The winter darkness stings deeper in February, the type of bone-chill that clutches in lemmas of stillness. But I was born on a rare 72-degree day in early March—my mom entering the hospital with a bright yellow jacket and swollen anticipation, both of which she could shed away. I think about this often: how we enter the world already shedding versions of ourselves.
In moments of blinding light, there is no limit to what shape your shadows will take. In the penumbra of youth, how do you know where the shadow begins and where it ends?
On Time’s Restlessness
I’ve spent my youth in a terrible hurry—to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. Always satiated but always slightly hungry. It’s a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience… the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits at the end of the search.
You have always been in a rush to grow up, wrestling with an unspoken timer, teetering between the fulcrum and edge of life’s seesaw. Like bobbing sailboats tethered to the dock. If your life were 24 hours you constantly mistake sunrise for sunset, forever.
On Writing and Becoming
I write towards a life sentence. I write myself into being.
Writing is an act of identity making—every word a clavicle, every sentence an organ. No wonder we call it a body of work. To write is to attempt the revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, yet its total revelation is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all the truth of all our experience.
Sometimes when people ask my age, I say twenty-two with a sheepish grin. I simultaneously want to be older and ageless. Age-agnostic, perhaps, because I feel just as angsty and confused and unsettled as I did at eleven, and probably will at thirty. Perhaps what I will lose as I age is this restlessness.
On Friendship and Time’s Generosity
What strikes me most about twenty-three is witnessing the generosity of time. Michelle making cookie batter the night before, Shirling waking up early to adorn a cake with flowers, Justin quietly clearing plates, Gary with his heavy-weight Sony capturing moments. Four different cameras of varying fidelities all trying to preserve the same light.
There’s something profound about having people who allocate their precious time thinking about you. It’s an inherent social contract, a mutual buy-in that says: your joy matters to me. As Bahar noted—it’s really a reflection of who’s in your life.
On Light and Meaning-Making
Two Sundays ago at the beach, a new friend mentioned the word for fear of the ocean while staring at a foggy ship. Is there a word for fear of the sky? Once, an ex visited me in New York and saw prison where I saw possibility—he couldn’t see the sky through the concrete jungle, but I saw mountains to climb.
When I look at emptiness, all the coins inside me start rattling, restless. Li Young Lee once said—look at the birds: even flying is borne out of nothing. It’s this prospect of flight that both terrifies and thrills me, an Icarian task.
The light is most golden just before the shadows fall. To be twenty-three is to stand in that penumbra, that hazy space between what was and what could be. The years ahead will eat up your margin for error until there is no margin left. The mistakes you make will no longer be flaws of inexperience, but flaws of character.
But perhaps that’s exactly where the beauty lies—in the not knowing, in the becoming, in the perpetual dawn-or-dusk of being young. Once you’ve read everything, then at last you can begin.
Humans, they frustrate me and delight me all at the same time. Perhaps that is what love is. Perhaps that is what growing up is.