Episode 91: Freedom

The truth is, I will be indefinitely living with my parents until I find a job. That's the truth. 

It's not a happy one, but until I can afford my own space, my own car and car insurance, this is the life. It's not a bad one at all. It's a compromise. 

I need to decide what's more important. Staying home and saving up money for my Masters and its living costs. Or leaving the nest early once I find my first job and have the freedom I want oh so desperately. 

I crave my freedom every day, but maybe all the freedom I need exists when I finally own my own car, rather than own my own space. More on this later heh.

The past 2 months living at home have revealed to me exactly what being a daughter entails. A good daughter. Not the kind of daughter I was when I was also a student, which was barely a daughter at all. I think I just woke up, stressed myself with homework and applications for internships or for school, ate, and patted a dog.

But now. Now. It's a lot of cleaning up after people. The kind of tidying work that goes unnoticed. Thinking of others all the time. Massaging everybody every evening. Mom's back is sore. Yen's injured area is tender. Dad's knees are inflamed. This is the kind of life my Mother has lived forever and dedicated so much to. The art of being present for others. Now that I'm fully invested in this role, whilst job searching, I realize how very rewarding and at times, exhausting this can be. 

In just one night, I've walked and touched everybody. Made several promises and plans for the next day. Fed and watered a dog.

I become one with my own home and family. I become a critical gear in the machine, doing important work shit. It's no longer just forms and documents or taxes that I take care of. It's necessary functions too. It's taking care of others.

My full time is taking care of my family and this home.

Shit, it's pretty cool. And fun. And awesome. I love it actually.  

This f-unemployed time is a gift. I am growing into it and it grows on me. I don't think that when I finally start my career and have a job, will I ever have as much time to invest in family and home as right now. So these times are the good times. I know that much.

To constantly give and give to those who love me unconditionally and have always been there for me. For this to be my turn is incredible. 

The only and biggest peeve of all this is not owning my own car. Haha, it's not a financially sound idea to own a car as an unemployed person right now, but this means I have to rely on others to get anywhere. 

So... I have significantly less freedom than I used to in college. This comparison makes me feel like I'm always reporting to my family. Where and when. 

I never ever had to report to anyone where and when in college, unless I was out all night to my roommate. But this level of worry from parents who are so scared of Houston at night... I get it. But it's exhausting to me. 

Houston is not at all a safe city at night, but I'm smart enough to navigate it. I was smart enough to navigate Singapore, DC, Smith, NYC, and California all alone at times. Every time I stay out or go out in the day, it's a where, when, and why, and with whom. 

The 4 horsemen of joy haha. 

I want my freedom back. I want my friends back. 

I'm literally home all day at times. Alone with myself, my own thoughts and job applications. Plans of going out, all the dancing I used to have at Smith -- scarce. 

It feels like a sad existence. 

I do try my best. I try, but too many memories of how it used to be. In college. with friends and plans like the drop of a hat. Always surrounded and enveloped by new experiences and stimulating conversations with diverse personalities. Agh. God. I miss that terribly. I ache for that every moment where I've felt that I've stayed in my house for far too long. 

Only to realize, Houston is wayyyyy toooo dang hot and unwalkable for a solo time. And... many other factors. 

I just, really want to feel like myself again. I would go on these solo trips to other Texas cities or California and be a good travel bean, escape to these beautiful places and all that, only to come back home to scarcity. Scarcity of people and plans and energy. Just in my room, scheming and then sleeping. Feeling myself shrink and shrink. Soooo unlike who I used to be. 

That abundant me. 

Not wanting to spend too much money on experiences, because... unemployment :I. 

My discipline for myself and my dreams shrivels a bit every day at home. Any momentum I gain feels like... I'm just gaining more momentum to be still. To sit still, sit at home, worry no one, go out nowhere, be sad. More mentum to be a sad bean. A still bean. Unchanged and quiet and alone. 

I feel oh so alone sometimes. 

All this dependency on family to get anywhere I'd like or meet anyone I'd like. All of this reporting. Worrying the family when I overstay or go out late. But shit, that's when I feel most myself. At night! Looking all shiny. Under a crystal globe.

I miss it all. 

I need to start anew again. I know. I know that deeply. I try, but then I feel more tired, like pushing against a wall. Hitting every wall every time. 

I feel stuck a bit heh. Plenty of stuck. 

Houston, agh. How much I hate your unwalkability. FUCK YOU! >....<

Welp. I try, you know. I try to be positive. I know this is temporary. But I feel like everyday, getting out of bed is so freaking hard, when there's nothing to look forward to. Like glue, on my back.

Freedom wouldn't feel like that. 

Episode 90: My Golden Castle -- A Late Episode of Singapore

**Note to dear reader: read this episode with this music in the background:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEu-5Pwq5Js&t=472s

Below is an old episode!! A bit more about my time in Singapore studying abroad. :)

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3.29.22.

Let it be fact that my second time at Universal Studios was in Singapore.

We took a cab there on Garima's moola of course, haha. All of us were excited to do everything. Naina was brilliant and brave. She could ride all the scariest rides and still come back for more rounds. Shikhar clung on alongside her, trying to convince himself it'd get better. Neha was all about it, doing everything and looking massively cute bean. Garima tried it as well and ended up liking it! God. I never tried anything scary. I didn't have the heart too. I'd pass away. I'm sure Ian would have liked to get on, but he didn't. 

There was a Transformers ride with a 1 hour wait time and instead of going with the rest to try the scarier rides with smaller wait times, he decided to wait with me even as I egged him on with the others. I know I'm not a charity case then but I kind of needed the charity. I'd be miserable waiting in line that long on my own. But in line, Ian and I talked about so much. So many questions. It felt claustrophobic too being in such a tiny dark space, with loud noises and flashing lights all around you, but the one thing I clung onto was the movement of our conversation. In and out of Korea. In and out of the U.S. 

Eventually we rode it and after, I swear to god, I thought the memory of the ride was better than the actual ride. I rode Transformers about 8 years ago and I swear... uh, I should have just left it up to memory. But alas, too late. It was over. The hour was over. And we headed out to wait for the others. When we regrouped together, it felt so nice again to hear all their stories of the scarier rides. We then decided to ride the Indiana Jones Pyramid ride I think, and I remembered from childhood again, that that ride would have a backwards drop in the dark that no one could anticipate. The wait was long again, but together, we played little games. Took lots of little pictures in the dark. 

Shikhar didn't anticipate the drop and his scream was the loudest, highest pitched thing I've ever heard. I couldn't help it, none of us could as we burst out laughing while the ride took us on its bigger spins and zips. It was awful but knowing how badly it scared Shikhar earlier made it much more bearable. When the ride was over, we had to all take turns laughing about this like kids. Gosh. 

Out in the sun, we did other smaller rides together. A pterodactyl ride that took us high up the trees. I hated it, like usual. I'm truly not meant for theme parks!! :( 

I'm made for water parks :D.

And alas, one of the last rides we waited on was the Jurassic Park ride. I anticipated a drop as well but unlike my 14 year old self who had the chance to but didn't get on, I got on this time. 21-year-old Ngoc did it. Got on. Got plenty soaked. Hated it. Ian hated the moment he heard he'd get wet. So he bravely watched our bags. Would later accompany me to revisit Shrek's castle while the others wanted to do more scary rides until closing time. So our group again, separated and will later happily regroup. 

(Theme parks are meant for waiting with your friends.)

And then... after a long day of it all. We reached Shrek's castle. I loved it so much. Grounded and golden -- It felt like home. I twirled and twirled as I took it in with my group of lovely beans. We all took a picture there together, one of my favorites of us.

My heart simply melted at its sight.

Golden and golden. Dreamy in all the colors that make me yearn for the truth I grew up with. Back to when my heart would pound at every Disney movie opening and my imagination ran limitless. Peter Pan is going to fly into my window any moment now. Back when I wanted to have royalty in my blood and a happy ending by the end of the year. Because I once believed, as strongly as I believed standing still and bathed in the sunsetting glow; magic is real. 

Staring up at spirals and gold upon gold of a castle convinced me so. These well-known shapes, even the scent of the air. A ball was going to happen in the evening and I'd happily be at the center of it all. I couldn't look away. I never knew I could want something so much, something so intangible and childish and almost forgotten, buried in my chest-- this feeling that my fairytale rested on these fake cobblestone steps. I was awed. Music drifted from all around, all the best soundtracks, telling me to fall in love. 

Fall in love with the magic I had once known so surely in my heart. 

Which is why I melted and couldn't stop thinking about going back after we walked through Far, Far Away so quickly. It was perfect tonight that I followed my heart and the magic I felt there, that I chose to overstay. Until they told us kindly to leave.

Ian and I sat there for what seemed like forever. I had been videotaping myself making a wish into Frog Prince fountain. I wished for the same things as I usually do. More certainty. That I will be where I should be. May my ancestors and loved ones guide me there.

And so that is what it is to stand below this sight (my picture below), and pretend. Yet feel so true all the magic that still lives in my heart.

what my christmas lights do

There are no dark corners here. 

How the gold of each small bulb dances and reflects on the shiny covers of my old books to the far corner, against the purple rose necklace I left hanging on my lamp, along my old orange-brown table so that I may only guess its darknesses.

I don't see darkness.

Bright enough to see a spirit. Not bright enough to wake up a late-night, sleepy but floating mind that writes these prose poems. 

Under the right lighting, I can tap into who I want to be at that moment. How incredible that different colors and brightnesses make me feel the world differently. 

How reliant I am on my eyes to move my mind and mood and attitude. For I am a creature.

I just wrote some letters tonight. New ones and started old ones. Everything is stamped. Now it's just getting these folks' addresses. I felt like writing these really belated letters because of the golden colors touching my forehead. 

A head pat. Half looking like my college dorm memory. Half making the room look like somebody else's room in a Christmas cottage painting. I sleep here.

I sleep here. And I hate it. I really hate turning off these pretty lights and seeing absolute darkness for the first 15 seconds, scurrying to my bed and hiding behind a plushie.

I hate waiting for my eyes to adjust. Something could be moving and I'm just alone, figuring it out. Eventually, the outside light of my neighbor's would move weakly through my window and light up the tip of my room. 

If only there were more dust in my room, so that when light travels, I can see its path. So that it might light things along its way, instead of just the wall. The room might be brighter then.

But in the morning, even at 11, barely noon, I turn on my Christmas lights. 

I open just one window's blinds. 

I mess around on my laptop.

And then I am transported into another atmosphere, the one that the movie plays at the end of a teary moment, the camera zooms out, exits the window out into the night and there you are, the viewer, enjoying the lighting of that space you were in only once you've left it. How easy it is to find light in darkness. As much as you yearn for it. 

But without getting too deep, this is how I like it. 

Feeling powerful and in control of my life is easier than I thought; it's what my Christmas lights do for me.

Thank you lights, for your exceptional power. Thank you me, for remembering it. :)

vulture

You can't keep living on a dopamine chase.

Nothing grows there. 

No amount of rain known to humankind can make the desert an ocean again overnight. 

Ocean. Life. Coolness. Lakes. Like...

You can search for as long as you wait

only to be as soon hungry as you were last full. 

For a word. A look. A wonder. For the end of this hunger.

Your eyes wide to the world. Heart open like book pages. Stories of success. Stories with the end, you have memorized. 

There are memories of the last happy high that survive. 

May you feel a third of that in the next page.

You can't keep trekking barefoot on burning, scorpion-filled sand. 

Don't ask when, who, what you'll be happiest. 

Your feet will only be stung. Red, swollen, barely scabbing.

What does one do in deserts if one does not move? If one does not search? 

Then one... shrivels? while one waits? 

Or do the burnings and stings of the search transform one's feet? New callouses. Adding heat resistance to numb your memory and next ache.

There is a memory, of when things were wonderful, but it is only a repainting as you trek. A metallic, shimmery mirage keeping you hungry.

How the heart aches, only when it strays from happiness.

How well the memory works, when it strays from the capability of making new ones.

How far one strays in the search for happiness. 

Happiness is not in a hormone. Is not dopamine. 

Happiness was never all that worth it. It's not that big a deal. 

No deal. 

Not real. 

Just a transaction, perhaps, between the world and yourself, where you make sure to take the most, leave with the best deal.

Of course, that's not true. 

Happiness is a part of something? A part of that last first-scoop-of-ice-cream memory. A part of whatever shit. Whatever. Add whatever nice memory you've got here.

I've already found the answer before. On purpose, I've just circled around it like vultures over carrion. For what purpose? I make myself laugh. Because, well, frankly... it's a lot easier to mess up finding the quickest route to dopamine than it is aiming the arrow at myself. At my own self-progress.

The bush is already beaten. The sun burns. The vulture circles.

I only dry up, shrivel and shrivel, from living and re-living the same truth.

I can't find happiness. I can't make it. I can't make anything that isn't far from being unreal. 

I don't know what I'm spewing here, but the thoughts are heading somewhere. 

The point is, I can't keep doing what I'm doing. 

I can't keep a hunger like this.

I've got to stop flying over dead bodies. 

I don't want to die feeling like a sad bean that has wasted her time finding something the easy way that in its easiness, always is the wrong way.

The better way for me is through it. No more circling. A cut. Across paper and memory. 

I want it to rip. 

I want to aim the arrow and shoot a straight. Keep things simple. Keep my eyes on the target, in the heat, feet scalding as I remember water. 

I remember water.

If the arrow is straight and I keep my eyes on the target, I hope I find myself just as I am reminded of myself. 

        A vulture is diving somewhere right now.

The water I had been searching for was always in my blood. 

        The vulture can only feast when it stops circling.

I imagine that arrow piercing my back. How it traveled across the globe, 360, from myself to myself, painting my back a red flower blossom. I fall where I am. The gasp that escapes is a mantra to time where I could have been.

Spewing nonsense on my knees about wasting my time and how silly I am. That I didn't. Simply, I didn't think to remember myself. I didn't want to.

But the water, may it be everywhere. Just as I remembered. Escaping from my back and cooling my skin for the first time on that desert night. 

I hope in the morning, I wake up. White shirt now crispy and maroon. That I walk on, never forgetting that I do have what I should have remembered much, much earlier, to save the many reincarnations I was as a vulture -- circling around the same damn problems.

Circling, seeing the truth, and still flying as if blind. I keep true to the inertia of the circle, and unlike a vulture, I don't brave the dive. My carrion decays below me.

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omg dear reader! this poem was like so out of the blue. I have no idea what happened. it started out so different from how it ended. I forgot every rule. I just went on, throwing everything around for a little bit, like this game I once really liked playing in my film class, OctoDad. 

I'm sorry for the bloody imagery. 

also, no cannibalism intended in the end. i was trying to say something loud in a basic form. heh.

i am being weird right now. i

am so

weird right now. feeling weirddddd~ 

I'm sober. 

And the whole arrow imagery, I am perfectly okay and would never hurt myself, but in the middle of writing this, I randomly clung onto the imagery of the arrow. And... heh. Yo, I promise I'm good. I'm making too many "I'm good" promises lately, haha, but they're all true. Dang.

daughters

are ghosts you can touch. 

exist in multi-planes, for your convenience. 

hover above ground, often in a scurry when hungry. 

are people that belonged to you before they belong to themselves, if you believe that. if they believe that.

are people that belonged to themselves before they belong to you, if you believe that. if they believe that.

get angry sometimes. blame you for it. and come back to you, with or without your apology.

don't come back, with or without your apology.

curl up, when lovesick. against a wall or such. 

are dangerous beings, in your eyes, when lovesick.

find their own fault first. 

fault you first.

can be tainted.

can be ruined.

can be influenced and be unforgivable for it. 

are beings you are most proud of. 

fuck up.

are beings you want to hug and worship.

fuck up.

are beings you've forgotten.

are protected.

are powerful.

are powerless.

hurt you the most, when they stray and burn their own way to the farthest edges of protection.

are protected from what? 

come to an age, when they realize their ignorance of the world was what made them so fearless. So, it was you, who separated the world from them. So, they arrive, thankful. 

are still fearless, despite their distrust. 

don't thank you. a nod in your rearview mirror before closing the back door.

are loud, in their bodies, minds, and speech, when out of sight.

are so careful, when expressing their bodies, minds, and speech. shivering in every darkness.

are so careful, for every reason you've given them and every reason they've lived to witness. may you never know.

weave worlds you can only glimpse into. 

have words to say. 

are made. women are made. and you made a daughter. you made a woman. 

were chubby, small things before they were anything else.

don't want to be called crazy. 

like softness and sweetnesses. 

don't forgive you.

don't forget you. 

say the damn words.

don't want to remember the things you said. 

remember what you said.

try. 

shiver in every darkness because of a world that's designed for the male gaze and male hunger. 

hide.

dance.

live in a world that naturalizes a woman's fear. 

hide.

dance.

are not ghosts you can touch. 

don't want to hide. they want to dance.

left for salt

"I'm leaving," I said, "for salt." 

Nothing new. Just leaving to feel something true. 

Leaving for a speck, for a feeling. Like the moon searching for nothing new, just her sun's light. 

What lets her be. 

Before, the daily existence was a waking up, a staying-in, a too hot to step out. An overheating dog with a tongue sticking out. Parents who accidentally leave their small kids in hot cars. Or forgot they had kids. 

I am a being. 

Before, I was a body. Well-rested. Sitting. Lower back pain from games, indigestion, unmoved. Not a feeling. "She's not a fool," my thighs and knees screamed as I sat still. They recalled all the excited walking, the uphilling, the little happy jogs out of pretty buildings. The consistent months and years of building their thicknesses.

"She's not a fool," my belly churned, after another cup of hot sauce, corn, cheese. After going unused since last season, between a sitting up and a sitting back.

"She's not a fool," my back cracked, so used to being shaped like a curve like my mother, as if it was me who breadwon for a family. 

Sat still. Stopped and stared. Curved like a cup on a dusty ass counter. 

Why all this? The stillness? 

"Unemployed" is the normal excuse. 

"I have few available friends in this city." 

"No car or insurance." 

Movement is bought then. 

It must be. I can only move freely when I can afford to. 

Luckily, I still can. Or, I can move freely when I know enough people in a city with cars who love me or who don't mind my company. A mosquito asking to be driven across midnight downtown for the city lights. A little girl in your front seat, thick from elotes and cup-shaped. Or, who had the memory to look at her yoga mat again, peacefully stretching only her back.

But today, amongst the mountainous outlines of a new memory I'm making, the Miami-like trees lining these wide-wide streets, and on concrete caked with sand, I found my salt.

I'm not immovable after all. I do have fucking feelings.

I learned to re-try salt's taste. 

Salt is in a wave. On a beach. In the eye-drying force of the winds against the surface of my chest. I lean into the wind, which salt rides. Caking my hair like the concrete I walk. Filling my mind like the vision of Huntington Beach's waves below the pier. Rolling and fucking real under a sunset, saltier with the darkening sky. It's when you can't see shit that its scent envelopes you, squeezing you in the darkness. In its stillness. 

Maybe all my stillness from before was not for naught. It was all a plot neatly set up so when I find my salt, I would be squeezed so tightly into a shape that even my disgruntled self cannot escape. 

But not even the moon can be still to accept her sun's light. Nor the sun to offer itself to its universe. They had to spin always. Never a stillness. Maybe in all my bouts of empty-feeling daily routines, I was always pulsing.

Salt cannot be buried.

Salt raises the dead. Salt is in every memory. The quantity of it I'm so certain of every time. As I sit in Phuong's room and type the softest I can when she's tucked behind me, I remember my own pulse again. I remember all my ache. The excuses to preserve each ache. The very ache that made me burn, hollowing out every cup I wanted to fill again. Moved me to fly out here to Southern California just to remember salt, this singular matter. 

I cannot be escaped. Sea, horizon, wind, and water. I cannot escape. 

Because I am enveloped by a matter. Matters. I am enveloped by forces that bring matter to matter to me, so that I may never forget how true I am.

Episode 89 - Your New Graduate

More than a month has passed. Your middle school turned high school turned college student is now a graduate. A Bachelor of Arts. 

I wake up in the morning with not one real plan in my head for the day. 

There's a coming of age that happens in your teens, but the harshest one I've experienced is the one I'm going through now. All those beautiful memories that I can only make in one specific place, where everyone is at a similar pace in life, and events and dances happen often. Where I felt so safe. A town so quirky, so small, but with so much to look at and do. There, I'd wake up in my college dorm with plans. Probably already exhausted thinking about them, but I had them nevertheless.

Now I wake up with few to none. Sometimes in the middle of the day, I have flashbacks of my graduation day. That's when it hurts most. Specifically when it was my turn to walk the stage. When the crowd roared and I didn't hear it. 

"They roared," Yen said, "and I don't recall. But they probably did." 

I made a little heart to the camera in my hands. A small "thanks and yes, I'm in love with you and this moment". My friends and my family who flew in to be with me. Everybody. Everyone I loved in one space. I wore the same sandals that I had paraded all over during my DC internship, all over Singapore when I studied abroad, the same one that saw all my late-night weekend dancing. The very same. 

I walked across the stage. At the end of the walk, I squeezed a girl. One of my greatest, kindest, loveliest friends: Miss Ivanna. I squeezed. Just as I had squeezed the many before my walk. And the many after it. 

Hellos and hellos and hellos to everybody as an hour before, we had lined up in the biggest line ever, and on the walk towards my seat, I swear I probably saw everyone I ever loved at Smith. I passed and waved and cried and put my little hands together into a heart for them. 

"Because I love you!" 

Because I still do.

Nothing is truer in this moment as I write this. 

I was the happiest I ever was at Smith. In college. Studying and stressed and obsessed. I had vague plans about my life that I didn't have to answer to yet. I had friends and plans every day. I would be caught in the middle of a big sandwich bite by a classmate. I was in the gym seeing the same good friends do their thing, cheering each other across the room. I was in class, having silly conversations, ones that Prof could hear. I was at dinner, making a friend cackle at another honest accident of mine. I was somewhere. 

I was. Happier.

And I hate saying this. I hate saying this. 

I wish it wasn't true. 

But nothing feels truer. 

I am at home now, with family. I have some plans perhaps, but all of them are almost alone. In cafes applying to jobs. In libraries picking up my book holds. On couches as I try to finish that very book. At tables playing League, sometimes catching a friend or two. All over the house wiping down every surface, tidying up every little thing. 

I do travel. I have traveled. And that's when I'm happiest. When I'm going to places. It makes me feel even a small semblance of the past me, of over a month ago. The possibility of invisible strings bringing me to you all along. I had it so good, and I knew it. 

How could I not then? 

I had it good. I had it good. I never blew it. It was too perfect.

My time at Smith taught me so many things.

1) An education rooted at a traditionally all-women's college showed me what an ideal world and classroom should feel like. Inclusive. Everyone is heard and given an equal chance to speak. 

2) The beauty of a place, as beautiful as Smith is in its autumns and springs, does motivate a little girl to go outside and picnic outside. My first picnics were here. On that lawn.

3) I crossed paths with one of my favorite authors of all time at Smith's Paradise Pond. I screamed about it for days.

4) Every study session. I mean, every. Someone's a fool and doesn't study. And so we end up not. :P

5) Drag bingo is a fantastic Friday night idea.

6) I am so complete, so whole on my own. I am so capable of creating beautiful moments with others, friends or strangers. I am so incredible for that, for making folks laugh with my timed wording or awkwardness. 

7) I dressed my absolute best to every class. Every day, I showed up. I have never felt more spiritually connected and in love with my body than in college.

8) I peaked. 

9) Smith flew me home when I was homesick. Paid ticket and everything. Gosh.

10) I love so well. And I deserve love.

Your new graduate deserves the world. She wants to serve the world.

I want to serve. 

I just... am quite at a new end to all this. A new whatever-this-is where I'm at home most if not all the time. 

When I'm not a student or employee or intern, I'm a daughter. It's a pretty answer on paper. It's not so pretty in real life. 

My time is everyone else's first. 

And then I remember a time when it wasn't. When it was mine. 

I remember when.

But the upside is I've never been more free in my life. I'm the most lonely right now, the most plan-less, yet the most free. 

And I have never been more scared in my life.