What do you do when everything is taken away? Well, you espouse the wreckage and make that everything.

The Byzantine Crypt visualizes the afterlife through a temporal duality—entwining architectural antiquity with contemporary installations, confronting the brief burning that is mortality. This rejection of time itself intimates the permanence of humanity’s impermanence: our anguish is not modern. Reading the gallery as humanity’s collective memorial yields the effect of attending one’s own funeral. Thus, a viewer exits mourning, sometimes prematurely. One need not have lost to understand its inevitability.

My grief at “Everything #4” was twice premature; by my third visit, everything had been taken.

Today marks five months since my father passed away and the world turned into a wasteland. Yesterday marked two months since I stepped in front of “Everything #4” for the third time. I realized everything had not been taken away—not yet. For there I was, wasn’t I?, staring back at my stunned self with reminders of him ingrained in my face. Until I was taken, neither was he.

All this is to say that the wasteland, however desolate, has wreckage. Something can always be built from ruins. Not anything, and certainly not everything—but something, all the same.

This publication’s newest chapter transcends the archive—wastelands have no file cabinets, and remnants are not organized. What do we create when dropped in the mouth of destruction? When do ruins become buildings again? At present, I’m not sure. Care to find out together?

I applaud others my age who are attending lauded writing intensives this summer—I have friends who consider the two weeks they spent learning from seasoned professionals and other teen writers at these residential programs to be some of the best days of their lives. However, in youth literary spaces, there is an underlying, unspoken pressure that you have to attend one of these workshops in order to—I don’t even know—be a real writer? Regardless, these opportunities should not be the expectation. You do not need to go to Iowa or Kenyon to spend a summer writing. These are not new revelations; however, something about concentrating the tumult that is the contemporary youth writing scene into a single, one-and-done Substack essay feels so horribly inadequate—especially since these feelings are still active for me and other writers my age. I’m still sixteen and still navigating the literary world. I’m not done talking about this.

As teenagers, we have so much time. There is time for laurels—for awards, prestigious publications, impressive names to append to your 50-word writer bio. Right now, can’t we just write? The reason I’ve found it difficult to write poetry these days is that I’m oriented toward an after—as if the important part lies not in the writing itself but in where it lands once the writing is done. The magic is in the process, the creation, how sore your brain is after trying to articulate the inexplicable, and how full your heart is after succeeding, even minutely.

I could spend hours beating myself up about the application I did not submit to Kenyon. Or I could remember that my love for writing transcends two weeks in Ohio. Your love for writing, I assume, started as a child, infatuated with myth-making—bringing to life people and places that did not yet exist, except for in the uninhibited expanse of your imagination. Maybe that’s not your exact story, but regardless, your love for writing existed well before you were aware of the institution you now aspire to. Therefore, it exists independently of it. You do not need Kenyon or Iowa or anywhere else to tell you that you are a writer. You are a writer if you are a person who writes.

If you continue to find yourself in a rut, my advice is simple. Find poetry everywhere; by which I mean find love. For me, lately, love is the swollen lip in the aftermath of a mosh pit, a roll of film I thought I fucked up but upon further observation looks cooler with the accidental light leaks, a shared inhale backstage between castmates the moment before the curtain goes up, the way my best friend can tell I’m playing our song after strumming one guitar chord (“True Blue” by boygenius), files upon files of shitty iMovie short films about detective bobcats and malicious flamingos my cousins and I made in 2019, an email from my friend Maya with the subject line this essay reminded me of you, sprawling on a recording studio carpet and writing angry songs with my bandmates, the heist music of my brother’s favorite video game signaling my sacrosanct duty to drop everything and play a round, the way the owner of my favorite record store knows exactly what album I need on a given day, the three feet of space between houses where on fogless days the entire San Francisco skyline is visible on my walk to school, the rhythm of stops and transfers on my bus route, the performer on the beach singing Simon & Garfunkel with the Pacific Ocean’s rip currents as background noise, the monarch butterflies that orbit my house all April, my little white desk on which I’ve read some of my favorite books and watched some of my favorite movies and created most of the art I’ve ever made. All of these are poetry. Isn’t that beautiful?

Ambiguity often works to my advantage—after all, art is up to interpretation. Yet I cannot help but feel as though those who know me in person perceive my writing drastically differently from—and thereby, perhaps, deeper than—my other followers. I don’t intend to hide things, but having this Substack publication, this Instagram account, comes with an inherent degree of performance. There are things I don’t want tens of thousands of people on the internet to know about me; at the same time, I want my meaning to come across.

When I was younger, mainly from fifth through seventh grade, and sporadically in eighth, I kept journals with a pious fervor. Lately, I’ve found myself sitting down, reading them for hours, reminiscing in the joys I’d forgotten, and mourning the sorrows that, as it turns out, were not juvenile or superficial or in my head. I’ve been apologizing to my younger self, but most of all, reveling—in how, despite everything, it all works out.

Since I have these memories so clearly documented—in their rawest form, penned seconds after the event—I can return to them now by flipping open a page, writing about past experiences from a (slightly) older perspective. In high school, this habit has escaped me, and I wish it had not. Sometimes it feels as though a lack of documentation has robbed me of my memories.1

We write to preserve fleeting things; simultaneously, we ensnare them. Whether intentional or not, the creation of art, in situating a permanent frame around an evanescent canvas, cannot exist without entrapment. If it is our nature to create art, it is also our nature to cling to the things we know cannot last. Perhaps art is our doomed attempt to reckon with that, knowing some immaterial part of the magic will be lost in a material form, and daring to try to encapsulate it anyway.

I don’t think the dead exist to serve the living, nor do we exist to serve the dead—yet I think we are all servants of something, and we create art in fulfillment of that service. I’m here to write poems and other things that are poems in disguise, like this essay. Where they go, whose eyes they find, whose minds they vex, and whose hearts they unravel are not in my hands. My writing may well stifle the ephemeral, and yet, like a well-intentioned parent, it can nurture it at the same time.

I think it’s interesting that I chose the theme “ephemerality” for the first issue of my literary magazine.2 I don’t envision Vellichor shutting down any time soon—if I’m able, I’d like to keep it operating as long as I live—but I always thought it’d be fitting for the very last issue to be themed, “eternity”. Beginning with fleeting and ending with forever.

We’ve joked all week that sirens here sound like UFOs, placing bets on when we’ll finally get abducted by aliens. Lightning flashes—an augury. When, if not today?

I’ve just published an Instagram post for my literary magazine, something I once loved doing. And yet today, same as most days the past few months, I felt sick the whole time designing it, as if racing against an internal clock, feeling a tense sense of relief after finally posting, like I could at last be done with it—except I’m never done; the anxiety remains, and perhaps heightens, because now it’s time to obsess over inexpicable things like like counts that never mattered before, and even then, to stay relevant, I’ll have to do it all again in two days.

I disencumber my weight onto the dorm bed, hands resting flat on my stomach, bearing vestigial signs of hunger. This is my problem, I realize—I’m always starving.

The one solace I have had from this has been writing creatively, and even that has been lost, in a sense. I am discovering bits of it on subway platforms, between blades of Central Park grass, and within rays of the beaded East Coast sun, yet I am still searching. I am looking harder than I ever have before, and that is precisely the problem. Inspiration must be discovered like lucky coins beneath sofa cushions—by chance. Instead, I am clawing at the seams, begging for something to shine.

Summer in the city is a homecoming to somewhere I know innately and not enough: train rides to Coney Island, 3 a.m. pizza slices, witnessing my brother attempt to win chess matches at Washington Square Park, watching movies outdoors alongside the crickets and conversations in Bryant Park. Again, I am searching—searching for the me in a parallel universe that called this place home. It’s a different kind of searching; it is gentle, natural, less of a hunt and more of an encountering—finding what was already there, existing without you; forever changed upon your presence, changing you along with it.

I’m used to leaving New York understanding some part of myself more than I did when I arrived. This time, however, is my first time here without my family.

Though of course, these things are never solitary. Today, in my journalism class, my teacher asked, jokingly, “Raise your hand if you like writing.” Instinctively, the whole room, including me, raised their hands. Had the question been asked a week ago, I still would have raised my hand, perhaps as a reflex more than anything else—truthfully, I wouldn’t have been sure.

The thing is, you need people to remind you of what you love.

We call ourselves the Breakfast Club, because it started with breakfast (bagels, obviously), and from there, it spiraled into hysterical elevator conversations, morning coffee runs, many an afternoon spent sprawled in Central Park, singing “Riptide” in an empty law school classroom, a failed attempt to concoct mango sticky rice in our dining hall, a more successful run to Whole Foods to obtain mango mochi on the hottest day of the week, trips to record stores and bookstores which involved more yearning than purchasing, bubble tea, photobooths, the filming of a Heated Rivalry parody in the laundry room (enough said), many a collaborative New York Times game on the subway (curse you, Connections), impromptu karaoke in an empty museum basement, a generous amount of ice cream to combat the heat, side quests all over Manhattan (in which I was deemed our designated map), movie nights—the list goes on.

In two weeks with the Breakfast Club, I remembered how to live again; in remembering living, I remembered art. For the first time in months, I am excited to write.

So, as far as inspiration goes: it is the new place, yes. But it is also the return—the new colors the change of scenery has given to my mundanity. My bedroom becomes revelatory, my same four walls a muse.

Driving home from the airport, I watch as a plane ducks into the cloak of clouds—invisible yet still there. It’s nighttime, but the days are so long it’s still light out. I missed this fog, yet find myself craving a sweltering sun. I’m caught between these places, a pendulum swinging dutifully to both.

Once, I found solace in gods. Lately, I’ve recognized the prayers that are people—the steeples we call skylines, the sanctity in others. I don’t want to diminish friendship to pastoral metaphor, but I do have faith. Because any road I take, so long as it’s traveled willfully, will lead me, one way or another, to myself. Back to myself, or simply to myself. At once, a return and a renaissance.

While I stepped out of the Met five minutes ago, it seems I’ve yet to exit the museum. The people are portraits: a picnic beside me arguing about estrogen and expletives; a man chiding his unleashed and sprinting dog (“Frodo, NO!!”); a man lighting a cigarette, offering one to his friend, who declines; a woman audibly reacting to the paperback in her hand, laughing or gasping every few moments.

An American robin in its sunniest plumage hops inches from my sneakers, rain-soaked from last evening’s thunderstorm and sun-bleached from today’s heat wave—the San Francisco soles unaccustomed to New York’s mercurial meteorological patterns. The bird makes swift, jerking movements with its head, bending down to eat something—a worm, maybe? It gathers dried grasses for nest-building. It can carry so much in its mouth, which perhaps extends beyond my knowledge, opening into a gaping avian sinkhole, a landing zone for the raw materials of living.

I have left relics in the grass around me: an empty acai bowl, residual pitaya staining the plastic; a quickly-emptied cup of cold black tea, the ice now melted and bubbling; postcards from the Met sealed in a paper envelope; a brand-new copy of Patti Smith’s Woolgathering; my camera; and my phone, which I have not touched except to get directions.

I’m slowly recalling what it means to be a writer. I can call myself this, of course—it’s what I am. Why would I need reinforcement? Patti Smith didn’t.

The sky is blue all around, save for a single cloud, twisted into a fetus. It will dissolve when it’s ready. I understand still needing protection.

In three words, if you lack the time or desire to read this in full: Here. Always here.

There is no inherent malice in the existence of a youth writing pipeline, but this particular conglomerate worries me beyond the aesthetics of prestige. Year after year, these panels of literary judges demonstrate a predilection for ethnic drift—that is, diasporic anguish limned in a now-recognizable poetic register.

The editors who reward such works are not nefarious; they are, however, conditioned to prize certain styles above others. When racial tribulation becomes the near-exclusive criterion for publishability, it convinces developing writers that these are the only themes worth pursuing, that this is the sole kind of writing with value, that this alone constitutes Serious Art™.

And you can’t blame us, with our impressionable, still-calcifying prefrontal cortices, our thirst for validation, our inclination to look sideways at our peers and recalibrate. There’s a comfortable reliability in jettisoning one’s beloved Audre Lorde collection to study this year’s YoungArts anthology as scripture, in identifying and emulating one’s contemporaries of choice. This essay does not seek to belittle these writers—they are, in innumerable ways, extraordinarily gifted. Yet when substance redefines into the security of poeticized pain, it becomes difficult to perceive anything outside those borders as meaningful—the most pressing issue being that, in youth literary spaces, meaning has borders at all.

Linguistic fragmentation, oscillating bilingualism, and tone shifts from familial narratives to diasporic displacement are not tokens of bad writing. In fact, they can be, and frequently are, among the most devastating and cathartic modes of literary expression available to a writer. However, when young writers are rewarded exclusively within a narrowed aperture of what counts as worthy, everything exterior to it can feel gratuitous. The impulse that undoubtedly exists within every writer to make art that is joyful, strange, whimsical, or formally transgressive gets strangled. Innovation curdles into conformity, and the most singular voices learn to sand down their edges to pass through a very specific door. One would imagine this is the antithesis of what organizations like YoungArts and Scholastic ostensibly exist to cultivate.

The United States’s perversion of teens’ passion in its fixation on curating antiseptically polished college applications wreaks remarkable havoc in this sense, co-opting writing as joy and repackaging it as collectible achievement. Consequently, a plethora of young writers have been catechized to perceive their work as valid only insofar as it has a prestigious landing space: a literary journal to appear in, a prize to append to a bio, an institutional imprimatur that confers, retroactively, the sense that the poem was worth writing. This form of self-alienation is so gradual and ambient that most young people do not notice it happening until they find themselves unable to write a single line that isn’t angled toward a prospective judge.

Relegating poetry to the accumulation of accolades induces the myth that art must go somewhere, receive some form of external ratification, in order to matter. As Emily Dickinson’s forty hand-sewn, dresser-drawer-bound fascicles attest, there is beauty in something not meant for publication, written for yourself alone, or for a friend, a lover, a confidant. Perhaps a stagnant poem is the freest one.

To enter a dimension thornier still: these institutions do not reward broadly construed identity-based trauma; it is specifically racial identity-based trauma. Which is to say, if I submitted a poem about trans identity to one of these competitions in trademark conspicuous, fractured style, it would almost certainly not receive the same consecration were I to write my experience as a South Asian American child of immigrants. Race, it seems, lies in a comfort zone—provocative enough to cast the illusion of liberalism, and familiar enough to feel safe. That should bother you.

That said, am I a raging hypocrite for running a literary magazine in the midst of this? While my publication endeavors to amplify artists at every stage of their development and subvert genre, form, and discipline, I’m positive that at least one young writer has felt personally diminished or devalued their work because of a rejection letter from us. Those are not the fruits I set out to harvest, nor the lesson I want any writer to carry.

It should not be expected of a seventeen-year-old to gain admission to storied literary magazines. In all likelihood, your favorite poet’s juvenilia never saw the light of day—and was arguably better off for it. My intention is not to demand the abolition of youth literary spaces on the whole, but instead to reconceive them. Rather than condition impressionable voices into palatability, youth-oriented spaces should seek to cultivate young voices in their freshest, rawest, messiest forms. That young people possess the eyes and language with which to view and explain the world uniquely is a gift—thus, why should we train conformity, inhibiting this expression so early on, much less at all?

The goal should be that the next time you encounter a poem that brings you to your knees in a Safeway parking lot, your first thought is not, “Why didn’t I write that?”, but instead, “Thank god someone did”. We are not in a race to be first to a feeling. Profundity is neither exclusive nor terminable, and another writer’s precision does not foreclose your own. We should instead marvel at the fact that we as human beings—we small, impermanent, bewildered animals—are capable of making things that render other human beings less alone in their bewilderment. That is what the accolades, in their blunt, bureaucratic certitude, so consistently miss.

If we, as young writers, contort ourselves toward a mold, we will never be anything but an approximation of it. And if we collectively aspire to archetypes, we will never dismantle the molds themselves. To the teen who believes they must bend their work to meet arbitrary expectations of literary seriousness, or to the one who has begun to internalize perpetual rejection as proof of their own inadequacy—you are not a bad writer. Organic furtherance of craft transpires by writing what lives in your mind, rather than what you’ve been trained to regard as publishable. At the risk of sounding cliché, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It is more than enough that you write.

“A million times heartbroken, and Dublin keeps on going. You’ve gotta love Dublin for dreaming.”

“So how’s the heart?” / “It’s traveling, Da.”

“Love’s all very well, but in the hands of people, it turns to soup.” / “Are you married, Eamon?” / “Yeah, I am, actually.” / “Still in love?” / “Yeah.” / “Good soup.”

— from the Irish folk musical Once

SCENE I: Soup (Good and Bad)

Last Thursday in a coffee shop at 5:42 p.m., my soul healed à la grilled cheese and tomato soup, because sometimes it really is a soup and sandwich discount deal that reminds you that childhood is not yet gone, and part of it can always return to you in circular, if terminable form. I delightfully discovered a surprise crouton at the bottom of the bowl, its craters soaked in bisque. My Moroccan mint tea dwindled into murky dregs at the bottom of the mug, and I capitalized on the cafe’s free refill policy. New curls of steam rose to the drywall ceiling, carrying my toasty contentment upward, as if announcing it to the birds. I’d like to think the chirp of the song sparrow outside meant it replied. (I take an ornithology class at school now, which has rendered me insufferable in the outdoors; I will obnoxiously inform you that the bird you are hearing is a scrub jay, house finch, mourning dove, Bewick’s wren, or yellow-rumped warbler; luminously, I have noticed the sounds of the birds with far more vigor than before—it is astonishing how loud a thing can be once you finally pay attention to it.) Regardless of the sparrow’s response or lack thereof, I departed for theatre rehearsal on a warm stomach. I grabbed a double-chocolate pecan cookie on the way out because it felt like a double-chocolate pecan cookie kind of day.

Aside from last Thursday, I have three distinct memories of this very meal, minus the cookie. In reverse chronological order: 1. On a weekend retreat for my a cappella group, when the tenors were assigned lunch duty, and I concocted a large pot of tomato soup to complement our grilled cheese sandwiches, 2. The day I learned my best friend had never eaten a grilled cheese sandwich with a bowl of tomato soup, which was such a diabolical notion that we made it for dinner that day, and it’s safe to say her life changed immeasurably, and 3. The first time my little brother and I ever had grilled cheese and tomato soup, when I was very young, in Disneyland. Grilled cheeses and tomato soups are always shared; even in the coffee shop, I was surrounded by a community of cramming undergraduates and paperback-armed grandparents alike. Simple as the meal is, its communality makes it sacred.

Often, I dream I have unlimited time to write, and an unlimited supply of tea withal. Occasionally, I blanch at the idea that one day, inspiration may elude me, and the thousands of poems I write in my lifetime will coalesce like a viscous soup—a kind I disfavor, like cream of mushroom. Imagine forcing yourself to stomach the disgusting sludge of your words that once held meaning but have since gone cold. Then again, I do that already.

Then again, soup is meant to be shared. Someone at the table enjoys cream of mushroom, and perhaps one day, you will too.

SCENE 2: A Between-Lunch-and-Dinner Party

I brought the mezze platter; another friend brought the fig leaf tea. A nutty scent wafted into the kitchen as we steeped the dried leaves in a porcelain teapot. We removed the damask drapes from the bay window, opened the two baby panels, and looked east into the neighbors’ garden of lemon and mulberry trees. It was quiet there; clouds plaited in latticework wisps. We had dried apricots to substitute for light, little suns fluorescing on the mezze platter. Everything was a platter there: hummus, fruit, charcuterie. We arranged tahini oceans, berry homes, and camembert snow—things that lived when put together. Before any of these gatherings, I arrive at my friend’s house at least half an hour early to bake cinnamon rolls or slice Asian pears into crescent moons. That day, I’d separated pomegranate seeds from their membranes until my fingertips stained a faint crimson that persisted through the afternoon. I realized that is what growing up means: bittersweetness, suds to rinse the evidence, the evidence enduring anyway.

SCENE 3: Friday the 13th

Yesterday marked the six-year anniversary of what I associate with the beginning of the COVID era, even though the virus itself had been present since 2019. That was the day my elementary school shut its doors for what was supposed to be two weeks, which turned into two months, which—well, you remember.

I didn’t remember it was the anniversary until I was, regrettably, scrolling on Instagram and found a reel that said so. It played BENEE’s “Supalonely”, a song I don’t think any of us could escape in 2020, and cycled through a series of photographs that encapsulated the era: Netflix parties, Zoom meetings, masked hangouts, even Chloe Ting’s ab workout, which people in the comments shuddered at with haunted recollection. I watched this video and felt an inexplicable ache. Some part of me missed this era that was so objectively awful for the world, and in addition, irreparably fractured society’s perceptions of community.

And yet, I tend to romanticize what I no longer have, while conveniently forgetting that six years ago, I would have done anything to get out of the situation I was in—freshly out of the closet, dealing with those accompanying shades of hell. Ten-year-old me would kill to be sixteen right now, would probably not believe you if you showed him the recents in my camera roll. That means I must have done something right.

At 1:26 a.m., before going to sleep, I said a prayer. I did not realize it was a prayer until halfway through. It was subconscious, an old orison my mother used to sing to me when I was old enough to mouth the words as she went and young enough to still believe. While belief is a strong word, I found I had room for something like it after all. Though it may not choose to lodge in that room, the space for it exists, and for now, that knowledge is enough.

SCENE 4: A Serendipitous Saturday Adventure

My best friend rocked on the tree swing as I climbed the boulder next to it. The eucalyptus, fondly christened Hippie Tree, extended its branches across the whole of the cliff’s edge, overlooking the indented coastline. The colors of the Golden Gate Bridge, a poppy against the cerulean sky, leaked into the waters, amalgamating with the green of the stout hills beyond, a gradient reflecting in the strait. A seagull nose-dived into the veil of the cirrus clouds like an angel falling from a firmament, caught by a net of pearls.

The way you get from one place to another is what binds you to the earth. Mine are the local bus, BART, and MUNI—a holy trinity of iron and diesel I learned to count on the way I count on sunrise. That day, a fourth and fifth member joined the congregation: the Golden Gate Ferry and Marin Transit’s 219 bus, which outran us by seconds. We stood on the corner and watched it pull away, and there was nothing to do but walk.

The old railroad trail ran out of downtown like a scar the trains had left behind, leading us to a leafy grove, murk closing overhead. Fungi reached up through the fissures in the arid soil, grasping toward a light they would never quite meet. Beside us, the lagoon opened up, grey and placid in the January cold, its sediment muted from gold to umber. The grass came afterward, thick, tall, and seemingly ceaseless, until finally, the cliff rose before us—steep and assiduous, the way hard things are always patient with you, waiting to be climbed.

The world fell away as we ascended, the shroud of fog slackening, the whole arrangement of streets and lives receding into something that could be held in the palm of one’s hand. We had to earn our view; that was the truth of it. At the top, the sights bisected, rock and spray of the Pacific on one side, silvery bay on the other, the smell of salt all around. We did not say what we felt then, but it was there, settled into us the way the fortuitous walk had settled into our legs—slightly heavy and unexpectedly full.

That day, we talked at length about the butterfly effect—if I’d grown up in New York City like my parents had planned, if she’d never moved to my school district, if we hadn’t skipped middle school together—would we be sixteen, missing our bus, and hiking up a cliff on a Saturday afternoon?

After stepping over the tiny creeks sprouting seaside daisies, lupines, and cobweb thistles, we arrived at the tree where I’d spent hours of my childhood. When I was seven, I thought the two swing sets must be for giants. Today we were giants.

A goal we have set for ourselves this year, particularly as we drift closer to graduation, is to revisit the places that made us—to show each other bits and pieces of the lives we lived before we were part of each other’s. Hippie Hill was one of mine.

Some places hold you even after you’ve left them. To grow up is to traverse a landscape without realizing, until one day you reach the top of something and look back at how far the ground has fallen.

SCENE 5: Ending with Todays

And what else is there to do now, in this coming of age, but make art?

Today, my best friend and I are at the beach, jeans cuffed as we wade into the frigid San Francisco waters. We half-contemplate taking a surf lesson when I receive the text. My band is playing a punk show on the other side of the city. An iced coffee later, with sand-sprinkled socks, we are on the hour-and-fifteen-minute-long bus ride there. We play the show, and due to the short notice, we are down a guitarist and our bassist, but we are still playing, and all the songs are ours. Today, there are no covers in our set.

We stay to watch the other incredible bands, then emerge in a titanic throng to Dolores Park, an exodus of teenagers in search of food and finally, a train home. By the time I sprawl on my bed at the end of the night, I am exhausted. I spent yesterday reading, watching, and listening to art, and today, making it—something about that circularity made the day feel blissfully complete. Good soup.

Make art until you are weary and full with it. Look back at it when you are older—laugh or cry, but don’t burn it, no matter how stupid it is in hindsight. Make more stupid art afterward; repeat.

In San Francisco, I inhabit a world of Queen Anne spectacle, where the ornamental excess of salmon-pink turrets and gingerbread trim masks overcrowding; of Italianate aspiration, where the vertical elegance of cupolas and pediments disguises how tightly life is stacked inside; of Victorian Gothic dread, where spires, hardwood staircases, and ornate cornices anticipate the next earthquake or tech cycle; of Mission Revival denial, where stucco and red tile launder conquest into charm; of Art Deco bravado, where sunbursts and chevrons announce faith in progress, even as the buildings themselves outlive the future they promised; of Beaux-Arts authority, where symmetry formalizes power, and civic order depends on elevation, distance, and stone; of modernist efficiency, pledging open-plan, frictionless, streamlined, corporate swiftness, somehow failing to notice the human congestion pooling beneath that sees through their floor-to-ceiling glass; and of postmodern irony, where resistance murals are sponsored by venture capital, history existing as a veneer and sincerity kept at arm’s length.

San Francisco’s versions of itself, its innumerable mythologies, are each fundamentally incompatible with the last, yet inscrutably built atop one another. It is as if the city constantly tires of its colors, repainting without stripping the old layers first, building up sediment like a geological record, so that renovators scraping down to the studs find decades’ worth of aspirations flaking off in their hands—each layer still insisting it was once the final word. Thus, we live in a state of constant remembering and imagining, vigilantly making room for both. The city is at once larval and fully mature, so we continue to develop. Perhaps San Francisco cannot be chronologically historicized into a start and finish; perhaps its memoir observes no narrative arc. Perhaps it is not the beginning, middle, or end of San Francisco, but the braiding of the three, that delineates its identity.

When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.2

In Homo Irrealis, the essay collection by which this essay was inspired, André Aciman distinguishes longing and yearning temporally: “one longs for something in the future; one yearns for something in the past.” But what about the things that transcend future and past? The yearning, yet longing wantings that are intangible, imagined—desired in past, present, and future, and in something greater than the three. The wanting is a hypothetical one, as it has not occurred; however, it has certainly been, and in the case of yearning/longing, is likely being imagined. If the thing that is wanted for has been imagined, then on some plane, the wanting exists. Perhaps not in physicality, but in the consciousness—in the metaphysical. Now that the wanting exists, the notion that the attaining of the object of the wanting could, as well, exist positions that notion into a line of possibility. While the attainment has not happened, it might have, and it very well still could, yet it also may never, even though it should.

This is the philosophy upon which San Francisco is built and rebuilt—the thing that lives between and below and around and above yearning and wanting. We long for something in the future, so we create it: modernism, postmodernism, pristine and rectangular office spaces. We yearn for something in the past, so we revive it: Mission Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Gothic Revival. All the while, the past lives entangled in the future—the Spanish Colonial building housing a tech startup. We never truly lived or stayed within an era, and are therefore left wanting more of what never truly existed or ended. Yet, our own prowess begs futurity divorced from the frivolity of befores, of remembrance, so we contemporize our own historical revival. The actualization of both our yearnings and our longings depends on rescinding the other. Thus, neither can be fully realized. So continues our perpetual liminality.

Because dreaming costs money, my dear.3

Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, a critical exploration of the implausibility of cradling fantasy in a neoliberal capitalistic society, argues that “the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the ‘technologies of patience’... enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now.” This idea intersects with my previous essay, a brief meditation on the societal glorification of legacies: “The prospect of being remembered, regardless of how implausible, is enough to orient entire lives toward an after.” Similarly, citing exchange value, Berlant asserts, “with the ballast of capital, you hoard against death, deferring life, until you die.” Posthumously postponing achievement, living for a version of yourself you will never meet, is enervating—and society depends on that lethargy. When the importance we attribute to the future outweighs that of the present, life equates to endurance—live through this anguish in anticipation of something better later. What that is, when and if that better thing, or in Berlant’s words, “good life”, will come, is ambiguous. The laws of betterness are not specified or even guaranteed, yet we continue to live by and thereby live for them.

The promise of superior living, of upward mobility, is a capitalist concept to ensnare the working class in their own toil. The fruits of this promise exist only in fantasy, yet the imagination of their existence—the fact that they might have been, but never were, but could still be—is enough for us to keep seeking them. The promise is a constructed distraction, so we continue to fail to understand the impossibility of our aspirations, continue to fail at achieving them, and continue to live in an oppressive cycle of unfulfillment.

When you build your house, then call me home.4

The building on the corner has been under construction for eighteen months; the scaffolding has become architecture. We hang tarps over the construction and call it progress. The cranes idle, the permits expire and renew. Somewhere, someone is drawing plans for a building that will house both a startup and a historical society, and they do not see the contradiction because there isn’t one—or because there are only contradictions, which amounts to the same thing. But what if the building never finishes? What if the house is always one unpaintable layer away from completion, from perfection? We live in the wanting itself, in the space between the hammer and the nail, where San Francisco has always been.

Perhaps San Francisco’s refusal of linear time does something Berlant’s cruel optimism cannot account for. When the past keeps erupting into the future, and the future has already been built over three times, the deferral mechanism disassembles. We cannot hoard against death when every building already contains its own demise and revival. We cannot suspend questions about the cruelty of now when now contains eighteen other nows, flaking off in our hands.

The cruelty remains, maybe intensifies. The tech worker in the Mission Revival building is no less exhausted from living in architectural irony—but the temporality of yearning, of longing, of whatever we wish to call our hungry, confused wanting shifts. We are not waiting for the good life in some distant after; we are cycling through versions of it that were promised in 1906, 1968, 1999, each one insisting on itself, none of them delivered. The promise renews less because we believe in it and more because the city cannot stop repainting itself. Perhaps that is its own kind of optimism—cruel not because it defers, but cruel because it never lets us forget what we were promised, what we’re being promised, what we’ll be promised again when they repaint next year.

I am a singer. This is a fact. Singing comprises a significant part of my life. This is also a fact. Singing is a deep passion of mine. This, too, is a fact.

I can sing in front of people. I do it fairly often. I sing in my band, in musical theater productions, in a professional a cappella group. I have been singing for crowds since early childhood. Thus, audiences are not foreign to me.

And yet, when I am asked to spontaneously sing at any sort of event, whether the audience is small or large, whether it is simply for family or close friends, I shrink. My ribs tighten, my body physically grows smaller. Something in me constricts.

There is an ache lodged deep within me. It wants, more than anything, to say yes, to agree, to get up and sing for those expectant eyes who know that I am capable of singing, who have seen me sing onstage before. And yet, that same ache is what makes me say no every time. Declining, disappointing people—at least for a second, and then the night continues, and the matter is dropped and long forgotten to everyone but me.

I care too much about it. This is a fact. Absolutely no one lingers on these moments once they have passed. This pattern has sonified into a metric rhythm. They move on; I do not. There is pain in both silence and exposure, so I flatline, defaulting to the former.

The root of the problem is that I stopped. The cessation of performing an action one loves irreparably changes the shape of that love, regardless of whether it is returned to in the future. Sometimes, that can be good.

I stopped writing in middle school. I have been writing since I was two years old (yay for hyperlexia!), and in fourth grade, I begged my dad for a Google Drive account, because I “can’t write a 300-page novel by hand!” Out of tedium and non-necessity, I seldom rehash my middle school misadventures on here. In summary, American middle school is fundamentally incompatible with the trans existence (usually). So, during my (not so) glorious days of chronic absenteeism in eighth grade, after a painfully long period of artistic excissation, I elected, with my newfound time, to dust off that old Google Drive account.

My passion for writing reformed, incontestably. It grew. It expanded. It discovered angles and contours previously unknown to it. Years later, it led to this humble Substack publication.

However, during the pandemic, I stopped singing. I never sang at home to begin with, and now, there was nowhere for me to sing. Out of diffidence, I only practiced in a vacant house, and now, the house was perennially occupied. So, for longer than I wish to admit, singing etiolated.

When, at last, I reunited with my voice teacher, my ability had not diminished. Sure, I was rusty after two years, but, as any good voice teacher will tell you, the voice is a muscle, and with enough exercise, I grew stronger than before.

Yet, my actual passion had reshaped. Not lessened, not subtracted. Changed in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.

For years, I defined my life by theater. What was 2023 like for you? After a second to think—2023…oh! First, The Addams Family, then Les Mis! I was always in two shows per year: one in the fall and winter, and one in the spring.

Then, Rent happened. Rent was a formative time in my life for a great many reasons that deserve their own essay, but what’s relevant here is that after Rent, the spring show of 2024, I did not perform in a fall production. I made this decision for many reasons. I was not particularly enamored with any of the show options that autumn, and I was consumed by schoolwork and other commitments at the start of sophomore year—reasons I now wish, more than anything, I had overruled.

The following spring, I was in The Little Mermaid, and the magic rushed back. I wondered why I had ever stopped, why I had ever made excuses to not be in theater. However, when October arrived, I once again neglected to perform in an autumn production. This time, it was not of my own volition. I got top surgery (discernibly a higher priority than Guys and Dolls), and yet. Two autumns of my life have gone undefined by theater. So what have they been defined by?

The complexity of my vocal relationship runs deeper than my mistreatment of theater. As a young child, before I was cognizant of my transness, I hated my voice and failed to understand why. My only escape from that curious loathing was singing, not speaking, which somehow felt different.

But I stopped. And I realized what had changed shape in my relationship with my voice was my perception of it. Now, it betrayed me not only in speech, but in music—the one interruption to my own vocal notions.

I am profoundly passionate about singing—I know this. But somewhere along the way, I externalized that knowing as a fact. For instance, I know my favorite color is blue. This is a fact. However, my actual love for the art has forgotten its inwardness. Leaving anything unattended in the open for too long will make it rot.

There is one reason, and one reason only, that I never have and never will start HRT: because my singing ability will never be the same. My life would be immensely easier on testosterone. I would socially pass as male. It would likely distend my career prospects. I would be secure in my body. I would probably even like my speaking voice.

And yet, if this passion is so intense that it leads me to actively refuse the comfort promised with the facile act of discarding it, it must be worth something, right? I know it is worth something. I just don’t know how to make myself believe it.

I detest writing conclusions to personal essays. Conclusions demand resolution when often, none exists. It feels wrong to tie up everything raw and presently feeling in a neat little bow and declare it finished. I cannot tell you that I have repaired my relationship with my voice. That is simply not true. I can, however, leave you with this.

Your passions do not exist to satiate you. That does not mean that they should kill you or drive you mad or send you down the path of the tortured, depressed, alcoholic artist. What you love is meant to bring you joy, yes. But the ache that sustains throughout your artistic process, the itch you still haven’t scratched, the thing that continues to scare you about your passion, is what makes you know your creativity will last. It is what informs you, a little violently, that your heat will abide.

So, dear artist, let yourself be uncomfortable. Sing at the function you don’t want to, even if, at first, you hate the way it sounds. What frightens you is often what promises to stay.

Perhaps this is why we look beyond Earth. Not because space welcomes us, but because it withholds itself. We can see it, at least in fragments, and that partial vision aches. There is something unbearable about knowing that we are the incapable ones—that there is more in the skies than what the naked eye can hold. We feel a bitterness toward our planet, for it shelters and confines. Gravity keeps us alive and keeps us tethered, an anchor we fail to see as mercy. To be held is to be restrained. What is a floating ball of matter to deny desire?

Somewhere in the familiar past, a boy cranes his neck toward the vast night sky and feels a dull ache fester at its base. The crack that follows is a rearrangement of ancient matter. The atoms in his nape were once cloud, ocean, or the ash of a fallen star. The soreness is born of habit: looking up. It is children who dream most of stars, of the contents of their matter. They feel, more keenly than adults, that the universe is not distant—that it lives inside their bones.

This is why we forgive space its violence. Its lack of air, its radiation, and collapsing suns. To see the stars is to witness our physical histories. The body is a museum of extinction and memory. We are not separate from the cosmos—we are its afterimage, preserved in flesh. Iron in blood from supernovae, salt in tears from primordial seas, our spine as a fossilized wave. Our body is a star chart—an anatomical embodiment of the fire of the past. Even gamma radiation becomes bearable when we remember what it signals: the death of stars that made us possible.

An astronaut circles the Earth fifteen times in a single day. Fifteen sunrises and sunsets in which borders blur into cool-toned marble. From there, politics must feel flimsy, almost embarrassing. Lines drawn on maps lose their conviction when the planet turns beneath you, whole and unbroken. Discovery divided by nation seems small against such scale. Do we reach for the sky out of curiosity, or disillusionment with the ground? Our cities scar the Earth with evidence of want—concrete, canals, reservoirs, bridges stretching where rivers once decided their own paths. Eventually, some of us grow tired of building and breaking the same world.

So, the question shifts. Not why do humans go to space, but how could we resist it? Bone loss, fluid displacement, and disorientation feel like modest prices for perspective, peace, and the chance to trace our origins. Yet gravity is not the only force that binds us to land—love, friendship, grief. We orbit one another, emotionally malleable by design. We shape each other’s lives through proximity. Human connection is its own form of gravity—proof we are not solitary, aimlessly drifting matter.

The universe, meanwhile, is impartial—a diplomatic mother. Entropy is its way of touching everything equally. All is fleeting here, and decay is the universe leaning into itself. Rust, rot, erosion, forgetting: these are not failures but returns. Matter leans back into conversation with itself. Paint peels to reveal what came before. Loss clears space for becoming. Even suffering feels like the universe testing the edges of its awareness, asking how deeply it can feel itself.

The cosmos is seldom abstract. It creates sound and silence, purposefully toying with dichotomy. The Earth is a symphony of thunder and tide, quaking and avalanche, breathing and speaking. It thrums with the percussion of friction: leaves scraping asphalt, sand shifting, ice cracking. Then, it stills. The pause between heartbeats, the hush after snowfall, the held breath before understanding. Cyclically, opposites find resonance: a connective tissue fastening stillness and motion, acting as synapses through which they fire.

In those fifteen orbitals, a twenty-four-hour clock is abided by and cycled through, a rhythm that lingers in nonexistence. We cling to cadence because it comforts us. We name elements, chart constellations, divide hours—trying to press order onto the infinite. Space, however, is not privy to any system but solar. Time there is not linear; it pools and stretches like viscous fluid. It thickens, thins, rushes, stalls. Like honey diluted in tea, it is everywhere and nowhere. Unlike atoms neatly arranged into tables, time refuses containment. Its bonds break and reform, at once expending all the universe’s energy and none at all.

Sometimes the universe does not feel vast. Sometimes it collapses inward, shrinking to something cuppable in your hands. A breath leaves your mouth on a winter morning, fogging the air for a moment before dissolving. That cloud contains galaxies’ worth of physics—heat exchange, condensation, the obedience of molecules—and yet it vanishes almost immediately, as if embarrassed by its own existence. The cosmos does this often: performs its grandest laws in the smallest gestures.

A star dies somewhere far beyond sight, its collapse scattering elements across space. We call it catastrophic. But on Earth, a flower wilts in a vase, its petals browning at the edges, stem softening where water no longer reaches. The motions are not quite so different. Both are endings shaped by time and fuel, by the silent inevitability of depletion. One feels enormous because we cannot touch it. The other feels small because we can. Scale is a trick of distance, not value.

We often imagine ourselves as witnesses to the universe, passive observers of its unfolding. But attention is not neutral. What we notice gathers mass. What we neglect drifts outward, unmoored. Attention behaves like gravity—it pulls things toward it, shapes what can form nearby.

Neglect, too, is a force. Things unobserved do not vanish, but they do thin. They lose orbit. Their radiation displaces to the background—still present, but no longer shaping the foreground of experience. In this way, humans do not stand isolated from cosmic mechanics. We enact them. We pull and release, gather and scatter, simply by choosing where to rest our gaze.

Perhaps this is our responsibility as inhabitants—not to dominate the universe, but to notice it carefully, to maintain it. To keep certain things from drifting too far away.

When a life ends, something stops noticing. The universe loses one way of seeing itself. But the seeing does not vanish entirely; it redistributes, heat moving and atoms traveling. The elements that once formed a body continue their long conversation. Forgetting, here, is not abandonment, but release—a loosening of focus. The universe has always been made of such returns: stars dimming, oceans retreating, species folding back into chemistry. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is held forever.

And so the question lingers, unanswered and intact. Not what is the point, but what does it mean to want at all—to be a brief, attentive pause in an otherwise continuous unfolding. To be a thought the universe has, and then gently lets go of, changed by having had it.

We want space because we want ourselves. We want to know that our hunger means something, that our innate reaching is not a genetic mistake. That to look up is not a betrayal of the ground, but an acknowledgment of what we have always been: stardust that learned wondering.

Now it is winter break. Typically, during school holidays, I sleep in, but my bedtime remains largely unchanged. While I procrastinate the homework assigned for the break, my nights remain occupied, now claimed by my magazine—a work I adore, but never ends. Out of habit, I default to labor.

Often, I treat this time, uninterrupted and solitary, as a small luxury. Headphones in, the world muted, I’m able to make progress. Lately, though, I have begun to wonder if that is precisely the problem.

Time reserved for oneself should not demand output. Rest should not be conditional. Yet our modern culture’s reverence for speed and productivity has deprecated leisure, convincing us that even breaks must be optimized. Thus, we return to school and work already exhausted, carrying a fatigue we never allowed ourselves to set down.

This year, I have a free seventh period. I told myself I would use the extra hour and a half each day to rest. Only twice this semester have I actually taken a nap. Time is not the issue. Our culture is. We always have something else we should be doing—something we’ve been persuaded is more important or respectable than sleeping.

Rest is systematically devalued because it resists extraction. It cannot be efficiently optimized or converted into profit. In academic and corporate systems governed by productivity and growth, value adheres to what can be accelerated and monetized. Rest interrupts this logic, slowing time, suspending output, and centering human need over economic yield.

Because rest produces no immediate institutional return, it is dismissed as lazy and indulgent. In prioritizing profit, we forget the role of rest as a necessity for maintenance, care, and survival. Forget, however, is not the right word for this phenomenon. Forgetting implies a passivity, whereas the condemnation of sleep we are seeing is intentional, active, and structural.

When success is defined by visible effort, work becomes performance. This is partly why creative passions are so often discredited—especially in teenagers—and why activities that can be quantified, such as sports, are praised more highly than the arts. Students enroll in classes not aligned with genuine curiosity, nor with fields they hope to explore, but for the prestige of the course title itself. A difficult class sounds impressive; a “valued” extracurricular confers legitimacy.

When impressive is the baseline for respect, particularly among teenagers who crave validation and often lack the agency to choose what truly serves them, sleep is lost over somebody else’s passions. Rest is vilified when burnout is expected.

Yet while stillness is framed as laziness, many of our deepest perceptions arrive when nothing is being done, a belief long affirmed by Transcendentalism. Thoreau attested that “silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself,” a sharp rebuke to the performative productivity of both his era and ours.

In Walden, Thoreau lamented the industrialized, capital-driven America of the Romantic period: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

With social media, the epidemic of constant communication has only intensified. Compulsive posting, commenting, and messaging erode intimacy, rendering communication another technological conquest—something society can boast it has achieved, regardless of whether it yields more harm than good. Instant communication is undeniably an asset to our contemporary world. But is this primarily because it connects us to people, or because it aggrandizes corporate labor?

In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson describes society as “a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater,” echoing Hobbes’ conception of the social contract, wherein individuals relinquish certain freedoms for collective security. Emerson, however, warns that the championing of conformity induces the robbery of individual sovereignty. When we invest our unique selves into society, we enable society to glorify sameness.

By treating exhaustion as a personal failure instead of a natural response to constant demand, responsibility shifts to the individual while the system continues to extract labor, energy, and bodies. Rest becomes something to be earned rather than a shared right. In this way, its denial helps maintain control: tired people are easier to manage, less likely to resist, and more dependent on the very structures that exhaust them.

Alternatively, rest can be understood as a quiet form of refusal, asserting that human worth is not synonymous with output, and that life exceeds what can be harvested for value. This is precisely why rest is disparaged, and why reclaiming it can be radical.

In Pensées, Pascal observed, “All our unhappiness comes from one thing: that we cannot bear to sit in our room, alone and silent.” A few weeks ago, my English teacher tested this claim. Our homework for the week was to sit in complete silence for one hour, doing absolutely nothing beyond observing our thoughts. Depending on who you ask, the task was either effortless or excruciating—thankfully, my experience aligned with the former.

As an artist who finds inspiration in idleness, and as an autistic person with absolutely zero perception of time, the hour felt like ten minutes. It yielded no immediate creative fruit, but that was part of what made it so enjoyable. I realized how long it had been since I allowed myself to think without the obligation to produce, to justify my thoughts with output.

At the time, I was writing a paper for my psychology class on cognitive consolidation during sleep. This exercise felt like that—consolidation. It resembled sleep, not of the body, but of the mind: not the absence of thought, but the absence of pressure to think toward something mechanistically “useful”.

I let thoughts pass without feeling a desperation to write every fleeting fragment into physicality. I let what lingered linger, and what fleeted fleet. It felt restorative to let thoughts drift without the pressure to do something with them.

I noticed the rush of cars beyond my thin bedroom walls, and the strong, abiding scent of the pumpkin-maple candle I had blown out an hour ago. I noticed it so strongly then that it gave me a headache. I realized how much the filler in our lives, the constancy of stimuli like music or videos playing as passive background noise, detaches us from our environment. I had never noticed how loud those cars were or how pungent that candle was.

In my room, dark except for the faint blue of my dimmed LED lights, I noticed how many objects fluoresced—things I hadn’t noticed glowed until I truly looked.

At the same time, despite how brief it felt, there were signs that an hour had, in fact, passed. When I stepped out of the dark blue luminosity of my room, the sun had set. There was a world still turning, that had been turning while I’d been sitting with my thoughts. And yet, I didn’t feel an urgency to join it. I returned slowly, on my own terms, and when I eventually completed the work waiting for me that night, it felt less frantic.

I moved through the remainder of the semester with a slowness, whether or not I consciously recognized it. I began sleeping earlier. Now, during winter break, I no longer feel compelled to prove that my dormant hours are well spent. They can simply be static.

While rest is a necessary recovery from labor, it should not only be understood in relation to it. Rest is not currency, nor is it transactional; it is inherently divorced from capitalism, and understanding its autonomy allows us to understand ours. A life that must constantly earn its right to pause is not efficient—it is captive. To rest without explanation is to remember that we are human before we are useful.

In her constant masquerade, the eldest daughter becomes a virtuoso of theater, inhabiting every role in every production—from lead actress to supporting cast, ensemble to understudy. The eldest daughter’s poise in excelling without preparation is the envy of every swing. She is given no script, yet must deliver each line flawlessly, and not only act but serve as the playwright as well. Her younger siblings get a script—of course they do—because it was written by her.

And yes, their roles are unfair. They must be. But whether her siblings recognize it or not, their older sister assumes the brunt of the suffering, no matter how well she disguises it.

The eldest daughter is a caretaker, therapist, role model, and intermediary, all in an hour’s span. Most of all, she is forever a bellhop, bearing the weight of her family’s generational baggage on her shoulders. When she’s old enough to finally set it down, her muscles will ache chronically. The pain does not end on her eighteenth birthday; it simply takes a different form.

The acting, the writing, the pretending—the work is not what hurts most of all. It is the fact that none of it was chosen. She does not choose to be strong, to be responsible. If she could, she would choose in a heartbeat to be as weak, as naive, as heedless as her siblings. Instead, she is forced to swallow her fate of endless perfection as though it were privilege, when all she truly desires is freedom. She surrendered her own freedom so her siblings could have theirs, and now she questions whether she made the right decision when the decision was never hers to make. Her destiny was determined by inheritance long before she could resist it.

The matter complicates, however, when the eldest daughter is not a daughter at all. When it is not only her fat, her stretch marks, or her ugly face in the mirror that betrays her, but the existence of her repugnant breasts, curves, and high-pitched voice. Softness she did not ask for—though that hardly matters; eldest daughters rarely receive the liberty of softness anyway. The problem is that her role in the family, in society, in life was assigned to her before she was conscious enough to understand she was alive. It’s a girl!, the doctors exclaim as she wails, and though she is far too young to comprehend language, somewhere in her infant gut she understands something is dreadfully wrong. Regardless of when she later pieces it together, from birth, he knows, somehow, that he is not a she.

He is an enigma, the eldest “daughter”. When he cries as a teenager that nobody understands him, it is not out of angst. On top of surrogate parent, mental health professional, and mediator, he performs yet another role: girl.

He comes out of the closet and steps into himself, slowly marking the origin points of his insurmountable pain. And yet, something is missing—apart from the body parts he needs and the ones he needs removed.

He tries to find his community, people he can relate to, fellow performers. But the eldest daughters cannot claim a son. The eldest son experience is not nearly the same. He knows this, of course, but he never had the eldest son experience, did he? So he has no one, and he continues to perform, long after he’s outgrown the role. Then again, eldest daughters never stop performing, do they?

A trans man is your ideal woman, and you are too afraid to admit it. You force a prefix onto us—trans man, never just “man”, which is what we are. You never call a cis man a cis man. We use the prefix only when differentiation is necessary. You use it because you always feel a need to differentiate.

A trans man is easy to oppress, invalidate, and dehumanize. Our stories are ignored because you continue to see us as women, and women are easy to push aside, easy to deny. Thus, the transmasculine experience is braided with misogyny. When we are perceived as women, we are subjected not only to sexism but to dysphoria as well.

The polarization of gender in the modern sphere is a hellscape for the trans man because we fit nowhere within your binary. When you say “all men”, we point to ourselves as a counterexample, as we are victims of sexist oppression while being men ourselves, but to that, you brush us aside and say, “We weren’t talking about you.” In your eyes, we are inherently not part of “all men.” It’s performative for a man to be a feminist now, have you heard? So when a trans man stands up to his own oppression, is that performative, too? No. Not in your eyes. Because in your eyes, we are not men at all. The contemporary transmasculine experience is one we never signed up for—just like the eldest daughter complex.

The trans man who does not perfectly “pass” in your arbitrary binary is picked apart, pitted against “fellow” women, dehumanized, objectified, catcalled, and told he was “wearing the wrong thing” or “asking for it” after sexual harassment or assault. Society teaches us to despise the rolls, kinks, flab, and acne on our bodies. Every bone is scrutinized, it seems, and yet the trans man must still endure more. This body is not his. Everything is wrong. His blood detests itself. Meanwhile, in the United States, our rights to bodily autonomy and gender-affirming care erode before our eyes.

Every trans man is a performer. We are all seasoned theatricals, and whether young, middle, or old, every trans man is, in some sense, an eldest daughter. Our own communities reject us, and even when they don’t, acceptance often feels dysphoric.

The task of living as trans and as the eldest is Sisyphean—no matter how hard we push the boulder, and god knows we push with everything we have, it rolls back down. We question the point of trying, but if we stop, everyone around us will be disappointed. God forbid those around us are disappointed—that means we’ve failed. Disappointment is precisely what the eldest daughter has been preconditioned to avoid.

If we don’t try, our siblings will inherit boulders of their own. And our indirect training has made us too protective, too maternal, to let that happen.

In all pragmatism, the world will not learn to see us clearly. At least not any time soon. Clarity, however, begins from within. We are sons who lived as daughters, caretakers who deserved care, children who carried too much. But maybe beyond its injustices, being trans carries its own kind of liberation. Should we find it inside to forgive ourselves for conforming to a preordained character, we can allow ourselves the possibility of a life built not from obligation but from choice.

Perhaps we will always perform, perhaps we will constantly push our boulders, but even Sisyphus, condemned to eternal struggle, finds meaning in defiance. In the acceptance of our struggle lies rebellion and the creation of personal purpose. We can continue to push the boulder not because it is our duty, but because we have learned to carve strength—real strength, not the enforced kind—from misery, agency from expectation, and identity from the rubble of roles we were forced to play. Perhaps the eldest daughter in us will never die, but she doesn’t have to be all-consuming.

What is performative masculinity?

The “performative male” archetype depicts a man who consciously participates in traditionally “feminine” hobbies, interests, or aesthetics, not out of genuine interest, but in an effort to romantically or sexually appeal to women. He orders an iced matcha latte, carries deceptively dog-eared bell hooks titles without reading them, wears a Labubu keychain. The joke targets inauthenticity: men whose feminism is merely foreplay. The performative male trend has exploded into a global phenomenon, but at what cost?

What is gender performativity?

In Gender Trouble (1990), philosopher Judith Butler proposed the theory of gender performativity, defining gender as “performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be.” For decades, Butler and other queer and feminist theorists have argued that gender is not innate but enacted: a choreography of repeated gestures and social scripts. Simone de Beauvoir, French existentialist philosopher and feminist theorist, foreshadowed this decades earlier in The Second Sex (1949), writing, “One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.”

In our self-constructed theater, society rewards those who perform gender “correctly” and punishes those who don’t. “Good” and “bad” performances are dictated by taut binaries—expectations rehearsed so often they begin to masquerade as truth.

Drag, Butler notes, exposes the illusion of this truth: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” Scholar Paige Allen adds that “Drag parodies the idea of an ‘original’ or ‘normal’ gender. The ‘original’ itself is a failed copy of an ‘ideal’ gender that no one can embody.”

As McGill Daily correspondent Anneke Goodwin writes, “If gender is a performance, then the ‘performative male’ is only the newest character in our play. Their ‘stylized repetition of acts’ consists of ordering matcha, reading Sally Rooney in a public park, and manipulating their current situationship. Repeat. Their ‘stylization of the body’ includes (but is not limited to) growing a moustache, putting on rings, and adorning their jorts. Repeat.”

Performative masculinity, therefore, is yet another iteration of the performance of gender—this time, with billions of views. As we know, virality has consequences.

Goodwin warns, “Men are dipping their toes into ‘feminist’ traits for the first time, not in pursuit of identity or liberation from toxic masculinity, but for romantic and sexual leverage. Despite their newfound social popularity and deviation from gender norms, this ‘new male’ is not evolving masculinity. It is simply repackaging it with the hope of being more likely to get some play.”

Performative masculinity, toxic masculinity, and the alt-right reverse Renaissance.

Meena, a teen observing the trend, reflects, “I think in a time when a large number of young men are being red-pilled and engaging in alt-right media more and more, making fun of progressive young men for being ‘performative’ and making fun of men attempting to be liberal/feminist or even just seeking out the humanities is…not the look.”

She’s right to be uneasy. The manosphere—a web of online spaces promoting male supremacy and anti-feminist rhetoric—has become a breeding ground for radicalization. Within it, incel ideology thrives, positing that women are responsible for men’s supposed subjugation.

The term “red-pilling”, borrowed from The Matrix (1999), symbolizes awakening to “truth”—a metaphor co-opted to describe conversion to misogyny. For some, it becomes almost religious—a Great Awakening: a spiritual rebirth into resentment.

Herein lies the plague of toxic masculinity, a term that, in mainstream culture, has become synonymous with incels, misogyny, and the weaponization of gender roles.

Some claim that performative masculinity, at least, discourages men from adopting toxic traits. Yet in practice, its cultural footprint tells a more complex story.

Originally, the trend was a lighthearted jab at men who aestheticized femininity for social capital. But as it spread, it devolved into labeling any man with a matcha latte or wired headphones as “performative.” A joke, perhaps—but one that blurs satire and scorn.

The internet now ridicules men for even the possibility of performance. The result? A culture where sincerity becomes suspect. These days, you cannot see a post on your feed featuring a man participating in decidedly “performatively masculine” traits without a barrage of comments toeing a fine line between playful teasing and outright bullying.

Surely, men can listen to Clairo without ulterior motives. Surely, a cup of tea need not be a gender statement. But the irony is that the more we joke, the less space we leave for authenticity.

While on the surface, the trend seems harmless, the urge to label a man as “performative” simply for enjoying certain hobbies or having certain likes feels like a step backward. Meena adds, “I don’t think it’s any form of feminism to push men out of spaces via the excuse of ‘well, we women were pushed out of spaces’. I don’t think any sort of progress can be made through trying to make things ‘fair’ in the sense that ‘we struggled, so should they.’” To ridicule men for reading Audre Lorde—or for engaging earnestly with feminist thought—risks undoing the very progress we’ve made. In her words, the truly performative man is “Just a douchebag. We don’t need a fancy new word for it.”

Performative masculinity, in its current incarnation, feels regressive in 2025—a time already marked by male dissociation with the humanities, rising homophobia, and a global conservative tide. By devolving into another label, we have inadvertently created a pendulum swinging between toxic and performative masculinity. Once, we seemed to be making progress in growing a movement determined to dismantle toxic masculinity. Now, we’ve simply repackaged the policing of gender under a trendier name.

Being visibly “effeminate” and having “feminine” hobbies as a man has always singled men out for homophobic jabs. The fact that the performative male trend is a joke inadvertently makes it that much easier for people who are bigoted in reality to say that they think it’s unnatural for men to take part in “feminine” hobbies without automatically sounding homophobic. Now, rather than laughing at men for being “gay”, we laugh at them for being “performative”, which is a far more acceptable remark to make in predominantly progressive circles.

When “performative” replaces “gay” as a socially acceptable insult, prejudice wears progressive clothing. What was once homophobia becomes irony, and irony becomes immunity. And when even “feminist men” feel alienated—mocked for caring too much, reading too deeply—we risk pushing them back into the arms of the manosphere.

In a survey for Impact, men interviewed stated they found the performative male stereotype to be mostly funny and largely harmless—but they cited concerns that the trend would steer men away from educating themselves on feminist theory and from humanities education in general. This rejection of the liberal arts ties into toxically masculine, alt-right ideology.

Teen Ellah Altman expresses, “Guys will tend to move away from feminist literature, work [written] by women, and feminist media because they think it’s a sign of being weak or a ‘performative male’ and just turning all these things into a reason for men to be even less feminist. [The trend] is doing the opposite of what it was maybe intended to do.” She concludes, “It’s not creating a good environment for people to be curious about feminism and to take it seriously and not as some big joke or as a way to impress women.”

What scares me most is the labeling of creating art as performative. My Instagram feed is curated to my hobbies and is full of creative people. Lately, though, almost every time I see a man creating art (most often some kind of physical, visual art, like a painting), the comments are rife with either “ew, gay” or “haha, performative male”, which ranges from homophobic to simply demeaning. Especially in 2025, it feels inhuman and dystopian to actively push people away from creating art.

Small footnote for this section: as with all internet phenomena, the literature written about this topic is weird. Whilst completing background research in an effort to prepare myself for the subject matter of this piece, I came across some insightful, thought-provoking works, mainly derived from academic gender theory pieces and undergraduate journalism, but some of the pop-cultural commentary I came across had a strange, underlying connotation, and out of confusion and interest, I explored more deeply. A pattern I noticed with a couple of pieces in less of the scholarly, and more of the mainstream media space was the conclusion that while men who drink matcha/listen to Clairo/read feminist literature/whatever else are performative, it’s okay—they’re harmless. Which is so deeply bizarre because it still forces the performative label on those men. The barrier is still created, in which men can no longer enjoy these hobbies without being labeled “performative”. It’s so bizarre because at its core, people should be allowed to do what they want without facing negative commentary from others. This ties into a larger essay topic that I’ve been interested in, which is the fact that we, as human beings, are simply not nice to each other anymore. I fear we have severely lost the plot.

What about queer communities?

The conversation deepens when we examine the trend’s impact on queer communities—particularly sapphic and transmasculine spaces. Altman notes, “The things that are directly related to the performative male trend are all things that have historically been signals for queer people to spot other queer people, to recognize who the people within your own community are because sometimes it’s hard to tell, and as subtle signs of resistance.” Articles of clothing that have lately been associated with the performative male aesthetic have included carabiners, white tank tops, and specific cuts of denim, which have rich histories with working-class queer communities, including butch-femme and transmasculine cultures dating back to the 1940s. While, of course, these articles of clothing are not exclusive to queer people, when these items are adopted by mainstream trends, the rich history and context within the queer communities they originated from is often erased or trivialized. “By making fun of it as a trend that cis men are doing kind of feels like they’re appropriating things that have been symbols of hope and resistance for queer people.” Altman adds, “And I don’t feel like I’ve heard a lot of other people talking about it. Like, I don’t think I’ve heard anybody else online noticing the parallels.” She cites more modern examples of queer wardrobe signaling, including “Doc Martens, tote bags, flannels, wired headphones. Feminist literature. Girl, we’ve been drinking matcha. Catch up, do better.” Asian creators, too, have noted how the West’s commodification of matcha erases its cultural roots. Within the performative male aesthetic, this displacement compounds: an Asian thing gets turned into a performative male thing. Altman states, “It’s kind of disregarded that all these things that have kind of been part of queer culture and just been using it to appeal to the female gaze. I would classify this trend as appropriation of queer culture.”

This appropriation isn’t always malicious—but harm doesn’t require malice. Even well-intentioned mimicry can erase history.

While queer communities have begun performative masc contests, reclaiming and celebrating their own stereotypes and culture, the distinction remains: for cis men, these are trends; for queer people, these are lived experiences of identity.

While Altman agrees that categorizing all men who read feminist literature as “performative men” is unhealthy, she recognizes that this trend sprouted from understandable frustration with men who actually did so performatively (“performatively”, in this context, is not used through Butler’s gender performativity lens, but as a way of performing in a way that appeals to the female gaze). Altman adds that for men who genuinely wish to educate themselves, it is crucial to be “researching about different feminist authors and taking the time to read. Find out from other women what books might be good to read instead of just seeing what other guys are reading online.”

The core critique of the “performative male” trend is its perceived insincerity (doing it for validation rather than genuine interest). In contrast, for lesbians and transmasc individuals, these expressions of masculinity are fundamental to their identity and a form of resistance against heteronormative gender roles, not a temporary trend for social capital.

Is it really that deep?

Most creators engaging with performative masculinity mean no harm. Jokes metastasize into movements; that’s the nature of the internet. But awareness must accompany virality.

Altman concludes, “Things start as harmless and shallow and as a joke. But I think that if this keeps going on, there could be serious harm done to specifically the queer community and specifically men who are going to be steered further away from feminism and further away from actually respecting women. It’s not a good look.”

Samhita Krishnan, writing for The Occidental, poses a provocative counterpoint: “Even if every man reading feminist literature nowadays is putting on a front, is that really the worst thing in the world? If the alternative is a man who conforms to traditional masculinity, one who never steps outside the status quo, I’ll take the Performative Male every time. Perhaps he hasn’t fully grasped how to embody it yet, but at least he is presenting in a way that challenges the conventional notion of masculinity.”

Perhaps she’s right. Maybe even the truly performative male, for all his irony, is at least reaching toward something—however clumsily—that challenges the status quo.

True performative masculinity—men embodying sensitivity as strategy—is indeed hollow. But for many, the interest is real, and it began long before a TikTok trend gave it a name.

To mock these small deviations is to re-inscribe the same binary we claim to resist. If Gen Z prides itself on progress, we must recognize sincerity when it appears—even, and especially, when it looks like softness.

How old were you when you got into graphic design?

Weirdly, this is somewhat of a difficult question. Many folks on Instagram know me for my poster designs, but at first, I actually picked up graphic design as a necessity—not as a hobby! In my freshman year, when I was fourteen years old, I started Vellichor Literary, a multimedia magazine publishing global creatives, somewhat on a whim. While I’ve since learned the art of fleshing out ideas and meticulous branding, people are sometimes shocked to learn about the spontaneity from which my magazine was born. In hindsight, it’s a wonder that I, an autistic person who craves routine, designed a logo, built a website, created an Instagram account, and opened submissions to the magazine in one day. Then again, it feels only principled that Vellichor Literary was born of the same intensity that drives my artistic hunger.

Hasty as its beginnings were, Vellichor launched into the world—and that’s when it dawned upon me. I need to learn graphic design. (I really don’t know where I thought my Instagram posts were going to come from—the sky?? Perhaps the magazine layouts would spawn out of the air?) My first attempts at social media design for Vellichor were abysmal. Like, actually tragic. That is why they have since been archived. We don’t talk about them. It turns out, though, once you’re forced to work on a skill every single day, you start to get better at it!

I can’t pinpoint the exact time when graphic design changed from a skill I had to learn to a passion I was in love with. In any case, I am deeply grateful it did.

What advice would you give to a teen wanting to start/grow an advocacy-based organization?

First of all, that’s such a cool idea—I hope it’s been going well! Secondly, honor yourself. Believe in your dreams and fight to make them come true. Take opportunities that come your way and don’t beat yourself up over mistakes—learn from them! The two most valuable things I’ve learned from running a magazine haven’t been hard skills—they’ve been time management and recognizing my boundaries. That last one is so, so important. Burnout is not worth it, full stop. If you ever begin to resent what you love, that’s your sign to take a step back and breathe!

What are your favorite things to read on Substack?
I love reading people yap about niche things they really care about. The strange bits of history, obscure early internet phenomena, and late-night social commentary I entered knowing nothing about, and exited with a new rabbit hole to explore.

Favorite AP class?

Lang, at the moment! I’m especially excited for Art History and 2-D Design next year, though :)

Do you wear wigs?

Have you worn wigs? Will you wear wigs?

How did your mom agree to pay for the apps you use for graphic design?

Spat out my chai laughing. I wish. I used to use Canva (love-hate relationship), and I’m now fortunate enough to have access to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud through my photography and digital design class at school (I know, I’m still not over it, either).

What’s your favorite genre of literature?

I read a variety of books, but I find myself drawn to gothic lit, queer horror, murder mysteries, and lit fic! My favorite book of all time is Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura.

Favorite film and why?

Life Is Beautiful. No words I could use would bring it justice.

To be or not to be?

That is the question.

Did you know I’m in your walls?

So that’s why I’ve been hearing rustling at night.

Would you rather moonbeam ice cream or dancing at the movies?

I beg, can we leave this in June?

Do you have any tips to improve writing poetry?

Write relentlessly. Read voraciously. It’s insane how much we improve by doing—in a year, month, or even a week, you’ll look back at your old writing and see improvement!

What inspired you to start Vellichor?

As a queer, trans, and neurodivergent creative of color, I often struggled to find a space for myself within the literary zeitgeist that welcomed my identity in all its intersectionality. In each place I landed, I was hiding more pieces of myself than not. That coarse desire to create authentically drove me to excavate and construct my own monument to the arts.

Do you plan to ever vlog on YouTube?

Yes!! I’ve just been waiting to magically stumble upon a camera with better quality than my phone, lol.

What’s your favorite musical?

Biased because I’ve been in both, but Rent and Les Mis.

How long have you been writing poems for?

Since way before I can remember! I’m hyperlexic, so I taught myself how to read and write when I was two. I wrote all throughout elementary school (especially novels! I have so many horrible first book drafts from elementary school, lol), and won my first two writing contests in fifth grade, but only really got serious about poetry in ninth grade.

How are you so goated?

How are YOU so goated???

Presidential campaign when?

Awww, this is so sweet! In seriousness, I would never work in politics—I think that would just be way too stressful for me. I am, however, an activist through and through!

If you could have one thing in your life that you’ve always wanted, what would it be?

Honestly, I feel so blessed to have so much already. I wish for world peace, the eradication of plutocracy, and the unconditional protection of trans kids everywhere.

Would you ever do a commission for an artist, like an album cover or poster?

Yes, absolutely!!

Any fav fonts?

Literally so many, and my answer to this changes all the time. At the moment, graphic design-wise, I’ve been obsessed with Bootzy, Mazzy, Cormorant Garamond, and Nautica. I always write in EB Garamond, though!

That’s all for today—this was fun! Thank you all for asking me questions—I hope this helped you get to know me better. I want to get to know you all, too! Feel free to comment or DM me (@bensroughdraft on Instagram) to say hi, or to ask anything else! Signing off until next time.

There was a time we roamed roads not knowing what they’d lead to—not knowing which was more traveled, weathered down, believed in. The compulsion by which our paths were examined, analyzed, and ultimately selected settled betwixt intuition and faith, nigh the heart, and far from logic. These days, such driving forces rarely illumine our doorsteps. Perhaps the abiding presence of the digital, sustained by the waxing absence of the analog, has softened our synapses. Our instinctive transmissions, both the chemical and electric, have palliated—and if our neurons struggle to communicate, how can our tongues succeed? These days, when presented with a crossroads, we raise our heads, angling our eyes in that perfect mechanism contingent upon practice, to spy on the action of he who is next to us, evaluate him, and thus, determine his action’s effect on our inevitable decision.

Our actions are influenced by those who surround us, and yet we seldom dare to greet our neighbors and collaborate on the aid we so desire. Rather than meet at a confluence, we pilfer the verdict concluded by the person in front of us, bargaining on their original thought in place of ours, when in actuality, their decision is as much affected by their predecessor as ours is by theirs.

When met with the reality of our decisional motivations, the question that plagues the mind is whose thought is the true original. Does free will drive this original, or does the nonexistence of free will attribute all decisions, including that of the so-called “true original”, to external force? Should we convict nature of this crippling externality? Or has the inescapable nurture stripped us of the ability to think freely?

WEST: Concentrated happiness; a warmth that does not radiate.

The issue with people, particularly Americans, is our obsession with perfection. The art of the handmade gift has seemingly vanished—we are so afraid that our Crayola marker card, illustrated on printer paper, will be deemed subpar, agedly inadequate, that we opt to purchase the storebought card instead; invariably printed the same way, complemented by perfectly straight lines and stock illustration, and complete with a generic phrase that only loosely applies to the recipient.

In part due to a lack of recovery (or perhaps a societal unwillingness to evolve) from the COVID-19 pandemic, we have swapped dinner parties, potlucks, and picnics for restaurants and cafes. The art of opening your home, creating food to share and seeking participation from others to do the same, and the slowness invited by cooking—the idle, conversation-soliciting minutes while vegetables sizzle, spices marinate, and sugars bake—is too intimate for our hardened hearts to permit.

Americans will purchase all the world’s knitting needles and stacks of yarn, yet never sit down and knit. These sorts of individuals, ones possessing the privilege of impulsivity, are so quick to consume, to purchase, but the one currency they are hard-pressed to spend is time—especially if they are influenced to make that purchase, as we so often are. Our contemporary mentality has morphed into something like this: if we can observe others creating through the comfort of our screens, why abandon that comfort to create something of our own?

In a digitality defined by speed and disposability, our culture of financial immediacy has become characteristic. It’s cool to have—like those bagfuls of yarn—but scarcely so to create. The modern zeitgeist is punctuated by instant gratification. Thus, why succumb to the difficulty of a learning curve, the slowness of art? Why create art when such an abundance already exists for you to consume?

When creation becomes antiquated, the definition of American greatness changes. Innovation is rapidity, and rapidity has no room for the poet, the hobbyist, or the thinker. By this logic, we are actively diminishing the meaning of innovation. For if time is not spent on change, has any real development occurred? Therein lies the paradox of American achievement.

SOUTH: Unplugging the supercharged; liminal emptiness.

What modernity lacks is the ability to unplug. I, too, find myself guilty of this urge to fill. Each crook, cranny, and crevice; minute cavity; and lull in time demanding stimulation. When we grow dependent on this “filler” stimulation, its constancy dilutes our sensitivity to whatever it is we should be focusing on.

Our persistent exposure to exaggeration, from clickbait headlines and video titles to shock value-ridden social media content, can make less stimulating environments, such as the walk home from school, seem comparatively boring, therefore more difficult to pay attention to.

When we associate a repeating activity with our cell phones, it becomes second nature to whip out those phones when the activity occurs. For example, if the first thing you do when school lets out and it's time to walk or take the bus back home is check your notifications, you are likely to continue using your phone each day at the end of school.

While indulging in the world of notifications after a long day of work or school can seem harmless, it may do more damage than we think. How much of our sensory awareness erodes when we concentrate our attention on our phone, blocking out the remainder of our circumjacent stimuli? The answer can range from the small, yet significant observations: the sweet, heady scent of the summer grasses, the luminous cerulean coloring of the sky, the shapes and stories in the clouds—those little sensory perceptions that can make us feel more alive and in touch with the world, release “happy hormones”, and even inspire certain Substack essays (yep, we’re getting meta, and not like Mark Zuckerberg). Of course, the absence of sensory input registration can have more drastic effects, as well. Reduced awareness of our surroundings, especially when outdoors and around vehicles, can be fatal.

Modern American society is fundamentally sculpted to provide us with an excess of stimuli and a lack of time, or perhaps more accurately, a lack of cultural emphasis on time management. The act of “killing two birds with one stone” is not only idealized—it is the norm.

NORTH: An archaeology of the carefully laid; reconstruction with intent to endure.

We are a palpably directionless people. Yet I believe in the possibility of collective redirection. We, as a society, have idealized the speed and simultaneity of accomplishment so much that we have forgotten that true achievement takes time. To attain this directionality, we must redefine the concept of “reward”. Instant gratification cannot be our sole motivator forever—not if we want to produce tangible change.

We must come to terms with slow progress—the kind created by patience, persistence, and resilience. Unless we accept the intrinsically gradual nature of growth, we will not advance. Progress can be conceived in terms of architecture. In order to rebuild, we must excavate our foundation and explore the raw, emotional fissures at our collective core. The question abides: is society ready to deconstruct?

In all honesty, most of the poetry I read while getting around the city fell flat, in my opinion—a melange of lackluster craft coupled with cliché rhymes. However, one in particular caught my eye, and once I’d read it for the first time, it followed me everywhere. Once I’d stepped off the train and onto the platform, the words lingered like perfume, and I found that they not only took up space in my brain—they demanded it. Each consonant wormed its way into the cavities of my skull, each sound stretching itself as if exploring the dips and folds of my throat, each now-familiar shape idly loitering on my tongue until I could taste its intonations.

I am a musician, and poetry, to me, is no less music than a song on the radio. This poem, as it appeared more frequently during my daily subway rides, further affixed itself to my brain. Once I had exhausted its bare meaning, I dissected it word by word, and then by the things that are smaller than words: the space between syllables, the berth separating stanzas. Therein lay the music of my autopsy of the poem—a signature in syncopated time, placing stress upon the piece’s weaknesses and excavating meaning from them, as well.

As the poem revealed itself to me with increasing prevalence (or perhaps my zeal to actively search for it simply made me notice it more), I reciprocated its eagerness to reunite by returning to it with a fresh set of eyes, prepared to anatomize anew each time. I derived a thrill from scrutinizing its sculpture, attempting to understand the block from which it was carved.

For all my routine examinations, what truly struck me about the whole ordeal was the poem’s mere existence. While not every poem on the subway was my cup of tea, the fact of their actuality filled me with wonderment, and most of all, reassurance. In an age defined by haste, disposability, and transactionality, any trace of human-created art is a comfort. It’s dystopian to admit, but the unwavering continuance of the Poetry in Motion project for over three decades, especially in New York City, offers a partial reprieve from the certainty of artistic Armageddon.

Amidst the souvenirs of capitalism, advertisements for everything from apps to makeup brands to universities, the existence of poetry gives this cynic-by-necessity some inkling of hope for an artful future.

Subway poetry is necessary because, unlike that millionth ad for Facetune, it makes the bustling passerby—at least, the literarily-inclined ones—stop. A poem compels you to look up from your phone and read with intention. Poetry invites a slowness that is becoming a rarity in our digital world. Public transportation is one of the best ways to bring that slowness back into our lives.

We live in a world where every waking moment of our lives, every crevice, every minute lull in time is filled by content. When you’re not driving and focusing all your attention on the wheel, a ride on public transit summons a pause. There is an act of suspension that occurs in a train car or on a bus seat—a suspension that transiently removes you from the world. A suspension that carries a sort of unwieldiness as its presence grows scarcer.

We have forgotten how to slow down, look up, and notice the cracks in the ceiling, the raindrop caught between window and sill. The trivial mundanity that ameliorates life’s tedium.

A poem on the subway softly coaxes that slowness again.

As the editor-in-chief of a multimedia periodical, this phenomenon has been reverberating endlessly in my brain. Even more so than a subway poem, the permanence and physicality of a magazine require readers to pore over its contents, flip its pages, wear down its spine, and return to it. Whether on your nightstand, desk, or kitchen counter, physical media melds. Rather than disappearing into an algorithm, it becomes part of your environment, inviting opportunities to share it, sit with it, and linger in its capacity.

The palpability of a magazine trumps the distance of a subway poem, in that a poster on the subway is not touchable. A poster framed and protected by glass on a wall does not yield pulp between your fingers, the opportunity to pick at the seams, and watch pages fold, curl, and fade. The shield between you and the poster inhibits erosion.

Be that as it may, the magic of the subway poem lies not in its tactility but in its ability to coalesce. Subway poetry, too, fuses with the reader’s environment, but in contrast to the way of the magazine. While the portability of physical media grants autonomy to the reader, subway poetry presents the element of surprise. Hence, my glee with the poem I’d become acquainted with. The variety of pieces in the Poetry in Motion series allows the reader to encounter multiple, and perhaps develop an affinity for a particular one, as I had.

Be it a poem on the subway, a magazine at the barbershop, or a newspaper in the doctor’s office waiting room, the presence of print to read—rather than content to scroll—either passively or with precision, is necessary. Whether print literature acts as idle timepass, an intellectual exercise, or active opposition to AI Armageddon, it is essential to global welfare. We need something that does not flatten, compress, or disintegrate into a black void. We need something that breaks skin—in puissance and papercuts—to liberate us from the algorithm we obey.

Should you find yourself ensnared by curiosity, the poem that so captivated my mind can be found below:

Origin Story — Jenny Xie, 2018

I was profligate like a floodlight to the sun.

Hoarded saccharine and toothmarks,

wanted only the thickest rhymes, two of each.

Full I was of promises I never intended to keep:

puckered laughter, lines to feast.

I let everyone who entered my life enter through me.

Demanded nonsense love and bodies that would ring.

Not to mention higher kilowatts

of creeping joy, more red in everything—