prose sketches

instagram with words

[kllew]

the postage to taiwan

is three first-class US stamps, though I affix four. Within the envelope— a letter to my grandfather in tiny loops of schoolgirl cursive, stringing together syllables of formalities that hide the faltering hand— is sealed.

Adulthood has taught me the American way of saying what you mean. But penning a letter, bound for more native territory, renders spaces—punctuation— stages for the elaborate reckonings— charades— of the heart.

--

Dear Grandpa, I hope that this note finds you well. I heard from First Uncle that you have been unwell. I am sorry that I have not stayed in touch these past years.   As I, too, grow, old, I cherish every tea lunch and haircut in Chinatown; every Christmas we spent together; the summer in Suzhou, when all I did was complain about jet lag and heat as you showed me the splendor of your childhood, weaving two distant worlds together— into a fabric resplendent in beautiful banalities.

Sending you all my warmest wishes for a full and speedy recovery.

--

Dear Grandpa, I hope you receive this letter before it is too late; I heard from First Uncle that the aneurysm might burst and swell at any moment.   I am sorry that I have not stayed in touch; that English supersedes my fractured Chinese; that I have not married; or earned an illustrious degree; or accomplished anything that would bring honor to our family.   Yet I wonder, why do you not write or call? Have you found happiness, forever grasping at threads of a life neither history nor circumstance could provide?   As I, too, grow old, I realize each tea lunch and haircut in Chinatown; each Christmas we spent together; the summer in Suzhou was a balancing act, in which you placed the pillars of parallel universes atop our narrow shoulders, our spines trembling under their weight.   Are you afraid to cross the threshold where the earth meets the barren chambers of lower realms— a hungry ghost, who disrupts the cosmic balance of desire and greed?   I will place your photograph atop our family altar, and offer you oranges and paper money, to provide even a hungry ghost a bit of sustenance, and let the incense smoke, curling skyward, guide our mixed-up, East-West souls drifting, two worlds, between. . And if I summon your spirit in prayer, you need not grant me anything, for your desires have taught me contentment, your restlessness has grounded me, and now I stand at the center of a universe, where yesterdays become tomorrows, and the gravitational pull stops the tides, so that our worlds might fall out of orbit and converge one more time.

我愛你, 陆凯琳

[kllew]

August 2001, Cape Cod

Every summer, growing up, my parents orchestrate a charade of my Americana childhood, in which they load the back of our minivan with water wings, beach chairs and a picnic cooler, and make the pilgrimage on the 295, past the concrete jungle, toward the knot of New England hamlets unraveling into patchworks of shoreline and sea.   For a week each year, we swim in the bay, eat dinner together, and light sparklers on the beach, the maladies of our daily lives smoldering in the embers, and drawn in and out like the tides.   While my father drinks scotch on the portico, and my mother broods in the house, my sister and I rescue hermit crabs, stranded by the surf.   We line containers with damp sand, kelp and shells, And place the crabs inside. I name my crab Tummy because the regression to bodily functions and infantile terminology makes me laugh.   Despite refilling the water every day, our hermit crabs grow listless, and mid-week, we return their lifeless bodies to the tidal pools and scrub the garum aftertaste of rigor mortis from the plastic.   --   On our last day in Cape Cod, a lump the size of a baseball erupts on my father’s neck. He insists he has pulled a muscle skipping stones, and despite my mother’s pleas, we do not return home early but play games of race the wave under the daggers of sunlight piercing the water.   --   Sometimes, I wish I could freeze time to that day in summer 2001, when all I knew of fragility was Tummy’s fishy aftertaste, and the tenuous, sunlit suspension between ocean swells becoming waves.   By September, my father has started chemotherapy, and a scar that looks like Halloween bisects his clavicle, where the tumor has been removed. He can no longer drink a scotch, or skip a stone, and my mother must inject him with artificial cells to manufacture some semblance of vitality. We never return to Cape Cod again.   --   Yet today, I wonder how it might feel to race waves or skip stones on the beaches of twenty years ago, or whether the tides might draw out the maladies from the depths of time and memory and into the swells, like shipwrecks left to petrify and disintegrate, borne back to shore by the waves, gnarled and smoothed into driftwood.   Or maybe I have learned to embody the tide myself, a resting spot for wayward hermit crabs, or tacit life force, gentle and soothing, yet constant and impervious to skipping stones skimming over her luminous surface.

[kllew]

4th grade, mrs. connolly’s class, mealworms

The kitchen staff in my office building has begun to stock our pantry with cold cereal. Raisin bran, frosted flakes and Cheerios are now the breakfast of corporate barons presiding over the post-gilded economy from swivel chairs perched in glass skyscrapers.

Every morning, I fill three Styrofoam coffee cups with cereal and stockpile them at my desk so I can graze through marathon stretches of conference calls and Excel messes, ironing out operational wrinkles as I peer through the walls of this glass box at the flashing lights of Times Square— each a jewel glimmering in the crown of architecture and sky.

The beauty of fortified cereal is that I can eat massive quantities without feeling full— revving the mechanism of the body while my mind goes numb.

Yet this morning, when I pop the top of the cup, the whiff of stale, fortified cereal catapults me back to April 1999. It is 4th grade, Mrs. Connolly’s class, and we are growing mealworms.

We place our mealworms in clear plastic boxes, punching holes in the lid and lining the bottom with a tapestry of bran. We are to observe our mealworms’ growth over their lifespans of several months— a nine-year-olds’ first foray into the study of mortality.

My mealworm is stunted, never moving or growing, to a point that I struggle to know whether it is dead or alive. I take to nudging it with the tip of a pencil, and only then does it spiral itself up into a tiny curlicue of exoskeleton and bran. While my classmates’ worms form pupa and emerge as beetles, mine remains, suspended in the limbo of lethargy and death.

My mother suspects that I’ve suffocated my mealworm, neglecting to punch enough holes for it to breathe, and she adds perforations to the transparent ceilings and walls and replaces the bran with cereal from the boxes from which my sister and I eat our breakfast.

Still, my mealworm shows no signs of growth, vegetating for a few more weeks until, one day, it doesn’t respond to the pencil tip’s touch, and I proclaim it dead on arrival, and never think about it again—

—until today, nearly two decades later, when I find myself wondering, is the human soul is as resilient an organism as a meal worm?

How long an expanse of asphyxia and famine  can it withstand before it withers and dies?

Is the pain of such protracted death acute, or does the body grow numb to a constant modicum of hunger and ache?

And how many nudges, air holes and scoops of raisin bran does it take to resuscitate? Or is it all too little too late?

[kllew]

on the last plane to formosa

“The Kuomintang was known to have used terror tactics against suspected communists, through the utilization of a secret police force, employed to maintain surveillance on suspected communists and political opponents…By the end of 1949, the Communists controlled almost all of mainland China, as the KMT retreated to Taiwan with a significant amount of China's national treasures and 2 million people, including military forces and refugees.”

My great-grandfather swigs baijiu and recalls the first revolutionary he killed, who trembled in the puddles of light, drenching the alley at midnight. A woman standing in a doorway, wails into the dark, and my great-grandfather draws a pistol from a silk-lined pocket because he dislikes the sound of her cries.

Suicide would have been the nobler way for China’s most feared man to escape defeat, but the Nationalists will need a police chief for the new regime, and my great-grandfather refuses to fade into the footnotes of history textbooks. After all, some must die for the Party to live.

The young man wears a white undershirt, splattered with hoisen sauce and blood, and his wife cries for their child, sleeping inside, while her husband’s shattered watch lays on the asphalt, still ticking each moment away. In the headlights of the Kuomintang cars, his wan face is luminous, as his soul floats over the alley, borne up by the east wind’s wings.

My great-grandfather sees how the body and spirit diverge. Yet only now, on the last plane to Formosa, does my great-grandfather realize how two men’s fates cross, like binary stars, eclipsed into a single point of light, so bright that he shuts his eyes, like doors of tents, lined with the tapestries of dreams.

[kllew]

Traversing the dusky corridor between Boston and New York, capping off a long weekend in Maine, is an Amtrak requiem for summer and fun. With just a few hours between me, Monday and reality, the landscape of rust-belt towns and jostle of the train car harmonize in a minor key of monotony and nostalgia. Yet the melancholy of the pilgrimage back to the city is a product of how lucky and grateful I am to have had the luxury of time and incredible company to fill the space of the weekend, and bearing that in mind, my heart is much fuller on the return leg of the journey.

This trip crystallized last-minute – a reunion of old friends and meeting of new. All graduates of the same college, we have since fanned out across the country, bound together by text message, mutual friends and the shorthand of shared experience. Those of us still in NYC convene over an occasional dinner or drinks and other sporadic landmarks on the social calendar, but naturally the commitments of work, grad school prep, family and accumulating other priorities fray the fabric of time. I also seldom meet new people with whom I forge an enduring tie, as the same constraints of time and prioritization render sustained, recurring meetings difficult, and divergence in current schedules, past experience and future plans only compounds the anomie of modern metropolis dwellers.

What astounds me, however, is the continuity of things with old friends. Despite distance and time, we are always able to pick up the threads of unfinished conversations and old memories. Jokes that were funny to our 19-year-old selves still make us double over with laughter, and we pull the same shit with each other that we did in college. Late night 7-11 runs, the idiosyncratic lexicon of slang and profanities that we continue to invoke and mutate in our adult lives, and the transposition of these old habits in the present day, fills my soul to the brim (corny, I know). Even the letdown of having a morning of vacation, rained out by our collective conference calls and work demands, is a little more uplifting as the tangle of laptops and chargers pays homage to days of tearing up the library, and each day that we are together again vacillates between catching up on the present, reminiscing about the past, towing the line between the (seeming) seriousness of jobs and mortgages and future plans, while channeling the silliness of the college students who couldn’t care less.

Thus, the semi-annual re-awakening of our shared trajectories and syntax; the temporary excuse to regress back to our sophomore year selves; and, ultimately, the convergence of these aspects of our identities with the people and lives that we have grown into, comprise the magic of these sacred, all-too-infrequent reunions. For a few days each year, we can inhabit the dimensions of both our present and past selves and spin new memories from the scripts of old ones, adding layers and colors to the tapestry lining our shared corner of the universe.  And while I hate to leave its temporary shelter, flung back to the workweek and the doldrums of daily life, I am newly energized and reassured by the coherence and stability of things that are immune to the passage of time and distance. They pierce the fleeting furniture of the day-to-day landscape with a light pure enough to illuminate the train cars, chugging ceaselessly forward into a needlepoint in the night sky, and to beckon us back, time after time. Like lighthouses guiding ships, these weekends are the sentinels, patrolling the coastlines of our lives’ topography.

[kllew]

learning to fall

As I have mentioned in these cyber chronicles before, yoga is far from my favorite form of workout. Contortions with the gym-going crowd of Murray Hill is hardly my idea of a fun way to spend an hour, and between the ombre-haired girls and the small contingent of fraternity shirt-donning men, they might as well christen it “bro-ga”. Yet over the past year, I’ve continued to go to classes on an approximately biannual basis because, despite the demographic and my own impatience with a slower-moving fitness routine, yoga classes are where I inevitably take away the most interesting tidbits of food for thought. Yoga is a personal challenge in calming my mind, gaining my balance and moving deliberately, and in concentrating on these realms, I inevitably learn a pattern of movement that illuminates an aspect of life’s physics.

Today, the yoga pose eluding me is a handstand, a feat of gymnastics that has been a personal sore spot from elementary gym class to the present.  Granted, my quarter-century self cares a bit less about wobbling before the anonymous, part-time yogis of a New York City fitness class than my eight-year-old predecessor, but it is still a movement that I someday hope to master. The instructor suggests that those of us who cannot perform a handstand balance our knees on our arms, stabilizing our core muscles, and lifting our hips as much as we can. This is one progression in a series to attain a handstand; the next is to plant one’s forehead on the ground and then raise one’s legs.

From a strength standpoint, the act of stabilizing my body while I raise my hips and balance my knees is perfectly attainable, and I am quickly able to fold my limbs, brace my stomach and grip the floor to mirror this pose. Yet I am unable to stay precisely at the human balance point for long enough to sustain it for more than a few seconds. The sensation is both grounding and disarming; there is a sense of solidity, emanating from my torso as I raise myself upside-down, yet I quiver at every fleeting thought of falling, every inkling on my body getting sore, and the shock of seeing the world from a different frame of view. Given the duration of time we have to play with the pose and adjustments, I try to hold it a bit longer each time until my muscles give out, and my body hits the floor.

Turns out my anticipation of the discomfort of falling far superseded the actual impact; within seconds, I am back on my feet, and on glimpse at my fellow bro-gis, I can see that the distance between their feet and the floor is much smaller than I’d calculated mentally. With these observations in mind, I can raise my hips higher and hold the pose for longer. Next, I hope to cultivate greater comfort with the sensation of being upside-down.

Perhaps I should question that it took a Murray Hill yoga class to remind me of this fact, but the actual painlessness of falling relative to the anticipated fear of doing so is a concept that transcends to all facets of my life. It is the same fear of losing something that I currently hold, which blocks me from attaining something greater; the cerebral crossed wires of grasping so tightly to what I have that I forgo another, equally interesting alternative; or the mental handicap of folding on a hand of cards without even taking a draw. In this way, the goofiness of wobbling into a human Flubber on the mats of the neighborhood gym is the reminder I need that I can regain my footing after I fall; fall once, and the fear of discomfort and loss will dissipate with the scent of Axe in the sauna.

[kllew]

back to the blogosphere

After a fourteen-month hiatus, I am back. Returning to the simultaneous solitude, emptiness and promise of a blank page and the cadence of words—floating from the depths of my consciousness to keyboard to paper—feels much like doggie-paddling in the ocean. While the sea is the origin of all life on earth, it is also unpredictable and novel compared to solid ground. Here, each letter is a pebble, dropped into the ebb and flow of my mind’s tides, then lapped up by shoreline to form the contours of coherent thought.

As I attempt to parse the events of the past year, I return to the themes of disenchantment, restlessness and inertia, palpable in the marginalia of what seems to be, in city betch years, an eternity ago. I question whether I have made progress toward achieving nirvana, or at least a twenty-something-urbanite-corporate-cog’s semblance of it. More likely, it is an ever-evolving process as the definitions of enchantment, grounded-ness and momentum change relative to my trajectory and sensibilities, but assuming a discrete endpoint planted firmly in the present moment, I can begin to define a frame of reference in the universe of personal reflection and growth.

On enchantment This is, perhaps, the realm which I have discovered most fully over the past year, and my nostalgia for life in the fast lane has receded to a faint ache, palpable only when I flex old joints. In fairness, my growing sense of satisfaction with the tally of life’s current balance sheet may be a product of time—becoming accustomed to the simplicity of breakfast and dinner to bookend a day; learning to enjoy a night’s sleep or walk through the Park without second-guessing their opportunity costs as functions of lost productivity; and weaning off the need to measure my worth based on the speed, accuracy and volume of work that I can do, or the extent to which I can sacrifice myself to the nebulous pursuit of excellence in a post-academic world. In many ways, I have my current colleagues to thank for their ability to honor a work-life balance; this has enabled me to find other metrics for self-worth and happiness than a “thx” email or bonus check, and over the past year, I have discovered fun and wonderment in (extremely amateur) dance, self-induced post-workday 5K and 10K runs through the cement jungle and teaching—all activities that my former self would have spurned as lacking ends, but from which I now derive joy, tranquility and a sense of accomplishment, independent of externalities.

Naturally, my thoughts still wander beyond the present moment, with graduate school, career and general future plans always fighting their way out of the periphery. Any other thought pattern would leave me too complacent, but I have, at long last, cultivated the ability to temper my anxieties with an appreciation for more immediate, more simply attainable sources of gratitude and fulfillment. Completing a long run at dusk—for which overcast skies manage to hold back a downpour and I am able to go a bit farther than last time—objectively pales in comparison to framing a sheepskin from a prestigious school. But I have reached the point on the continuum of contemporary enchantment that I can be happy about the former—a sign that I have (finally) begun to nurture and cultivate interests and a sense of self that can weather the other ambiguities and uncertainties. The very persistence of satisfaction over doubt and the suspension of urgency I’d previously conferred on more rational or utilitarian thoughts are, I hope, a few manifestations of contemporary re-enchantment, and a sign that I am capable of recognizing and igniting filaments of wonderment and beauty amidst the maladies of my striving.

On grounded-ness I have attained grounded-ness in the most literal sense. As a new homeowner, I am contractually and physically grounded, though grounded-ness borders on entrapment. That said, perhaps I would inherently prefer to live the nomad’s life, floating between places and endeavors. However, I fear that such a lack of anchorage will actually hold me back, so I am trying to embrace the sensations of landing and settling.

Homeownership has also grounded me, psychologically. I am now levered up (for some reason, the mental soundtrack of Cazette’s lyrics became the anthem of my foray into mortgages: Don't stop now / Off the ground / Higher than a supernova / Don't look down), and aside from being a red flag indicator of overly zealous financial risk incurred, taking on fiscal responsibility to the tune of Manhattan real estate has been a humbling experience. While I’d thought traversing the magic circle of morning taxi rides to my apartment then back to work, dealing in the human currency of sleep deprivation and too-high-stakes-for-mistakes mentality had been character-building, and I’d often found myself at the toilet-seat-sobbing, ladies’-room-outburst-prone nadir of professional character, the initial calculus of standing in the grocery store aisle, weighing some extra food costs against paying the monthly bills, was profoundly more overwhelming. Internally, at least, the toilet-paper-turned-tissue came out, and the figurative waterworks had begun. Since closing, I’ve re-calibrated my budget, re-accumulated some savings, channeled my own resourcefulness and prioritized the importance of simplicity.

What I initially viewed as symptomatic of a significant personal failure in financial management—taking on a second job—turned out to be another force that pulled me back to earth. For a brief time, tutoring re-kindled the inner adrenaline rush that I’d so craved, and ensuring no intersection between the spheres of my jobs was a new exercise in holding every aspect of existence in a sleepless, tenuous equilibrium. When one role wrapped for the day, another one began. Yet more importantly, tutoring reacquainted me with the joy and relative luxury of learning for learning’s sake—a notion I’d only vaguely appreciated as a student myself—as well as opened my eyes to the tenacity and finesse required to balance care with coddling; empathy and frustration. The pangs of exhaustion and exhilaration at seeing someone grasp even a glimmer of understanding, or the realization of caring to an intense level of worry for someone outside of one’s tightly-knit social tapestry, are fulfilling and life-affirming. In this way, tutoring has been one of my greatest and most unexpected labors of love, and late nights, buoyed back to secondary school forays into the Western canon, have grounded me in my own revelations. And ironically enough, I have necessity and sticker-shock to thank. 

On momentum Perhaps more significant than the distance I’ve traveled is the route I am taking. While enchantment and a sense of permanence have given me momentum in carving out some facets of my existence, I still sense inertia in the day-to-day, and I sometimes fear that too omnipresent a sense of satisfaction will lead to complacency where the ruthlessness of “harder, better, faster, stronger” should take hold. For instance, inertia lingers around following an overall tempo that would improve my quality of life; for reasons inexplicable to me, even, I retain juvenile habits—going to sleep too late and waking up too late; leaving dishes undone; letting mess accumulate; generally avoiding chores in the present that would make the future a bit easier and would also help me to establish routine and normalcy that could augment a sense of grounded-ness in my daily life. Perhaps I derive some twisted gratification from wallowing a bit longer in immaturity, or perhaps I cut myself too much slack in the one dimension of my life where the consequences of falling short are mine, alone. Perhaps it’s my stubborn resistence to seek help (even if it is my own), or the mentality that too much smoothness and choreography in life yields softness. But this inability and slowness to iron out the wrinkles in the plain fabric of daily existence is utterly ridiculous.

In an effort to combat this final bout of inertia, I have added a series of questions to the set that I ask myself regularly: Are you caring for yourself in the way that you would care for others or want them to care for you? Are you caring for your space in way that shows you take pride in your surroundings and is commensurate with the level of energy and toil that you invested in securing this asset? Are you acting your age?

Going forward, I need to reflect more on the motivation behind the “no’s” and ensure that grounding and enchantment harmonize to generate healthy momentum. Naturally, I cannot expect the process to be linear or finite, but the one resemblance that the art of living bears to the rationality of science is the significance of the inputs and initial conditions on the output. As chaos theory posits, one small change in a dynamic system leads to profound differences in future behavior.

Thus, with the gravitas of modern mathematical thought on my mind, as well as the drive to regain my writing voice, I should seize the opportunity to make the most of a watershed moment in personal history. I should use my words to cipher the evolution of my desired outputs and to parse the inputs and conditions, simultaneously conferring on them what I hope will be a dimension of beauty and insight that transcends the banalities of my foibles and follies.

[kllew]

These windows are the most essential embodiment of art. Not only are they beautiful in themselves, but no matter what lies on the other side, the windows transform it into something equally beautiful with the magic of lines and space, pulling the trigger of visual imagination and creating something of enchantment where there is otherwise none.

[kllew]

to the man in the silver sports car who missed the entrance to the LIE

Please stop yelling at the cop directing traffic at 34th Street. She understands that you need to get to the airport, but you overshot the turning lane, and there's no room to back up.

You are wearing a sports jacket and have golf clubs in your back seat. Maybe you're headed somewhere nice for the weekend, or en route to Los Angeles, San Francisco or Chicago to do whatever it is that businessmen do on business trips. You're probably not used to not getting your way, but please stop yelling at her. You are headed somewhere nice, or up, at least, and she is standing in the rain, in front of the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, like she has been every day for the past year. Besides, every road has an exit or a place to make a u-turn. Sometimes, you'll just have to drive a ways before you find it.

[kllew]

I love to be a tourist in my own city; to step out of myself and my surroundings and look at them from a different perspective. While millions of people pass through for a few days, trying to memorialize New York's sights with as many snapshots as possible, I am lucky enough to call this place home. And while I do not need snapshots for sights to which I bear witness every day, I am even luckier when they do merit a photograph--too beautiful to be relegated to the realm of memory alone. 

On this evening, the lights of the Manhattan skyline glimmered like jewels in the crown of architecture and sky, mesmerizing reminders of the city's beaconing opportunities juxtaposed with the ruthless terrain of the concrete jungle. This is the spot where possibility and impossibility converge.  

[kllew]

Learning to Breathe

[kllew]

According to an instructor at my Murray Hill gym class, I need to learn how to breathe.

I started attending yoga classes sporadically—a fact that both amuses and appalls me in that I am the last person who I would ever guess would end up on a diet and exercise regimen (thanks, perpetually high blood pressure, cholesterol, doctor’s warnings and too-tight skinny jeans), and that my own internal intensity barometer is so high that I would succumb to invoking some organized activity in an attempt to facilitate lowering it. Admittedly, I much prefer the classes that leave me breathless, sweat-drenched and sore, in which emptying my mind is incidental to engaging in an activity so exerting that I cannot focus on anything other than the movement, my body and that very moment. Spinning, for instance, has fit that bill. Turn the resistance on the stationary bike as high as you can, reach the point millimeters before you cannot even move the pedals, and run until your lower body burns in pain. In 45 minutes, I can get on with my day, adrenaline and endorphin levels high, while every other physical indicator of soreness and perspiration points towards having undergone an excruciating workout.

Yoga, on the other hand, is not nearly so infectious. Perhaps I am not performing the poses correctly, as this requires a great deal more finesse than the brute force of driving a stationary bike up an imaginary hill. Perhaps I am too easily discouraged by the low calorie burn and seeming inefficiency of it, or being stuck for 75 minutes in a mirror-paneled room full of girls in sorority shirts, who subsist on fitness and air, trying to attain a beach body and nirvana, is more foreign to me than the borderline clubby atmosphere of a dark spin studio throbbing with pop beats (if only it were Grey Goose in that water bottle….). Yet I suspect it that my distaste is a symptom of deeper maladies.

Whenever I attempt to empty my mind and focus on the cadence of my own breath, the stillness of the room or the intricate folds of muscle and bone that compose every movement, I find my mind wandering, from acute awareness of the boredom I feel when my brain is devoid of thought, towards the litany of things on my to-do-list and projects left undone at work, to the forbidden territory of skimming the messages on my phone as I count down the seconds on the clock till I can unfold my limbs and release the pose. Any time interval exceeding twenty seconds is too long; the more calming the waterfall soundtrack and stiller the room, the more conscious I become of my own restlessness. I wonder if my inability to regulate my thoughts without any external intervention is one of my greatest flaws, and for that reason, I try to make yoga an intermittent part of my so-called fitness routine. Every class is a new opportunity to attempt to clear my head, center my weight and re-calibrate.

This Thursday, it seems that my lopsided, text-message-transmitting warrior catches the instructor’s eye. When she walks over, she rests a hand on my back and feels my breathing. The average person takes 25,000 breaths per day, she tells me, but people who focus on deep inhalations and slow, calculated exhalations can take as little as 9,000. My breath is very shallow.

She urges me to focus on breathing, alone; the diaphragm is a muscle, too, and you need to be taught how to use it. I laugh to myself and reply in my most New York voice, so you are going to teach me how to breathe? The notion that I need to re-learn the most basic, life-affirming movement is utterly absurd. But I figure, why not. Self-improvement can transcend numbers on a scale or a blood pressure monitor.

She instructs me to push her hand away from my back on every inhalation—to make sure my lungs are full to capacity—and to exhale through my mouth, very slowly. At first, I cheat, inhaling during the exhalation phase, trying to prolong it, but the instructor corrects me. Let your stomach expand as it fills with air. Don’t pull your navel into your back. It’s about filling up your lungs, not zipping up a tight dress. If you inhale deeply enough and control your exhalation more, you will still have more air yet.

After several repetitions, I have finally mastered this sequence to the instructor’s satisfaction, and she moves on to the tri delt yogi in the next row to make another adjustment. For the rest of the class, I focus more on breathing than I have in probably my entire lifetime, and for once, the cerebral fidgeting induced by to-do-lists and distractions recedes into the depths of my consciousness.

On the way out, the teacher assures me that learning how to breathe will help me in all of my athletic endeavors. With more oxygen delivered through my bloodstream, and the ability to calibrate my inhalations and exhalations with the most demanding parts of pull-ups, lifts, rows and squats, she tells me that I will increase my work capacity and experience less discomfort. And while I am sure that she is right, I cannot help but think that this lesson in breathing will help me in ways beyond my workout.  Not only did this single adjustment help me attain some level of the focus and mental control that I had been fruitlessly chasing, but it reminded me that even the things that we most take for granted—things that we think we know so intimately and comprehensively—are not what they seem, but can always be cultivated and refined, and that, in itself, may be the most powerful catalyst of all.

[kllew]

On Mother's Day

Whenever I return to the city from a day at my parents’ home in Connecticut, I’m struck by a sudden spell of narcolepsy. Lately, I’ve found myself, waking up on empty commuter trains, already parked in Grand Central station, my neck splayed into the aisle, un-punched ticket still in my upturned palm, at once acutely alert yet still swimming in and out of the thick ether of unconsciousness.

Having grown up on caffeine and insomnia, I generally pride myself on my ability to stay awake, functioning on the various gradations in the flavors of sleep deprivation and grogginess. Yet these days, I jokingly wonder if my mother has laced the food with a cocktail of Benadryl and Ambien, or whether the immense quantities of homemade cooking hitting my stomach induce an unshakeable slumber as my body exerts all its efforts into digestion—a food coma force majeure—because I am no longer used to eating full meals off porcelain plates and silverware that has to be polished. Similarly, I wonder if the sleepiness is a side effect of the visit being over; the body’s sigh of relief to be returning home, tiresome details of logistics and conversation behind me, back to the solitude and predictability of another workweek.

This past Sunday, Mother’s Day, the MetroNorth is only late by fifteen minutes, though even this minor delay makes it difficult to get to my sister’s piano recital on time. As usual, I’d taken the latest possible train out of the City in order to get to Connecticut in just the nick of time. Yet now, the day upon me, knowing that every minute I save on the exit from the train and the drive to my parents’ home from the station will help to preserve the equilibrium of a visit rendered even more tenuous by any glitches or lateness, I hover in the vestibule, several stops away from mine. In my head, I echo the same secular Hail-Marys muttered by a fellow passenger to her companion before disembarking: “Let’s keep this short and sweet.”

When I arrive home, it is as though I’m coming in from a day of school. My mother greets me from another room of the house, and we sit in silence on the drive to the recital. I apologize profusely and promise not to be late next time, to which she shrugs and tells me that it is okay if I don’t want to be here.  My father doesn’t know the way to the piano school. It’s the same one that I attended ten years ago, before I quit the rigors of solos, competitions, recitals and the silent, adrenaline-filled moments before every performance, on the brink of either forgetting pages of sheet music etched into muscular-skeletal memory, or executing every bar, every crescendo so perfectly and full of heart that the audience skips a beat before erupting into applause. According to one of my old conductors, that pregnant pause is the ultimate musical tell; elicit that nanosecond of silence before the applause—the audience’s momentary shock and calm as the spell of the music is broken, followed by the semi-spontaneous reflex to reciprocate the auditory spectacle—and you know that you have done your job as a performer. My sister is a virtuoso.

 After the recital, we eat dinner at home, and my mom cooks despite it being Mother’s Day. She insists that doing so will be best because my sister has to study for exams the following day, and, giving me a once-over, conjectures that my diet must be poor.  Over dinner, the charade of questions is the same: how is work, is your apartment clean, what are you doing with your life these days, why don’t you make better use of your time, why don’t you call more often, what do you like to eat so I can make it for you and you can come home again? The answers are the monosyllabic ambiguities of intimates who have drifted apart: the same, yes, not much, sorry, sorry, anything.

I shift my full focus to the food: cutting, chewing and swallowing. Tonight, my mother makes shaved noodles with chicken and ginger, and Chinese eggplant braised with soy sauce and chili paste. The flavors and variety remind me of the takeout dinners I used to order from Zagat-rated restaurants or the dishes my mom used to make when I was my sister’s age. It is the most wonderful meal I have had in recent memory. Granted, the instant-oatmeal rationings of a tired-of-everything twenty-something on a strict budget does not set a high bar, but for now, this legato culinary symphony of sorts – the undertones of ginger and staccato pops of chili – drowns out all the questions and disappointments.

 My appetite surprises me tonight, and I ask my mother for seconds. For once, the questions cease, and my mother’s face lights up with more shock and delight than I have ever drawn from her previously. I made plenty, she reassures me, and offers to re-heat the pot so that my next helping is warm. I’m used to eating things cold, I reassure her, and she keeps me company at the empty table as I clean my second plate. For a moment, I have never felt so full.

 On my way out, she begs for me to take the leftovers home: free dinner for a week, she offers, all you need to do is microwave. Thanks, I say, but you should keep the food; let Dad and Eliza eat it. Are you sure, she presses. Yes, I say. I do not like it when everything is simply served to me. Life becomes too easy that way.

I end up missing the next train back to the city and take a later one. My mom drives me to the station this time and waits with me in the car until the train pulls in. Sure enough, I am unconscious by the stop in the next town over, and at the end of the journey, I find myself, once again, alone on the parked train, jolted awake as if by precise circadian programming or my body’s realization that we have stopped moving and arrived at the destination. This time, the drowsiness is so overpowering that it is hard to move, and I feel as though I am sleepwalking through the city streets.

There is a rental car agency a few blocks from my apartment, and in the lot, overflowing into the street, they have parked a new fleet of cars, available for rent. These cars are GM’s latest — an array of the makes I most dislike driving because, like cheap women, all the hardware feels loose. I just received my new driver’s license – a replacement from a night when I lost my shit (literally and figuratively) — and the thought crosses my mind that all I really want to do right now is rent one of the silver Malibus, program some far-flung coordinates into the GPS and drive, drive, drive.

When I get home, I give into sleep once again, removing my shoes and crawling into bed without showering. I recall scolding myself for eating so much of the narcolepsy-inducing foods and setting my alarm for daybreak so that I have time to finish up work, left undone from last week, before this week begins. There is unfolded laundry on my bed, but I am too tired to put it away, so I squeeze my body into the space between the piles of clothes and feel myself sink. When I awaken, at four, the light is still on, and I realize, once again, that I have not showered or changed clothes. Heart racing, I reach for my phone to turn off the alarm, when I notice a text message from Mom. Thank you for coming today, she says. I am happy you liked the chicken dish. For so many years, you did not like home so it is nice to be able to make something and know that you enjoy it. I am very happy today to have both my daughters here.

And that, I realize, is the beauty of mothers. Even when you yourself have stopped caring and grown endlessly restless, Mom does not. Despite every disappointment, every time we fall short of providing the love, effort and appreciation that she deserves, Mom still tries to make us happy in any small way that she still can. As old as we grow, even when we think we do not need her cooking or her concern, she is the anchor that draws us back—back to a place where, even just for a few moments, we can feel perfectly cared for, safe and full. 

[kllew]

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

--

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."

I remember reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time in 2008. Marquez enchanted me with his ability to infuse words with magic and wonder. I have never read another book that so wonderfully and suddenly vanquished my inability to suspend reality. 

[kllew]

a brief glimpse at the end of a long journey

A woman in a turmeric sari walks circles in the airport terminal. Already she is lost among the bags of other trans-Pacific wanderers.   Inside of the ladies’ restroom, magic sinks pour water without a human touch. But for her, the faucet is dry as the water pumps in Dhaka summers.   The golden bangles click against her wrist as she frantically rubs her brown hands back and forth, back and forth in the basin, as the rosy-faced Americans do.   Alone and far from home, the woman prays for water to rush forth and cleanse her hands. But mostly she prays the Americans can’t see her tremble, a twig in a monsoon.   A young girl in a ripped miniskirt emerges from a stall, smelling of smoke and glances at the turmeric sari.  “Look,” she says in a pantomime of palms, as water gushes into upturned hands.   The yellow-haired girl smiles and shrugs: See? She retrieves a cloth from the magic dispenser and offers it to the sari-clad woman, who splashes water onto her hands and face.   It reminds her of rain in the barren deserts of her childhood memories— the welcome shadows on the horizon, promising to cleanse the smog and lift the heat.   Sometimes she sat on the veranda in the storm, until beads of water dripped down her face. Yet only now, ten thousand miles away, does she truly rejoice for the wave of relief,   and unspoken prayers, answered by deities, who smell like cigarette smoke and smile before evaporating into the swells of baggage, bodies, greetings and farewells.

[kllew]

Sometimes, my mind wanders towards the heavens, and I dream that I could be 女媧, the goddess who mended the sky when the pillars of the universe caved.

_____

The top of Pen y Fan reminds me of Kundera. There is a beautiful quote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful..." I never finished reading that book, but I remember this quote indelibly. It has etched a cadence into my poetic memory. 

[kllew]

A Page from the Book of Questions

[kllew]

Give me your curve-setters, your douchebags, your entitled Ivy Leaguers yearning to get rich, the wretched refuse of last season's OCR. Send these, the financiers, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the bulge brackets and Big Four.