign they sounded. She tried speaking in French, then Spanish, then Korean and Japanese. Over and over, until these words broke down into sounds and rhythms and had nothing to do with the words that Rowan told her. 

At the thought of him, Rosemary felt her head begin to pound with the effort of running away from him. Yet the more she wanted to stop thinking about him, the more quickly and intensely the memories rushed at her, even old ones where there hadn’t been a Rosemary and Rowan, ones that she had long forgotten but now came at her like an indie 80’s film, shot from various angles. There were scenes from college, scenes of them at Schuyler’s pregames, of them at a bar in Beijing, or a club in Madrid. Them at Linus’ and her apartment, celebrating a housewarming. When did it all start going so wrong? She had always wondered when she would hear those words again, from whose lips they would fall, with that expectant hesitance about whether she would return the sentiment. She had never been the first one to say, I love you, and for good reason.

“No,” she said again, in that half-whisper she reserved for coaching herself out of anxious meltdowns. “Don’t think.”

But she did think. She thought about themselves in the past. The story within their group was that Rosemary had disliked Rowan when they were at school, because she could see through him, through how hard he had tried. But that wasn’t the truth. She hadn’t disliked Rowan, because how could you dislike someone that was so impossibly different? Someone who was so easygoing and self-assured, someone who couldn’t walk through campus without saying hi to a dozen people? For her to have disliked Rowan was for her to have been too proud to admit that she wanted what Rowan had; and she wanted him for what he could’ve represented for her. 

She quickly turned her attention to dinner, focusing on each bite of salmon, each stalk of blanched broccolini. She challenged herself to imagine the broccoli’s journey in reverse, from her mouth to her plate, to her pan; her cutting board and sink and fridge and then the brown bag and the grocery store; from a produce display to a crate, back onto a truck, across long miles across the country, back into the backyard of a farm, unloading onto the tanned, roughened hands of a farmhand, then back into the earth. She did the same thing for her leftover brown rice, her salt, pepper. By the time she ventured into thinking about her salmon, she had lost her appetite and Rowan had, once again, become a friend.

[joiefully]

january 2020

When Robert’s mother, a Chinese American doctor, first freaked out about the coronavirus and Wuhan had begun shutting down, I thought to myself—it’s because it’s my zodiac year. Not even my own mother was panicked at that point. However, the Chinese say that every twelve years, it is inevitable that you will clash with Tai Sui, a mustachioed Zeus with a penchant for misfortune, a fear of red. I left my boss a voice message and boarded one of the few reasonably priced nonstop flights out of Beijing, wearing my last clean pair of vermillion underwear and my pink N95. Staring at the sea of facemasks through my lab goggles, I dared to wonder: how could all of China have gotten punished, just because I was turning twenty-four?

It was then that I decided my first New Year’s resolution was to be less self-centered.

[joiefully]

Not your emotional dumping ground (from 2016)

(This was from sophomore year, holy shit.)

The other day someone texted asking me how I was. “I’m alright,” I said, a few hours later. “How about you?”

And lo and behold, the reply I received was not the usual, “Same,” or even, “I’m well,” or “Ugh finals,” but two blocks of texts talking about feelings—about peace and taking walks and probably the night sky. You know, the type of stuff people would tell someone like me—because I’m known to be more emotional, more into the poeticisms of, “Wow, the night is so gentle; the rain feels so cathartic; I’m taking a walk.”

Which is true. I am that type of person. Regardless of whether I want to or not, I’ve established myself as such.

But with a dawning horror, I realize that others tend to especially act that certain way around me. Our conversations tend to be heavy, skipping over whatever’s happened that day, straight into the heart of the human condition. Emotional baggages inspected at the counter I unwillingly man, if not opened for me to peer into and come up with a response to. This sort of discourse has “deep” slapped over it, and that is most often the reason why I see the message and do not open it. Because “deep” is emotionally taxing, especially on me.

This is something I’ve started to realize more and more as the new friends I’ve made become better ones—meaning that our conversations, once filled with lighthearted banter with the occasional foray into the personal, are now diving into the realm of emotional issues I am not sure I can handle. Even talking about the day-to-day relates to a deeper condition of the mind—an “I did this because like I told before, I feel this.” Once the friendship has been opened up, it’s common to spend most of your time in the deeper waters.

I realized with a horror that I enjoyed talking with new people so much, simply because of the person I was allowed to be with them. I am able to suspend this emotion-heavy character I am, to return to the surface and bask in the warmth of getting out of myself. It is often not a close friend who cheers me up when I am sad, but the girl who lives down the hall that I occasionally see in the bathroom when we are both groggily brushing our teeth. Because when we ask how our days have been, we talk about an exam the next morning, or the anticipation of an upcoming break. When we take our leave from each other and wish each other a good day, we sincerely mean it because we have nothing else we could wish on each other.

This is not to say that I don’t love or appreciate my friends and our conversations—simply that there’s become an incredible lack of variety. There is a certain way people view me—a handful of adjectives and nouns thrown together that I can’t even agree or disagree with—artsy, Instagram, music, writing—and they act accordingly, with me. And they all act the same. Our conversations become so eerily similar, even though they are all different people and I am open to talking about more than being peaceful and confident and loving yourself.

It’s natural that people naturally act more similar to the person they are talking to, in an attempt at connection. That’s quite a beautiful thought. But I disdain that, possibly because I am not quite so fond of who I am or at least how I’m viewed. Everyone is the same because I am the same.

Some boy I’ve seen at Frist a few times has recently caught my eye, and I’ve been joking (or not) about finding ways to meet him with my friend Chris, who had a class with him. Then, when I bought up the issue of my potentially being the default emotional dumping ground for people, he noted that between the two of us, too, our conversations tend toward the heavier stuff—recovering from heavy bouts of sadness—and that he agreed, that he enjoyed talking to me about the Frist-boy.

I was taken back, because I hadn’t realized that I may have been the one who set up these situations. 

(6 Nov 2017 - I have, indeed, talked to Frist boy.)

[joiefully]

preludio al vento

what has brought me back here? to this floating minimal text-box, an overlay on the navy screen, which at one point must have seemed so familiar to me? 

in many ways, this revisit is not all that different from these past two years post-princeton, in these past five months since i’ve fled beijing. everything has become a sudden reckoning with the past, of trying to decide what i can keep, of what i could possibly keep in this endless vacuum of time. 

my favorite zoom-cocktail story is that i had my apartment packed, remotely. anni video-called me the hour before my team training, and i could only say yes or no as strangers stalked through my room and pointed at my underwear and my leather skirts, my throw pillows and my pumps. in between every closet and drawer, i prayed that they would not find the little cardboard box underneath the bed until long after i hung up. there were things i desperately wanted to keep, like the jo malone products that O gave me for my birthday, or the aojiru i had just gotten from tokyo, but those, i had to give to anni. i also left her wine and whiskey and any facial gels they could not pack.

even now, i am running through rooms and houses, months and years, touching everything and everyone i can, seeing if it sparks familiarity, as much for them as for me. i don’t doubt that i occasionally return here for the sake of investing in a history; after all, isn’t that what selfhood is?

[joiefully]

28 june 2018

The line between personality and pretense is blurring. A girl who parties is a girl who is outgoing and social. That girl lacks depth. Does she inherently lack depth or does she lack depth because all she wants to showcase is the girl who parties?

This girl talks a lot about being an extrovert and about partying, about Tinder and hooking up, even though in reality she’s only slept with XX men, which isn’t a lot for someone who presents herself as someone who frequents events held by nightclubs and events held by fraternities. This girl cannot stop talking. This girl is worried about being liked and spends too much time talking about herself.

This girl misses.

She misses pictures of sceneries. She misses soft precious moments spent with the sky, especially the color of the sky. She misses the satisfaction of writing quietly and writing well. She misses conversations musing about time and the nostalgic heart. She misses being called delicate and elegant.

Now she is just cute.

She supposes that’s better than being disliked by women, being disliked by men. Was she ever disliked by women and men? No, she was just quieter and less intrusive and less known. That girl cannot decide if she has been pretending to be an extrovert. No, she possibly couldn’t have, because she so truly enjoys meeting new people—or so she says. Maybe she is simply eager to please, eager for many opportunities to test her new pretense and see if she can win them over the way she never used to be able to. It’s a complex thing, to be human and to be so consciously aware of being human, or that’s to how, to be aware of how different we all are but how much easier life is when you convince others that you are the same.

Perhaps she is being too harsh.

There is nothing wrong with this pretense. It is simply a silk wrap that is tried on, seductive to both her own skin and the skin of the men who draw her close and pull it off. She has enjoyed playing with the social fabric, enjoyed twisting it in her hands and seeing it flutter in the breeze of someone else’s approval. She has enjoyed how pretty it has made her, for it has made her confident, and that was something she could’ve never gotten by spending so much time in herself that she’s picked out the exact moment in which she’s fucked up.

See, the girl wearing silk is also the same girl that preaches self-love to herself and to others. The girl wearing silk has been the one to say hello first to not just attractive men but also beautiful, friendly women, to little children who are shy and adults who become impressed with her joy. You must trust that the girl wearing silk remembers who she is without it, and that she will take care of herself in cotton, linen, and air.

[joiefully]

Lying here in the dark with two melatonin in me I am thinking about Beijing, or most likely worrying about it because I fear being alone. I want a roommate. I get into these antsy moods every once in a while, where I so fear being alone and I cannot help but feel waves of anxiety when I do not speak to people. I’ve reconciled it at my last counseling appointment. It was a while back. The last one I was supposed to have I slept through because I stayed up until four watching a movie with someone. I get very tired during the day but somehow at night I cannot sleep. All very odd. Mom and dad don’t understand why I dislike being home. Because it doesn’t feel like home. Princeton is home and to go home feels like taking a day trip to somewhere uncomfortable and I never have any food I like to do and I’m always being shuffled around. I can’t wait for Beijing sometimes. Especially when I think about my last fight with my mother. My dad and my brother were even sort of on my side this time. I want to write something, anything, during the next year. Clara said I didn’t have to stay for two years. But we’ll see. Somehow I feel this great desire to go to grad school, but maybe it’s because this is a safe system that I am used to. But will it ever be the same? Won’t it feel boring? I realize that I most likely won’t have children. I wonder if I’ll find someone who is okay with that. Because I am not great with living alone, of course. I enjoy having crushes. Do people have crushes when they are older? I wanted too much and that’s why I was never happy with the thought of a relationship. I still am not. But I’ve gotten so much this year. So much delight and joy. That’s all I can remember because it’s all I tell myself. Even though I am so anxious sometimes, all I remember is joy. Sometimes I wonder why I keep seeking conversation with men. They are simple. Part of me wanted to message R but I am tired and I really wanted to remind myself that I just want something to occupy my time and it’s not a particular person. So much can change. I haven’t seen A in a while but I wonder if I’d be as unaffected as I am now. You can’t blame someone for being attracted to them. It’s nearing the end of senior year and everyone is scrambling. I wonder if my mom knows that going home I do not have a friend group there, or I don’t know if it’s there. I’m moving! I’m moving. I feel like I’ve had about a gazillion appointments with health services. For my shin splint, for the nutritionist, the counselor, the physical therapist, the birth control lady, the insurance lady. We’ll see. I wonder if my chest hurts because of allergy medication or if R pushed me down too hard.

[joiefully]

You’d be amazed how easy it is to rewrite the truth away.

Junot Diaz