in brief, as the season turns
Late summer through fall has been a breathless dash toward the finish line, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a quiet and largely empty afternoon to write. This cloudless, leisurely Sunday has felt very much like a treat — so here are some updates from the past few months, if for no other reason than I really hope to remember these moments for much, much longer.
All Points East at the end of August was a sticky, sweaty blur of jostling between crowd and barrier for everything, unexpectedly making new friends in the toilet line (!), shimmying to Bicep's new song live, sitting on Piers’ shoulders while Bombay Bicycle Club had confetti rain down on the crowd, sitting on the ground eating soggy fries in the middle of Maisie’s set while the grass tops pricked the backs of our bare ankles, shivering too much on an inexplicably cold last day and ending up with merch hoodies as a last-gasp attempt to stay warm. Such a good weekend, that — short on sleep and long on the fun.
August also saw us going to Balham for a (wait for it…) secret Singaporean supper club. How cool is that?! I never thought I would get to taste pandan leaf chicken outside of Malaysia/Singapore, and yet there it was, the second course in what turned out to be an amazing menu full of flavors that made me miss the other side of the world extra hard that day.
Halloween 2021 was a success — we went to a party, got maaaybe a 80% identification rate for our costumes, had good fun meeting old friends and making new ones, slept way too late, woke up to the afternoon sun high in the sky, and made 红枣炖鸡汤 together.
Yesterday I baked Yossy Arefi’s chocolate gingerbread cake and the house smelt like the first hint of Christmas — warm, spicy, ginger notes blended into a rich chocolate cloud that wafted out of the oven door each time I opened it to check the rise. So nice to be back in the kitchen again, folding things into dough, watching through the oven window for that first rise.
For writing-specific news:
I have a poem nominated for Best of The Net :-)
Contributed a brief vignette about batik/sarong to the Beauty of Batik exhibition in Hackney!
a slow unfurling
Lardo; London Fields
Went to a canalside restaurant, shivered under a heat lamp, made small talk with the girls one table over, kissed over a plate of crab agnolotti, said “cheers” with restaurant glasses, smeared sauce across my plate with reckless abandon, asked for the bill, walked the long way home with my hair smelling like some other table’s cigarette smoke; maybe this city is thawing again, maybe I can remember to be soft, maybe, maybe, maybe.
Walked toward London Fields bathed in the cotton-candy pink of an early spring sunset, met a friend (in person!) over pasta and merlot, compressed months’ worth of life into a three-hour conversation punctuated by the clinks of wine glasses, laughter everywhere - socially-distanced still but look, everywhere I turn - people are smiling. My hands hurt from the constant sanitizing, but god it feels so lovely to be able to slip past people (albeit really carefully) again.
Squeezed onto an outdoor pub bench with a very small group of people, said hi!! over and over again way too enthusiastically, asked everyone how they were: two friends are having a baby, one is working on a super cool project that is going to redefine the boundaries of 3D design, one just moved into his new place and is trying to sort out ridiculous furniture delivery timelines; which leaves us two, my cheek against the slope of his right shoulder, his hand over my knee, saying something like, yes the lockdown was so shit but also, we have been so lucky. So much has happened over the past few months — I got published, he got a bunch of art features, we wrote + illustrated a zine together, the wagon wheel of work grinds on, etc. Pandemic time has blurred everything into a haze, and I am better at remembering gratitude for these things on some days more so than others.
We stayed for ages, laughed too loud, got to pet a stranger’s terrier, had someone ask us for cigarettes, attempted to sing happy birthday when a girl two tables over emerged from the kitchen carrying a cake. A stranger’s face lit with the glow of birthday candles, them closing their eyes to make a wish. Saying cheers while sitting next to people I love. Picking out my favorite dishes from a pub menu. A London evening on the warmer side of spring, clear skies, unrainy. These are the things I want: a slow unfurling, life again.
early autumn as a laundry list
of standout moments:
It is the Mid-Autumn festival and mooncakes will be sold out online, everywhere, but on a Tuesday afternoon someone you love will find the last half-dozen of mooncakes “on the internet” (you’d never be told exactly where) and this is how he surprises you with them — six small golden rounds of pastry dough, buttons on a plate. You chew, tasting salted egg custard, buttered pastry flakes, and the sureness of something that feels very much like contentment.
You two will go to an early dinner in central London, and, after eating your way through a spread of ox cheek ragu, cauliflower mac n’ cheese, braised duck gnocchi and, lord — lychee crème for dessert — you end up falling asleep during the ride home. That same someone you love will take a photo of you in the car, the moonlight carving a pale crescent across your left cheek. You were out almost immediately, he laughs, and you smile, but really you are only noticing the bottom corner of the picture, the easy lacing of your fingers with his, two hands nestled against each other for the entire duration of the ride. How lucky it is to have, and to hold.
A friend you miss will arrive from New York with six fresh bagels as a surprise, a celebration of poppyseeds, onion granules, and garlic powder exploding in a Ziploc bag. You open it, inhaling the heady scent of dough, and in that moment you will miss Brooklyn just a little bit less. For the next three nights you find yourself already dreaming of breakfast, your heart singing.
October keeps shedding its leaves. One Saturday morning when the clouds look their usual gray but not heavy — you will go to Camden for the first time and delight in coming across a café hidden behind a lofted warehouse full of plants. You try not to buy any more plants, and instead settle for a most over-the-top hot chocolate drink (12oz of Valrhona with a torched marshmallow top) at the market.
You start submitting your writing, for real. It feels terrifying, but you will keep at it.
You get your first rejection and celebrate it as a milestone.
Around the same time, you will also get accepted to a craft workshop on language activism in poetry, where you will be the only person dialing in from outside of America. You mention you miss bagels, cheap LES eats, the 24/7 cacophony of New York traffic — and everyone laughs. This is how you find joy: in a tiny literary community spanning nine people, five cities, and two continents.
Halfway through the month your flatmate will announce that she’s moving back/ home to Austin — which kickstarts a two-week frenzy of hunting for replacement flatmates, packing, and coordinating moving logistics. How many times can you hear the rip of a packing tape roll without flinching? You’ve always been a good packer. See — the secret to that is moving often, and almost always alone. To be honest, you wish you were a terrible packer instead.
You get your second rejection. Your third comes with a note from the editors, and you tuck it into an email folder, still resolute in hope — however small. Each new submission feels as terrifying as the last, but again, you will keep at it.
Then completely unexpectedly, to your greatest surprise — you get your first acceptance (!): an email you open at 1am late Saturday night after gorging on three consecutive episodes of the West Wing. Immediately there is a well of warmth rushing up your throat. You swallow, hard, trying not to spill the growing wet behind your eyes.
You try a new restaurant — this time in Belgravia — with that same someone you love, and fall asleep again during the car ride home, super stuffed, super happy.
The second acceptance (??!?!!!) lands in your inbox and this time it’s from a dream magazine, a literary journal that you’ve stalked since your college years. The email finds you between work calls on a Monday afternoon when London is absolutely pouring and everything is just the same shade of gray outside, and you feel very lucky, also very nervous, thinking this must be some sort of mistake.
But this is what I promise you: that somewhere out there, beyond London’s second lockdown orders and this incessant, unrelenting autumn rain — the rest of your life is aching to blossom. Trust in the waiting.
the world has shifted on its axis and somehow i am
still here, standing. and yet.
i’ve been in the kitchen a lot lately. there is something hypnotic — cathartic, almost — about baking and cooking. the repetitive kneading of dough. the rise and fall of a knife blade weaving through carrots, kale stems, mushroom caps. the first soft hiss of oil on a hot pan.
midway through doing the dishes i have a habit of tilting my palm upward to catch the water, letting liquid sluice through my fingers, clear blades threading a slender weft of bones.
truth is, i have always kissed like a storm. bruised too easy. felt like a hurricane. i’m sorry i can’t help it. or sorry - i mean, i’m not sorry. i’m still learning not to apologize, when truth is there still aren’t enough mouths in this world for all the voices in my belly. shh, baby. swallow. at work (at home?) the other day there was a team discussion around establishing some kind of reporting cadence for an analysis i was working on and for a moment then, i thought to myself, cadence: what a lyrical word for numerical representation. i’m tired of spreadsheets. not everything needs to be a number. cadence is one two three please don’t leave. its been eight weeks since we’ve all held each other, now tell me if there’s an excel model for that.
did you know that the half-life of the coronavirus, airborne, can be up to three hours?
i didn’t.
but i think that when all of this is over it will take us more than three hours to re-learn how to hold each other, if at all. we might never greet with our hands for a long, long time. i wonder if people will go on tapas dates ever again.
what is yearning — if not the dog ear of a plane ticket winking behind a passport cover?
what is my body beyond 5’5” of skin molded into a prayer just light enough to hold the weight of living?
what is writing beyond a life in lines, sentenced?
/
this is my now:
a london spring — the careless whisper of May, just warm enough around the edges for us to shed the jackets. tuesday evening bleeding into what seems like thursday night. the days are a blur of hours set to the beat of emails, calls, presentations; the evenings stained with the first flush of wine creeping up my cheeks; our legs crossed at the ankles as we watch the last rays of sunset dissolve like pale ale in a glass. i am writing this while waiting for the blood orange olive oil loaf in the oven to rise, and i can just about smell the citrus zing making its way across the living room space.
london has been holding its breath for awhile now. some nights are moonless, still as the dark of a red wine pour looking up at you; other days the moon is a pale nick in the sky. always clear, planeless.
/
here’s a secret. some days i feel like an ellipsis. a body half-dressed in a room of people. unspun in an imperfect world.
and yet. standing. here, still.
simon says, turn the page
2019 // not quite a prayer and not yet a monologue:
I rang in the new year at one of my favorite theater-bar-restaurant spots in East Williamsburg, got confetti in my champagne glass and might have accidentally downed a piece anyway, then proceeded - bubbly-blushed - to get chicken tenders off the kids’ menu at Kellogg’s Diner as my first meal of the year. The second Tuesday evening of January I marched into my regular salon on West 4th, pulled out two sheets of “hairstyle specifics”, and got bangs for the first time in 5? 6? years. It’s britney, baby. *without the shaved head obviously, I text a friend, and get a string of exclamation marks in return. I catch my reflection in a car window and pause. No looking back now.
So much of February and March was spent prepping for the move across the Atlantic that I honestly don’t remember much else. The new: checking out the capitalist mecca that is Hudson Yards, finally going to Brooklyn Steel to catch Beirut live, finally going to Nom Wah (to the great shame of my ancestors, I’m sure). The old: wandering around Greenpoint, Brooklyn Bridge park, LES. Brunches at Concord Hill/ Clinton Street/ Wild Son/ Five Leaves, buying Pocky in bulk in Chinatown, picking our favorite murals up and down Stanton Street, saying goodbyes over wine at Spuyten Duyvil/ Hotel Delmano/ Woodhul, did one last tour around WSP to say goodbye to Kimmel, Goddard, 19W4, but not Bobst. When we finally got a Lilia reservation at 10pm i told the waitress that it was going to be my last nice meal in New York. I’m so jealous, she smiles, I’ve always wanted to live in London. I hope it’s amazing for you. I let the tines of my fork poke staccatos in the bomboloni and try to fight past the growing lump in my throat. I hope so too, I look up and say, quietly. Hoping that saying it aloud makes it true.
I sat in JFK watching the evening sun set. Delta called my boarding group, and, just like that, we were off.
London spring and summer was a blur of easing in, tasting rain on my face, learning to love blooming flowers against a sky that flushes in all shades of blue-grey, pushing myself out - and out - of my comfort zone. Lying outside in parks with a book, squinting in the heatwave, getting grass bits all over my denim shorts. So many wine-tinted evenings. Did you know orange wine is actually white wine? Did you know 7 is the maximum number of times you can fold something? Did you know that I could look at heartbreak in the eye and say, yes, jump? I love how we are most vulnerable half-asleep, at night. Some days my internal compass still orients me south of the Thames. Tell me again how we forwent slow heat and went straight for the fireworks. I am not usually this careless, and yet. Perhaps. We are inconsistent in hopes of being someone else’s exception.
In September I took myself to my first formula 1 race in Monza and, sitting there amongst the tifosi, bright red everywhere, hearing the engines roar as the drivers rev for lights off — that was everything 8 y/o me could have ever wanted. I promise I only got the tiniest bit emotional. Then wandering around Milan and Como, mesmerized with the way the Italian sun drapes over pale yellow walls, the way each window seems to be vined with so much greenery, the soft springiness of handmade gnocchi between my teeth. Waking up one crisp Sunday morning and saying, why not, to a spontaneous day trip out to Windsor/ Eton where we laid on the grass, barely touching, our breaths the smell of M&S strawberries, elderflower yogurt, and dark chocolate. Then, closing out the month in a dark hall, acid/ techno/ bass thumping in the back of my head, lasers and lights and bodies everywhere. My hand in the small groove of your spine, feeling the staccato ripples of your back, so so so close that I could almost unfold your shirt and trace the thin breath of sweat just above your waistband. All this music in us, and nowhere to go.
By the end of fall I got fully primed with a rudimentary understanding of rugby, what it means when there’s a knock-on, and most importantly — why you should never wear a green jacket over an all-black outfit (even if its a camo print). I said goodbye to too many people. Took myself to book readings and NYT talks — all places where I learnt that courage comes in so many different ways. I got invited on nights out, did karaoke, and found that The Bad Touch is almost as hard to sing as Don’t Stop Me Now. And then, at the beginning of winter — took the craziest 4-flight combination halfway across the world to New Zealand, a place I’ve never been. Ate burgers two nights in a row. Luged in the rain; at the end of 6 rounds, I no longer knew if I was shivering because of the wind chill or the wet. Caught a sunset like fire. Wore proper hiking boots for the first time. Rediscovered my allergy toward sports tape. Learnt to identify birdsong. Camped properly - also a first (**multiple days, through cramps… who’s a city girl now?!). Fell in love with the way tree roots gnarl across the forest floor, the crunch of tussock under my feet, the sound that glacier runoff makes across smooth rocks, the soft rush of tiny waterfalls after rain. Such a wild kind of beauty, that land, and so different from everything I’ve ever touched. On my last night in the South Island we unzipped the tent at 11pm, closed our eyes for five minutes and opened them to a sky, half-cloudy with fog, but the other half absolutely bursting with flecks of stars. Wow, I breathe, near tears. The Milford sky a dark swath of fabric, and the Milky Way glittering everywhere.
I finished the year on a balcony overlooking a tennis court, the warm night air a heady mix of cut grass and rain. I have not been home, this home particularly, in a very long time. I look at my childhood photo albums, staring at the girl with wispy bangs and one-and-a-half dimples grinning out from the pages, so hopeful of adulthood then. A quarter century feels like forever. I hope I did that kid proud.
Here’s to never losing heart. Here’s to my body and all the ways it brought me through the year, the decade, the quarter century. On to the next.