MANUCRYPT

• Perfect Snow 12/1/25

  It will snow tomorrow. The white powder will sprinkle lightly off the treetops like powdered sugar being tapped onto a cake. It will sift quietly through the branches, leaving a layer of softness atop the ground. Before it falls, the snow will dance gently on the tips of pines in a delicate yet perilous position. Then each flake will take a synchronized dive off of the edge, and in their shared elegance the snowflakes will swirl themselves into soft mounds of dust. These midair mounds, fluffy and airy, will funnel their way down and descend in well-paced whirlwinds. They will land in the hazy softness that continually grows. Somehow, it is within its nonreflective form of snow that water seems to reflect me best. When I stare down at the ground and see the soft blur of snow particles. I cannot make out a solid shape, let alone my own face. But I can see myself the most, better than I can when water is just plain water and it is absolutely clear. I don’t care to see beauty. It means nothing to me. This alone might make me the least beautiful person in the world. I don’t care about the shape of my nose, the asymmetry of my eyes, the fat under my lips, the way my cheekbones seem to hold different weights, the crookedness of my fingers or the unevenness of my knees. I don’t understand why I don’t care about these things. I don’t necessarily consider it all to be human imperfection either. Rather, I drive my attention towards the thing that can be perfect about a person - the white, hazy soul. The perfect, tender particles that blur into their own image of nothing at all. As long as they are perfect, they are flexible and can take on any form. They choose to remain airy to maintain this flexibility; they never make themselves compact because they understand that they are the epitome of uncertainty, though this doesn’t mean they’re valued at less. The particles understand that it is actually because they are so valuable that they cannot be set in stone. They are like diamonds, amethysts and other crystals that should know not to mold themselves too deeply into the ground and drive themselves too deeply into the dirt surrounding them because they are going to be dug out. They leave the underground and learn to float above the surface. In the air, they dance gently because they are pure like angels; they aren’t filth stuck buried in the ground. In the same way, the particles do not let themselves stay stuck in us. They free themselves and move into the sky at any chance they get. They move towards purity because they are perfect. And when perfect particles leave us for the sky, we become even less pure and the particles become even less attracted to us - creating a relentless loop of abandonment. Really, I can’t care for anything. I can’t care for imperfection because I stay distracted by the jewels of purity and perfection. But those jewels are always stashing themselves away from me, in distant royal parts of the world. Really, I am all alone. My hazy white soul is broken into tiny little particles that are constantly being sucked away from me by the sky. I want to think that my soul is flexible and can mold itself into anything. An angel, a bird, a cloud, a sun. All of these images can be created inside my chest out of that perfect snow-like material that floats around inside of me. But the truth is, these materials would rather leave me to be with the real angels and birds and clouds and sun. How devastating is that? I’m so worthless that even my soul would rather leave me for familiar perfection. The truth is that I have nothing. My snow is driven off and my bodily imperfections are not even noticeable to me. I have no metaphysical or physical. I have nothing inside of me. I have nothing to prove that there is nothing inside of me. My only evidence is my own empty-handedness. And that is probably perceived as me being too worthless and lazy to bring anything. I am invited to a feast and I want to prove that I deserve to eat. I want to prove that I am hungry, and so I bring no food because I have none. When I get to the feast, the host and other guests accuse me of not bringing anything because I am lazy and selfish and leech off of other people. They come to the verdict that I am the kind of man that never deserves to eat. So I stay hungry. But what could I have brought to prove my dignity? I am empty without a soul or a body. Does anyone understand how desolate that is? No. Because in order to understand, you would have to have a soul and a body to do the understanding. And if you had a soul and body, you could not picture how desolate and lonely you would be without one. It will snow tomorrow. I will stay empty, searching for my reflection in the particles. I will stay searching for the cold, tingling numb sensation that the snow is supposed to inflict on my body. I don’t know where I’ll find either of these things. I don’t know if I’ll have to wait until I die, when I’m reunited with my snow particles that have flown off into the sky, to feel. But right now, I don’t think I want to break free from this world and search for perfection across that gradient above the world. I feel that there is more value in keeping my distance from that perfect soul. What’s perfect should stay unattainable, after all. With that, I don’t mind the separation between myself, body and soul. I don’t mind being bound to the earth, with its limits and filth, if it means my soul gets to be off in freedom and perfection. I don’t mind losing my body if it means my soul gets to fly, even if it flies away from me and forfeits its association to me. I don’t mind if nothing is stuck to me, inside of me, if it means that all of my material gets to be free. I don’t mind anything at all. I don’t mind not being beautiful, I don’t mind being empty, I don’t mind being confused at all. I’ll lie in wait, gently and quietly without complaint like the soft snow on the ground. The ground snow that waits peacefully, with no inquiry about when it will melt and be free - knowing that because it is on the ground, other snow particles can float off. I don’t mind my body scorching and dying and withering up if it means ashes can float towards the sky. I understand that none of this makes sense. I hate it. So just let it fade and blur like snow particles until it takes no shape at all. How comforting is that?

  
  

  Lemonade and Clockworks 11/27/25

  This story starts with an unnamed man sitting under the sun in his garden. He is desperately scrambling to find a notepad because he wants to rewrite Shakespeare. Though he knows nothing of sonnets or iambic pentagrams, pentameters - whatever they’re called, he feels a calling. So he sets up his lawn chair and a glass of lemonade next to him, made with the squeezed juice of unripe lemons from his lemon tree. Sitting on his chair basking in the golden sunlight, if the man ever feels his mind start to lose focus and drift towards the sky, he’ll chug back that piercingly sour lemonade and jolt himself back into reality. But for now, his mind is clear and his notepad is in front of him. He picks up his pen and clicks it a few times, picturing the rhythm of a Shakespearean sonnet - if he ever knew one. Ultimately, it’s all up to his imagination. Because the man, despite not having ever read any Shakespeare, is convinced that he can create something of the same caliber. He is convinced that if he really takes the time to really soak in the sunlight that fuels inspiration, he’ll create something better than Shakespeare ever could. Remembering this, he casts away his lawn chair and sits right in the tall grass, letting it envelop him in creativity. He gets on all fours and rolls around in the sunny, wet grass like a filthy sunburnt pig, smearing his face with dirt. He wants to feel nature at its severest degree. This is because, though the man does not understand how to read Shakespeare but he does understand one thing: Shakespeare drew inspiration from the world. Whatever it was that playwright wrote about, the ideas must have been somehow triggered by his everyday sights. Shakespeare saw the sun and the grass and the sky, just as the man was seeing now. These elements were the same. So the unnamed man would then ask, “if different pieces of material are cut from the same fabric, should they each not be threaded the same way?” What was Shakespeare’s imagination without his eyes? Surely he did not invent love and murder himself. He had to have seen something that wove its way into the inner workings of his mind, detonating an invisible bomb that released his ideas in fluid form and let them spill onto paper. Point being, he could not have invented an entire story without knowing anything about the world. Thus, the man himself wondered just how complete of a story he could create if he did know everything about the world. If he understood and internalized every bit of dust, every blade of grass, every ray of light and every meter of the sky, just how much inspiration could he draw out of the world? Just how much of this fluid life could he cut away from the flow of the world and convert into his work? Shakespeare, I think, would have understood this: writing funnels life. Like squeezing unripe lemons into lemonade, a writer takes nature in its unripe, not quite edible form and squeezes out drops of it until it is digestible. A writer takes life, the world, and filters it so that it is suitable to human senses. Take paradise, for example. I’ve always heard that you can’t picture paradise because it's just so grand and beautiful; the human mind wasn’t created with the capacity to handle such grand and beautiful things. But if you filter paradise through a funnel and think of the little pieces that make up heaven, like infinite chocolate cakes and not having to sleep, then it's easier to picture. It fits into our range of understanding. I can picture eating a chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. I can picture spending my nights reading, drawing and playing guitar instead of sleeping. But I can’t picture entire, eternal happiness from all of these things combined. In the same way, life is so succulent that we cannot even begin to imagine tasting it in its full form. Though I cannot process life as a whole, I can recognize the meaning of individual elements like grass and sunlight. I acknowledge these limits wholly. But the man does not. He thinks that if he enhances his understanding of each of the elements, he can somehow muster the strength to push all of the pieces together into one complete image. He thinks that just by knowing of Shakespeare, and basking in the same sun that he did, he can string together both of those elements into a full understanding of literature as a whole - something impossible for a singular person to accomplish. He thinks he can string together time periods and the sky and grass and sun so he can rule the world. Hell, he even generalizes himself so much that a singular name is too much of a limitation for him, so he chooses to be unnamed so that he can encapsulate every identity in existence instead. The reader can use any replacement name. Arthur, Lucas, George. With no physical description, the reader can assume any race. White, Black, Asian. With any race, the reader can assume any ethnic background, any cultural customs, any family size, any language, any facial features and any religion. It is not even confirmed that the man is from a real country; his language could use made up letters and his eyes could be three times the size of his nose. The possibilities are endless. The man thinks he has achieved the pinnacle of humanity. He is everything at once. He encapsulates everything, everyone, all at once. But the reader of the man’s story cannot picture every possibility. The sheer number of possibilities runs outside their range of mental capacity. So, truthfully, the reader pictures nothing at all. Just a blank man, with a blank face too expendable to be labelled. His background is given no thought; he is a template for a person. Nobody. Just an ignorant man who wants to reinvent literature even though he does not even understand the first bit of Shakespeare. He uses the sun and the sky and the grass as pawns to advance closer to a thorough understanding of the world, but he makes no effort to understand each of them one-on-one. He only wants to experience the simultaneous effect of each individual element so that he can pretend that he is experiencing the combined forces of the world. The story ends like this: the sun and sky and grass each get angry at the man. They feel as if they are made to be expendable, as if they can be swapped out with any other element. The sun feels as if it can be replaced by dirt; the sky feels like it can be replaced by a stream, the grass feels like it can be replaced by stars. All the elements know how the man considers them replaceable. So vengefully, the grass spirals out into weeds that strangle the man and drain his nutrients. The sky grows dark and cold. The sun grows hotter. The man shrivels, basking in the lethal sun, still under the illusion that he is radiant when really he scorches and crumbles. That is his fate. In an effort to generalize himself by diminishing the specific value of his components, the man himself ended up diminished. Contrarily, I have accepted that with life in a funnel, I can only taste a small percentage of it. I will never be able to handle it whole. But this small percentage already overflows with too much vitality for me to catch. I have accepted that I cannot understand nature. In my lifetime, I will not even be able to learn everything I can about grass. What are all the different kinds of grasses? What are all the different kinds of insects that live in grasses? What are all the different angles that grass can be cut at? How succulent is each kind? The truth is that there is so much meaning and beauty in grass alone that it overwhelms me with enough understanding and joy to last my entire life. I have also accepted that I cannot understand humanity. I won’t meet every person that lived, lives, and will live. I won’t know everything there is to know about every civilization. But even regarding the few people I surround myself with today, there is infinite opportunity to find meaning in them. I still have so much more I need to learn and understand about my close friends, and I think that if I did understand everything about them, my understanding of humanity would fulfill my lifetime. Now, I’m going to write a much better story in just a couple of sentences. A 33-year-old man named Arthur usually works on Saturdays. But this particular Labor Day morning, he was off. Arthur worked in business management and was very collaborative. He was great at giving speeches; his diction was beautiful and his word choice was succulent and the impact his words had was grand. Thus, he was often praised for his intelligence. In recent weeks, it had started to build an unsettling level of confidence within him, and he started to wonder if he was one of the few geniuses of his time period. So, on this Saturday morning, Arthur decided to put it to the test. He got out a pen and notepad and decided he would let his genius run free onto this paper. With whatever people assumed his IQ was, Arthur was sure he could effortlessly reinvent literature with some kind of revolutionary prose. He clicked his pen a few times, for good measure, then began writing a story on his notepad. Basking in the sun in his garden, lemonade in his cupholder, he sat back in his lawn chair and wrote endlessly. After soaring through 7 and a half pages, he gently took a sip of his lemonade and received a sour shot straight to the brain. He quickly went back to reread his work. It was shit. “I give up,” he said. In humility, he dumped his notepad into a fountain in his garden and went through the patio door back into his house. Inside, he changed into lightweight shorts and a polo shirt, and from the shoe rack by his front door, he grabbed a pair of navy sandals. Arthur then stepped outside, shutting the door behind him, and began walking to the local library. He walked in the grass along the sidewalk because he liked the feeling of long grass blades softly brushing against his shins and ankles. The ends of the grass, tipped with fresh morning dew, left tiny sporadic sensations across his lower legs. Occasionally, he saw little grasshoppers perched on the grass blades. They looked up at him brightly with radiant eyes that looked like small orange gems. Arthur was hopeful. He would drive to the library and read Macbeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other works. He would analyze plenty of Shakespeare’s characters and plot devices before taking another good attempt at literature. He would even study authors other than Shakespeare - and forms of writing other than books and plays. Though Arthur would not end up surpassing or even understanding all of literature, his partial understanding alone would be so bountiful that he would end up becoming a well-acclaimed author - writing passionately for the rest of his life. In his recently published memoir The Broadest Understanding of Life Is That It Cannot Be Understood, he writes, “Even though the complete world is on a spectrum of light that we, for the most part, cannot see, there is a small section where light is visible to the human eye. Only a glimpse is needed for sustenance. The rest you uncover will shine relentlessly until it blinds you. Ultimately, what I don’t understand is that we have such little capacity for understanding the individuality of the world, yet seem to have infinite capacity for greed in understanding the wholeness of the world. Life is infinite, anyways. We can’t take it all, but we are entitled to enough. We can’t choke on a fruit of vitality; instead, we must savor each drop.” If the point is still unclear, in my final attempt at conveying my meaning, I’ll tie this all to the clock scenario illustrated by critics of capitalism. A skilled clockmaker might be able to make one clock a day. By handmaking each part - the cogs, the lens, the frame, the hands - the clockmaker is able to feel a personal connection towards his work. Through his own stylistic choices, he can imbue this clock with a piece of his own personality and take pride in the elegance of his work. But when the capitalistic approach is taken and clocks are overproduced for more profit, each worker has a task so specialized that it feels meaningless. Perhaps one worker paints the numbers, one worker drills the hole in the back of the clock, one worker arranges the cogs in piles. But none of them feel the fulfillment of their work. None of them can perceive the meaning that making a complete clock by themselves has to offer. In Arthur’s world, no skilled clockmaker exists. There is no singular person that can build an elegant clock from start to finish and catch its entire meaning. Instead, each person is forced to become a cog in a machine. Each one is forced to do their tedious little tasks that serve no individual meaning. Though each cog does contribute to the greater clock whole, that whole becomes so inflated that millions of clocks end up assailing you. In your bewilderment, you are made incapable of discerning any kind of beauty or truth. This is because overproduction diminishes the meaning of a single clock. If you’d look at just one clock alone, you’d realize the endlessness in its intricacies and how it could be observed from an infinite number of directions. You’d realize just how much insight you could gain. But because you are greedy and ignorant, you think that with more clocks comes more meaning. You let that ocean of clocks flood your eyes and tumble you to death instead of opening yourself to the idea that a small sip may be all you need to quench your thirst eternally. You rush to catch the endless machinery that can crush your hands effortlessly. You rush past the world in pursuit of it. If you are reading this and don’t have a name right now, then I sincerely hope that in the midst of your whirlpools of clocks and unsqueezed lemons, you can manage to slow time just enough to catch a drop of juice on your tongue. “I wonder if I am just desensitized to the hundreds if not thousands of things I see and hear everyday, and in my bewilderment, those things end up assailing me like floating ghosts, one after another.” -Dazai Osamu, Schoolgirl “...you are a windmill turning round so fast in the world that you become invisible.” -Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box “They ask me where the hell I’m going at a thousand feet per second.” –Radiohead, “The Tourist”

  
  

  Writer 11/18/25

  I write to understand the world and my existence in small pieces. And if I want to write something so meaningful that it brings worldly existence, life and death into question, I need to stimulate those same extreme circumstances in your creation. When I write, I must prepare to die. On a high mountain of thoughts, I have to dangle myself over the edge in order to reach furthest out into the horizon, to feel my hand closest to the sun that illuminates your mind. Or climbing a tall tree of lethal emotion, I need to use less fingers to climb so that I can use more fingers to grab its fruits. The risk is necessary no matter the place I choose. I must lose my grasp on safety and comfort so that my hands have room for success. I must be prepared to let my understanding of a notion die and decompose and recombine and grow and complexify, and then I must reach for every new branch that’s created. I must be prepared to take something I thought I knew everything about and slaughter it, so that it can be rebirthed and raised much taller than it was before. If you want to write to understand the world, you have to be prepared to kill any previous interpretations you had of it as well as any previous interpreting versions of yourself. I prefer the countless suicides over endless confusion.

  
  

  Swollen 11/2/25

  I have too much to hold. I have too many feelings, so I enlarge my hands to hold them all, then I enlarge the material inside of my hands to fill in the hollow new spaces. The stretching of tendons and bones hurts profoundly, so I expand my pain tolerance. The concept is, if I balance a feeling on one finger, it might feel unbearably heavy. But if I expand that weight to all 10 fingers, it becomes tolerable. And if a feeling is bigger than 10 feelings, then I’ll grow 10 more to hold it. But it stays true that I can’t change the weight of a feeling. All I can do is stretch myself, painfully in accommodation, and use my own weight to handle every experience that evokes some emotion wanting to overtake me. Sometimes, I wonder if stretching is the right thing to do. Why should I keep being bigger than feelings? If a feeling is too big for me to contain and yet I still want to take it on, let it crush me. If I have an experience that is too big for me yet I refuse to let it go for my own sake, let it overtake me. Maybe bad things that happen to me only happen because I inflict them upon myself. I only hold too much because I take too much out of life - and I refuse to leave behind any sort of offering to the world in return. I feel guilty about my greed to keep every feeling to myself. But I keep stretching. I lessen the pain of that guilt by making it easier to digest. I enlarge my stomach so that it can handle more consumption. And when a feeling enters me like poison I can’t cure, I diminish its effect by enlarging my blood concentration to wash out the toxin. The concept is, I take the frame of our solar system, which makes the sun look huge. I can’t change the size of something like the sun, but I can change my worldview. So I replace the preexisting frame with the image of our entire cosmos, in which our sun looks very small. When big unchanging thoughts flood me, I make my parameters for thinking bigger. Though, doubt comes by again. Do I try to stretch myself to fit the entire universe inside of me? I act like I can ever expand my imagination enough to picture the entire cosmos. How do I create such an image? I feel so pretentious. But if it was possible to somehow stuff the universe inside of me even if it meant stretching myself to the infinities, would I do it? Would I know my limits or expand them until they broke me? I don’t mind being in pieces if each shard reflects honor, but I’d feel guilty about staying whole and pathetically unharmed. I’ve always been a firm believer in enduring to achieve. And what offering do I give? What piece of my small, pathetic self can I possibly give back to the world that is worth appreciating? I’m still wondering.

  
  

  Work Work Work! 10/29/25

  What do I make of anything? I am a teenager. I am in the most transitional period of my life. I am meant to feel like I am wearing the lens of adulthood over the lens of childhood, briefly giving me a complete view of my lifetime. I can see the entire spectrum before and after me. To my left, I picture pacifiers and toddlers and kindergarteners and middle school cafeterias. To my right, I picture adults and middle-aged crises and dementia and death of old age. But God slides me across the timeline like a Candyland piece - my head is plastic and unmovable. I am not designed to turn my head; instead, I look straight. As a toddler, I looked straight at bright pink heart-patterned bedsheets and Disney princess posters. As a kindergartener, I looked straight at dirty post-it note confessions and Valentine's Day paper bouquets. As an adult, I will look straight at stoner metal and beer pong. When I reach 30, I will close my eyes and put my head down on my work desk. I will look into the abysmal meaning of my existence and why I am alive. When I’m old, I will forget the pictures of each day and live tomorrow with fresh eyes. When I die, I will look straight at God. Placed at the teenage square, my plastic head faces straight. The lens of adulthood is over the lens of childhood. I think I have the most input I ever will. But I realize the lens of childhood is fading out, and the lens of adulthood is fading in - giving both an uncanny level of transparency. I see almost nothingness in front of me. I wake up each day to look at memory and anticipation, but there is no present. All I can collect with my eyes is little faded pieces of life that don’t have enough energy and glow to feed my vital cravings. And all I want to do is turn my head left and right to collect those lively shimmers all around me, but I’ll break my little plastic neck. I look straight as if I have a needle in the collar of my shirt, pointed up under my chin. I had a red DVD player when I was 6. It was old and the settings were a little inconvenient; pressing the fast forward button would forward any movie straight to the end. Refraining from pressing it, I’d have no choice but to watch the full movie in what was complete lethargy to my 6-year-old attention span. So imagine I’m sitting patiently, watching slowly. But 20 minutes into the movie, the screen goes black. I can’t see anything. It continues for what feels like 20 more minutes, then 40, then an hour. Do I hope that my DVD player will snap back into it and start playing my movie again? Even when I have ample evidence to say that it wont? Even when black has felt 3 times longer than color? Do I sit and wait staring at that black, lifeless screen with the kind of patience that goes directly against my childish nature? I crave liveliness. Black movies are so boring. Too dull. To escape the dullness, I can hit the fast forward button. I can skip straight to the credits and get at least 5 minutes of playtime and colored entertainment, though it’s not much better. But at least there are white letters to compliment the black. At least there are words to see. At least there is meaning. At least there is something that resembles life. Once the credits finish, I’ll shut my DVD player and move on with my adolescent days. Maybe I’ll make a painting out of glue and dried pasta, or I’ll draw Teen Titans Go characters with the help of YouTube tutorials on the TV. Maybe I’ll go outside and ride my Elsa-themed bike up and down my dead-end street. Or I’ll sit at the kitchen counter, which I’m too short to reach on my own, and I’ll eat Cheerios out of plastic Ikea dishware. (The truth is, I’m making up all the details. The memories are fading and so I cannot see them with certainty. But this is how I picture my childhood.) Naturally, I want to die. If I die, I will skip teenage blindness and move past the adulthood that I cannot expedite by normal means. I will lose the right side of my lifetime. But, I will see. Because death is a seeing phase and being a teenager is blindness. It’s a trailblazing kind of dark that obliterates any of your previous notions of light. It’s a vacuum where you cannot even hear silence, and the non-noise pierces your eardrums harder than anything loud you can picture. Those seizing Panera Bread table buzzers. A ship horn. The fucking rapture could happen on the outside and you wouldn’t hear a thing. No, you can’t hear quiet either. You can’t hear the whisper of your own voice, nor the presence of your own thoughts. Not even a static left behind to indicate that your head has lost signal. And not being able to see is torture. I am told to endure it, to wait out the blindness and become an adult once this is all over. Because my eye sockets have just outgrown everything I knew how to see, and my adult eyeballs will have fitted themselves soon. “It’s all hormones, and they’re only this reactive for the time being.” But in that little sliver of time, those 2 or 3 transitional years taken out of the many decades of my lifetime, I will lose all concept of time - and the years following won’t mean anything after all. So teenage blindness is drastic. It’s worse than death. When I am left with no sort of meaning or entertainment that feeds my vitality, it dies from malnourishment. And I would have killed myself for a taste of something alive. But I’m here. And this year, I became a mother. I carried my child on my back through a blizzard that I knew would most certainly kill it for the sake of my life. But I hoped that wasn’t true. And hope gave me steps through the storm. But the kid died, of course. And now I am left helpless. I have to make do with the sacrifice, the recycling of life that birthed me. I must decompose him inside of me and move on, or go back and lay next to his corpse until I also freeze. It’s one choice or another, and both are equally justifiable. I want to keep sliding right. I want to become an adult. I want to become old. I want to die of old age. But I can’t deal with the idea of lugging around life like it’s dead weight. When I’m 20, I can’t picture carrying a dead kid on my back everywhere I go. On the subway coming home from work or going out to dinner with my friends. I can’t picture losing my child and having no time to grieve. When I’m 35, I can’t picture just keeping his favorite stuffed animal in my closet or his favorite song in my mental pockets - because my jacket ones are stuffed with business cards and cigarettes and everything else that is current. I hate breaking my vitality down into something pocket-sized, and I hate that my hands will grow big enough to hold it. When I’m 50, I can’t picture that my child will be lighter than a feather, as light as the angels on my shoulders that count my deeds, because whatever weighted meaning remains is drained out like water from a cell that loses volume and shrivels up and dies. Will he really be dead from now onwards? Will I really go into adulthood with no vitality and be expected to open up my life there? Is it true that, even going into adulthood, I still hold the naive and childish belief that I could have beaten the monotony and the gray? That I could have kept my vital weapon somewhere safer, or taken him through a storm that his endurance was better suited for? But enduring the storm is impossible. No matter what level of endurance you have, there is a snowstorm, sandstorm, earthquake, tornado or tsunami somewhere, near or far, that can decimate you effortlessly. No matter how much you can endure by nature, or how much you train. Life kills you. Life kills you when you are young and you miss the funeral for a work outing. Your death slips into the past as quickly as it happens, and you can steal a glance or two from your car window of “now” if you’re lucky. And then you move along, and the trees and buildings replace the view within seconds and they hold your eyes in place. And in a way, we both did endure. He endured death and I have endured life ever since. Life is so painfully dull when there is nothing to see. I dread when the bleak office buildings and their musty rooms, the dreary ceiling lights that weakly illuminate every object but seem to remove their luster. The chairs in their filthy mahogany coatings and the dust over the tables, the little threads that come out of the lounge chairs and the little splotches of stain and mess on the gray, hard, hollow floor tiles. The disgust I feel with how blank everything will be, and how the tiles will move from light gray to mid gray to dark gray to near black to pitch black with all the mud and sludge that every footstep drags, the tarnish that every boring, monotonous person evokes. My coworkers, who will be so boring and lifeless that I will not even be able to regard them as people. The clients who’ll step with black dirt on their shoes from all the other habitual stops in their routine of life. The cafe every day, with ground up muck that makes cups of colorless coffee. The grocery store with its dirty carts that everyone touches all the time. Everyone’s repetitive, soulless, lackluster lives do not only lack light, but they remove it. They remove it wherever they step. They add black and black onto the floor that pulls down the light from the ceiling and sucks in every last drop. The gray tile that I am going to become, the spot in an array to be covered with more and more blackness and robbed of more and more light. I can’t fucking stand it. It’s all so boring. But only children are afraid of the dark. And my child, my life, is dead. All I picture on my left is death. All I picture on my right is black. All I can see is nothing. But I’ll learn to live with scary, foreboding words. I’ll stay alive until my next crisis, when I’m 30 perhaps. Because to recognize blankness everywhere means that I see more than I think I do, and that nothingness has more substance than I think it does. Maybe meaning will come if I keep living, too. My new understanding is that to become an adult is to let a child die, one you would have given your life for. But neither of us gets to pick who lives; Time kills the kid every time. And it secretly makes me happy, because I did crave life and selfishly want it all along - even if it’s all black. I’m no martyr, after all.

  
  

  Happy Place 10/21/25

  I want to talk about my happy place. In my Lifetime Activities class last year, we did a yoga unit. We spent a couple classes practicing yoga poses and their difficult names, learning about the chakra and the mantras that aided in meditation. During one particular class, we just laid flat. The concept was to enter a state almost like sleep, except you were awake and listening to a YouTube voice guide you along the journey through your subconsciousness. I remember, around half an hour into laying flat, the voice asked me to picture my happy place. A place I could stay in forever and never have thoughts about leaving. I thought I would try to think of paradise. But immediately, a field came into my mind. I swear I fell asleep and dreamed the rest. The sun was so radiant that I waited for it to scorch the grass. The green was so bright and oversaturated that I waited for it to blind me. But somehow I could take it. All the light of the universe was being poured into this inconspicuous acre of land, and I could contain it. The entire cosmos funneled into my veins and somehow I could concentrate it into a single state of being. I pictured myself doing a one-legged standing pose, with my hands pressed together in prayer, as I stood on a mountain peak. Gravity pulls down from every direction, yet I just keep standing still. That was the kind of luck I had, being able to see the intense light of the field. There was no other life. Not even small animals or insects, no rabbits or beetles. I don’t even recall any flowers, let alone any bees or butterflies to pollinate them. It was just grass and the sun, and a thick tree nearby. I pulled the tree in my vision closer towards me and I saw what I thought were people. I thought their bronze tint was a result of the sun’s glow. But no, they were definitely statues. Creepy statues in a circle, like the Weeping Angels. And in the middle was me. I was being buried alive by all of them. I don’t remember if they were using shovels or their hands. I just know that they wanted me gone. I can’t remember if the statues had the faces of my friends or were all metal replicas of myself. Whatever they were, they were burying me. Viciously, but it didn’t look painful at all. In the middle, I just took it. I didn’t fight back or try to dig myself out. I think I even remember scooping dirt onto myself with my own hands. I heard the voice bring me back into consciousness. It told me that, any time I felt sad, I should think of my happy place and reinsert myself there. The video ended. There were lots of tears on my face. But I stood up, rolled up my yoga mat and headed off to my next class once the bell rang. For the rest of the day, I tried to debunk my vision. To decode its cryptic meaning and apply the extract to my life felt near impossible. I don’t think I’ve ever come back to it since. I started dating my first boyfriend around a year ago. I met him on August 9th. He lived in Maryland and he had no flavor. Photography, football, cars and a lackluster personality and set of ambitions. But I tried to force compatibility. After all, we had mutual future travel plans. He talked about the mountains in Skardu and a local beach he’d visited the previous summer. I talked about the Sea of Stars in the Maldives. It’s this sea with little bioluminescent creatures, and when you swish around the sand under the water you can watch them glow bright blue. It’s so beautiful. I feel like I see these stars every time I cry. I close my eyes and press hard on them, and I start to see phosphenes. The ones I always see first are the little bright blue dots. It looks like bits of teal glitter scampering around underneath by eyelids. The longer I press my eyes shut, the more images I’ll see. Mainly flashing white lights, pink streaks and green stripes. Sometimes they’re color-changing. But the blue dots always come first. And they always remind me of the Sea of Stars. It makes me happy. I feel like I should regret designating a field as my happy place instead of an ocean. I wonder where to go with this now. I can say, “in the end, the sea and land combine to make the oceans and continents on our globe; the world itself my happy place.” Or I can say, “one day, I’ll meet somebody who I can call my happy place, who makes my emotions stir like rough ocean currents yet lets them rest like still grass on an empty field.” I can say, “now, I’ll visit every field and sea there is until I’ve seen enough happiness around the world to make a happy place deep inside of myself, letting it grow leisurely like a thick tree.” But none of it feels like it matters. None of it feels right. In the end, I’m pulled back to harsh reality. I’ve never seen a field without the liveliness of rodents and bugs. I’ve never seen a body of water with a bioluminescent glow. But I think I’m starting to grasp the point now, because I realize that a field shines so bright without life whereas an ocean shines only because of it. What does that mean? That life only permeates through certain places? I wonder what the criteria is.

  
  

  Beauty and Filth 10/16/25

  I know about lots of trees and how they can be drawn out. I know about the redwoods down in California, and the birch trees up in Alaska. The Everglades in Florida, the Amazon in South America, the Congo Basin forest in mid-Africa. And I know about intangible trees, too. The ones that don’t bend or snap like the ones we’ve seen. The ones that like to sing and dance, swaying their branches in harmony with the wind’s song. I know places where trees grow upside down. I know trees with leaves in place of roots, trees that expel carbon dioxide, and intangible trees that even bear intangible fruits - like weird blocky lemons and apples. I see all these tree malfunctions every time I take a peek into my own body. I see this large tree growing inside of it, and it keeps on moving outwards knowing I can’t tailor the shape of my body to it. It can make me twist backwards in ways a human spine shouldn’t, or bend me forwards or backwards like heavy fruits are weighing down my head. It sings and it dances carelessly while I painlessly snap and break and dissolve. And then it buries my fizz into the ground and replants me. The sun shines down on me so I can grow back to life. I know about the deserts. The hot ones and the cold. I know about the Sahara across North Africa and the Gobi desert in Mongolia. I know about the succulents in Australia and off the southwest coast of the U.S. I know about the Great Basin. And the Arctic foxes and snowy owls. I even know that Antarctica is the largest desert in the world. And I know about the impalpable deserts. The ones that don’t respond to the thermometers you stick into their mouths or asses. The ones that don’t seem to have a temperature at all. They make you shiver uncontrollably and sweat out oceans. But, like the trees, they keep on growing inside of you. They visit every region like busy landlords, evicting temperature from every chamber. Your heart and brain lose temperature. Heat is stolen from your lungs, and beaten out of your stomach. But your organs don’t go cold. They just don’t feel anything that can be measured in Fahrenheit or Celsius. And they eventually crumble and die like rocks and minerals, buried back into the ground. And the sun shines, returning warmth and temperature and life. I know about lots of biomes. I feel them, too. They have a remarkable effect on me, shattering my body and rebuilding an ecosystem made of beautiful elements. It feels amazing afterwards. But you never get used to being broken down. To have what you know as sunlight sucked out of you like bone marrow and the water drained from you in something like programmed cell death. You are left in drought and darkness to shrivel up and die on the pale, cracked desert floor or in the mucky rainforest sludge. You wonder why you’ve been abandoned by the world of beauty and sacrificed to the world of filth. You reach out your hand to scorn the world one last time and you feel some warmth. You take it as the illusion of life that comes around during death. Because your pulse is falling quickly, and so you look up to put it all into perspective - just one last time. How vastly you’ve been betrayed by the sky which has so much to offer and instead leaves you to sink into filth. How vast the capacity for your anger can be, and how warranted it is. You look up at the sky to face it, and curse it one last time, and let it see your eyes and how much hatred is inside of them. But the sky is hypnotically blue, and the sun is shining down on you. You feel the warmth on your fingertips slowly seeping into your soul, restoring your color. And you realize that the world is just the world. The filth beats you to death and the beauty resurrects. I don’t know how to write in a way that will break you up like the world does. I’m afraid I can’t capture sunlight at the right angle, the one that makes it glisten so magically that you know it’s really the world’s sun. I don’t know how to give you the kind of description that’s vast like the world’s sky. I don’t know how to paint out a tree that sings or dances in a way that beats and shatters you so that it can rearrange your entire molecular structure. I don’t know the words that feel like the sunlight’s replenishment, I don’t know the words that feel like the rivers’ refreshment. I don’t know how to generate life quite like the world does. So when I ask myself to write a story modeled off of the world, I just can’t do it. I can’t get the detail down to the stripes on small caterpillars and the fuzz and line patterns of the leaves they crawl on. I can’t get it down to the delicacy of spider silk and its beautiful structures. I can’t. I know nothing about creating specificity when I am part of the pattern, the world’s intricate web of complex life. I know nothing about the composition of a leaf when I’ve never seen its underside. When I’ve only been a droplet, among many other droplets, looking at a leaf so big that it has its own horizon. I know about the rainforests and the deserts but I haven’t seen them in whole. I haven’t floated up in the sky above each one and gotten a good look at every tree and snowcap. I don’t have eyes as big as continents and I don’t have hands as big as the sun. I’m grateful to the world for breaking me into life again and again, but I don’t like having to have to die each time. I don’t like the pain and suffering that comes each time, though I know it must clear the path for sunshine. I am grateful to the world that I am alive, but I wonder why I was born from it if I haven’t inherited any of its gifts. I wish I could create the kinds of pieces that cleanse you, the glued up fragments of sunlight and rivers and even the dirt sometimes - all the refreshing worldly things that restore life. I wish I knew how to fit them together. I wish I knew the shape and proportions needed from each one of them to create the perfect shard of feeling, one sharp enough to cut deep into bone and let gold spill out of you. I wish I knew how to shine words in the ways that make you willing to feel all the hurt just for a glimpse of beauty. Words that shine down feelings and life like sunlight does, reminding you that apathy isn’t worth surrendering beauty. I don’t know how to do it right. So I’ll have to experiment with every level of detail until I craft a beautiful sunray. I’ll mess with the intensity and clarity of the ray. I might throw in minor obstructions, and I’ll turn the heat knobs back and forth until I find a perfect temperature range. I don’t know how to craft beauty so sharp it kills. And I don’t know how to create stories that restore life to the parts of us we never even realized had died. So I’ll have to use names. I don’t mean Kalahari instead of desert, nor do I mean Nile instead of the river. Actually, I mean the river under a bridge near my house. It’s on a trail that leads through the woods, a direct 5-minute path from my house to Henry James Memorial School. Around halfway into the walk, there’s a low wooden bridge that’s missing 2 planks. It has initials carved into its rails, and there are these big leaves everywhere around it. Underneath the bridge, there’s a creek too small and narrow to be called a river. It doesn’t get much sunlight, and you can’t kayak or picnic near it. It's not your ideal image of a beautiful river. But every time I want to make a generalization about my life to make it more decorative and appealing to my audience, I am going to remember this ugly river. I am going to remember how much specificity there is in my life, and how much material it gives me. Even if it's not some endless silk fabric, I have plenty of individual warm cotton clothes that get me through my winter walks across this bridge. Beauty does make profound changes. But the world doesn’t break you down and build you up so that you can see the beauty of life. Rather, it’s so that you can feel alive. Because, whether the world is filthy or beautiful, the impression it makes on you is only profound because it's real. The world is just the world. And you’re just meant to feel it. The beauty and filth past that always seems to blend together anyways.

  
  

  Crazy Land 9/6/25

  Selfish as many times as can be said, I have to find my own journey as if I am as important as any of the things that have made me. I am obliged to be a piece of the Earth, a piece of society, a piece of humanity and a piece of infinity. I am a shred of each, and even the thinnest shavings off of these blocky categories hold the most essence. How do I know that I can contain all of it? My hands are big enough to hold it all but are they dexterous? Is my body capable and suited enough to maintain momentous vitality like such? I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do the world justice. I don’t know if I could be legible as its scripture. I don’t know if I am articulate enough to poke out its many meanings with my tongue, I don’t know if I have the pitch to make a melody out of it, I don’t know if my skin bears deep enough to endure life’s carvings, I don’t know if my skin’s undertones give proper luster to the scarifications, I don’t know if I am beautiful. I don’t know if I am artistic. I don’t know if I am a proper vase for the showcase of life’s roses. I don’t know if I can embody life in the way it should best be shown. Why was I chosen as a vessel for vitality? Why was my soul sent down from heaven and imbued with consciousness and the quality to be alive? Why is it me when other people are murdered? What do I have that they don’t? Why am I put to work? What criteria of being life’s ambassador do I meet that the dead do not? Why am I a container when the contents of everyone else are emptied? Wretched balance of work and life. I took a position under life and a dead man is sitting in my office because of it. How can life place itself so virtuously inside of me that it draws out my greed as if sticking its fingers down my mouth and ripping out the base of my tongue in one quick motion? How am I put to gluttony when others are put to death by starvation? It kills me. The resentment, the guilt burrows itself in my intestines like tapeworms. They gorge all of my nutrients and they deprive me. I too am starved. I am starving to the point where I anticipate near death. Is it selfish to compare myself to the people who deserve life’s sustenance more than anything? Does it make me lack empathy? Do I lack empathy and fill the space where it should be with incessant, meaningless guilt? If I had supple empathy, surely I could contain life. I could contain the compassion for others that feeds vitality, that carves out with its teeth what it means to be alive. But I can’t. Instead I have the guilt that consumes me and reduces me into something so finite that not even life has the eyes to see. What is it? What is it? Where is the pinch and how does it feel? How can I feel it before making it go away? How can I hurt for the sake of contribution? I accept humanity. I accept its hurt and its pain and its misery and its tragedy and its rape and murder and abduction and violation and martyrdom because I am humanity. I am alive to suffer the collective burden and I take my part in responsibility if it means I get to be a part of this beautiful, faithful, birthing, refreshing, blooming, healing crystal that we call humanity - if it means that I get to call one of its glimmers my own. I renounce my lungs. I cut out my heart. I shoulder the guilt. So I can contribute to the pain. The blazing pool of shame, hatred, suffering and torment that evaporates into the sweet, purifying steam that bathes us in cleansing mists. I accept that life will break me to rejuvenate me. I accept that life will kill if it means I can live, if it means I will die when the next call for life breezes over. When a new soul on Earth rings my doorbell in warning instead of inquisition, and it breaks my locks before I get up to open the door, and it walks into my living room to knife me in the throat directly, I will not resist. When my vitality needs to transfer, a new home with new lightbulbs and a new block to spin its car around, I will forfeit my own containers. Dead people rot on empty stomachs. But they don’t get hungry. They don’t starve either. Still, I am sorry I never got to feed any of them - and contrarily, I sincerely apologize to the concept of death for refusing to feed it into my own chambers of acceptance. I would also like to renounce my structure as a container. Life, I assure you that I am better off if you tear my body to shreds in the process of using me. When my vessel contract is terminated, please crush me into the ground with a million fists - a million times stronger than my own importance. I just want to be torn up by the world. Pure confusion. Everything is pure confusion