this struck me as strange.

i can come along? while you run errands? as we meet each other for the first time and try to engage in a vaguely meaningful conversation, you want me to accompany you to duane reade to buy kleenex and hair spray?

sure, i guess?

i know i sound a bit irked, but i’m not really. i don’t actually hold this against him. i know he meant no harm. i suspect he figured that, on a morning when things had already been planned and scheduled, it’d simply be an easy way to kill two birds with one stone.

i do, however, think this brief exchange speaks to a much larger and more recent cultural phenomenon: we are becoming less and less willing to do things for other people that inconveniences ourselves. nowadays, i find that we often ask and expect others to acquiesce to our wants, our needs, our schedules, our rhythms. and if they can’t or won’t, we—at times explicitly, more often unconsciously—discard them and look for someone else who will.

when i eventually told him that wouldn’t work for me, we did something downright crazy: we found a time when neither of us was doing anything else and agreed to meet at a coffee shop relatively close to the both of us.

and as i sipped on my $9 iced latte, i thought about what it costs to see someone. the time, energy, emotional bandwidth, literal cash. you have to leave your apartment, you have to stop what you were doing before you leave your apartment, you have to find the q train because you accidentally got on the n, you have to wait 45 minutes for a table to open up, you have to act like you haven’t already heard this story twelve times, you have to laugh, enthusiastically but not too much… you get the point.

we’ve spent the last decade learning to optimize ourselves—our calendars, our inboxes, our sleep, our protein intake, we’re even pomodoro-timing sexual intercourse. if we’re not up by 5 a.m. after a 98 sleep score, listening to a podcast at 1.5 speed, responding to e-mails while ingesting a panoply of probiotics, something is terribly wrong.

much of the time, this is harmless; some of it, one could argue, is actually good.

optimizing our work lives, for instance, might even be considered necessary, since there was a time in america, not long ago, when being a good employee seemed to require a complete disregard for one’s own humanity. we were expected to work rain or shine, in sickness and in health, forced to hop on a zoom call under a beach umbrella in aruba.

so we learned to optimize in the office, to draw healthier boundaries between work and life. and now, i’m happily receiving auto-replies from people no longer at their desks past 5 p.m.

and yet, somewhere along the way, we took the ethos we built around work and carried it home, into our friendships, relationships, and partnerships. i can’t go out to dinner, i’m saving my energy. i’m not free to facetime, i’m protecting my peace. i don’t have time to help you move, i’m prioritizing myself.

to be clear, this isn’t a defense of martyrdom. nor am i suggesting another person’s needs should always take precedence over your own (see my previous essay on the perils of that). but perhaps there is a distinction between giving of yourself to the people you love and giving yourself up.

it seems that everyone wants a village. but no one wants to be a villager.

we want people to host us when we’re in their city, to bring us lasagna when a parent has passed, to get on the phone when we’re going through a breakup, to sit with us in the hospital as we await news, to party with us until the crack of dawn in vegas. we want all of this, yet we’re unwilling to do it for anyone else.

the part i think we sometimes omit when we talk about relationships is that we think of them as something we get to draw from, rather than something we also need to replenish. a relationship that never costs you anything isn’t a relationship—it’s simply proximity, efficiency, and convenience.

over the years, i’ve come to realize that the most valuable relationships are the ones that are hard-fought, the ones that ask the most of us, that ask us to show up, time and time again, even when showing up feels taxing, exhausting, and inconvenient. because when you choose to be vulnerable, when you genuinely open yourself up to another, i believe it demands the surrender of something that’s yours, be it time, attention, solitude, or sleep. in so doing, we co-create an intimacy that deepens into trust, and a trust that deepens into a certainty that someone will be there when we need them.

i have lived enough of my life moving between cities and airports and sets and hotel rooms to know how easy it is to let logistics become the reason to not show up. there’s always an early call time, always another flight to catch, always an important meeting to prepare for. i can always find a perfectly defensible reason not to take the time to invest in the people i love.

but i often think, if i continue arranging my life so nothing is ever asked of me at an inopportune time, what exactly am i arranging my life for? what’s left when all is said and done? a couple more bucks in the bank account? a few more hours of sleep?

i want to let go of the fantasy that relationships should fit effortlessly into the life i have constructed. i want to give something of myself to the people around me, in the hope that they feel brave enough to give me something of themselves as well. this, i believe, is the cost of knowing someone, of loving someone.

so i’ll close my laptop. i’ll move my meeting. i’ll wait in traffic. i’ll pay the $24. i’ll hear the story again and again. because someday, i hope, it’ll be my story that someone is willing to hear twice.

i always imagined that kind of person as a man who hosts dinner parties, remembers every single birthday, insists on driving you to the airport, plans the group trip to cabo san lucas. he compliments freely, comforts endlessly, celebrates enthusiastically. he is a man who cannot say no because saying no would mean someone, somewhere, might think less of him.

i am not that man. i am, if anything, the opposite. i am blunt; i don’t lose sleep wondering what strangers think of me; i live a rather insular life; i have not needed very many people to get through most days.

so i figured: not a people pleaser.

but perhaps there exists a hidden, more insidious form of the disease, one that does not necessitate an audience of party guests. perhaps it needs not but a single person to slither itself into a friendship, a partnership, a love. and there, it wears a different kind of coat—not flattery, but accommodation.

it starts so small. that restaurant sounds good. that weekend in may works. that movie, sure, i’m easy. but then, slowly, gradually. i don’t have to keep playing tennis. i don’t mind moving to san francisco. i don’t care about that job, not really.

what makes this so difficult is that no one is really ever to blame. love, after all, demands negotiation and flexibility. partnership requires generosity. no one builds a life with someone else by getting exactly what they want every single time.

yet, despite the noblest of intentions, amidst the flurry of bending and sacrificing and accommodating, the self sometimes goes missing. an identity begins to erode.

i don’t blame anyone i have loved for this. this isn’t the story of someone taking pieces of me. it’s the story of how i willingly offered them up.

it’s as if i woke up one day and found i’d accepted a job nobody hired me for. the work, i came to learn, was managing two inner lives at once—mine and theirs. if they were anxious, i went looking for a fix. if they were disappointed, i course-corrected. if they were hurt, i went back through everything i’d said, looking for where i’d failed to see it coming. little by little, the line between us wore away, until only a single entity remained, until i couldn’t distinguish where they ended and where i began.

people say you can’t pour from an empty cup. but what happens when the cup disappears altogether? what is left when all you’ve ever been is the shape cast by someone else’s light? who are you but a shadow, an echo, a reflection?

i’m tired. tired of becoming whatever stands before me. i have done it for so long and so well that i no longer remember what i look like when no one else is around.

lately, one question keeps surfacing: what do i want?

what do i want?

i don’t know yet. but to find out, i know i’ll have to disappoint some people along the way. it’s a strange practice—learning to disappoint someone you love—as a form of honesty, as an act of integrity. stranger still, it might be the most unselfish thing i’ve done in years—because a shadow, however devoted, however careful, has never once been any good to the person casting it.

i caught the odyssey last week, and i can’t stop thinking about the sirens. i’d always remembered them as the embodiment of a temptation toward something new—some secret desire a sailor had yet to reveal or experience. but that isn’t what the sirens sing to odysseus. they sing to him his own war, his own story, his own victories and losses, his own name. they offer him himself, with a completeness and clarity he could never have on his own, from a shore he can never get back to.

maybe i’ve spent too long learning to sing other people’s songs back to them, exactly as they wanted to hear. maybe that was its own kind of siren song, run in reverse—not sung at me, but by me, to the people i loved, until i could no longer tell my own voice from the echo of theirs.

so if there is a shore i am rowing toward now, it is not a stranger’s. it is my own. lashed to the mast, ears wide open, i want to hear it—not because it’s new, but because, for the first time, it’s singing for me.

i’m not even sure when we started sending voice notes. it’s like we had just decided, at some point, that everyone was doing it, and so we should try. suddenly it became normal to hear each other’s voices in these rudimentary recordings, tiny time capsules sent every so often from opposite ends of the coast.

it arrived around noon, california time. maybe you were on your lunch break. maybe you were in the office between meetings. i wonder if you thought about what you were going to say or if you just happened to hit record. i wonder if you remembered before your calendar did.

am i still in your calendar?

i heard you smiling. even over the phone, i could always tell when you were smiling. the timbre of your voice—your consonants softening at the edges, your vowels rounded out.

14 seconds. you wished me happy birthday. you wished me well. you said you hoped i had a good day.

14 seconds. everything to one person, nothing to another. time is not as fixed or as impartial as we like to think. seconds can hold a lifetime, minutes can carry a history, hours can contain an entire world.

but no one will ever know. no one will ever know what 14 seconds could mean except for the two people who lived inside them. no one ever will know except us.

i was sick last week. the kind where you can barely leave bed, the kind where your entire existence contracts to four walls and the popcorn ceiling overhead. there is a particular loneliness you experience with physical pain. people can bring you soup, text and ask how you are, but no one can actually feel the pain inside your body. no matter how precisely you describe the ache—its location, its quality, whether it’s sharp or dull or radiating—they cannot enter it. and you realize, though you’re surrounded by people who care about you, you are very much alone.

love is not so different; it’s a singular experience no one outside of it can truly enter. the only exception here, however, is that you’re not alone. love is an island—just one with two people on it.

when you’re in a relationship, you’re two people on the same ride, sharing the same ascents, lurches, and drops. to everyone else, however, it’s merely a story they hear secondhand. you can give them the chronology: the first dm, the first dinner, the first kiss. you can recount, in vivid detail, the trip you both took to the adirondacks that weekend in may. but ultimately, they weren’t there. knowing will never be the same as experiencing. they’ll never understand your hand in her hair, the look in his eyes, the way they called your name.

like that night in london.

winter pressing at the windows. christmas lights looped through leicester square. the cacophony of tourists rising from the street below. the airbnb had almost no lighting—whether by design or oversight, i couldn’t say—so the flat existed mostly in darkness and shadows. i lit a candle i’d bought near covent garden; everything began to smell faintly of orange blossom and musk.

we put music on. you had brought one of those mini sonos speakers from home, which struck me as both absurd and entirely like you. i don’t remember when we started to dance. fast, slow, eyes open, then closed; we laughed at everything and nothing at all. outside, the city was freezing; inside, two bodies, pressed together, warm and completely in love. nothing else mattered.

no one will know what that felt like. that night in london. the tragedy and beauty of love is that it forever remains a private archive, inaccessible to everyone but the two people who built it.

years have passed since then. we’re different people now. we’ve grown up, moved on, chased new dreams, found new loves. i now have the wisdom to know we weren’t meant to be. not because we didn’t love each other, we really did, but because loving someone isn’t the same as building a life with them.

still—for all of it, for every moment—i’m grateful. that i loved you and was loved by you.

14 seconds. i’m not sad. i don’t long for what was. we are no longer in love, in that way. and that’s okay.

but those 14 seconds are ours. and no one else will ever know.

the strange becomes familiar. the extraordinary turns perfunctory. the thing that once thrilled you curdles into something mundane.

i moved to new york in the middle of december. of course, i had visited many times before—a week here, a month there—but it had been years since i’d actually lived here. every time i return, i forget the same things. how loud it is: sirens, subways, someone screaming “fuck off.” how cold the winters are: teeth chattering, eyes watering before you’re halfway out the door. how lonely a city of eight million can make you feel.

the first couple of weeks, i was flailing. i used google maps to find the subway station one block from my apartment. i rode uptown instead of downtown. i walked for what felt like miles around my neighborhood to find a decent coffee shop, only to end up at a blank street. i didn’t know where to buy groceries, let alone floss.

two months later, where i was once flailing, i’m now floating.

i wake up promptly at 6:45 eastern. walk north on amsterdam. order my coffee from kieran, chat about how shitty the weather is. i finish my workout before nine. descend the subway stairs, swipe, stand, reread the essex hemphill poem mounted above the seats. every other monday, i bring my clothes to the dry cleaners and the korean woman behind the counter tells me about her daughter; she reminds me of my mom.

and almost every evening, i walk downtown to the theater and perform a show.

somehow, without my realizing when, the city shifted from a place i’ve been to a place i know. home.

and yet. there are moments—after the show, alone in my apartment, when all i can hear are the footsteps of the upstairs neighbor and the hiss of the radiator—that i miss the flailing, the chaos, the unfamiliarity of it all. every day felt like an act of wonder, each moment an uncovering of some small ritual of the city i hadn’t yet discovered.

but novelty, once expended, cannot be reproduced.

i confront this truth almost every night on stage.

i remember the first time i read the script. the dialogue, how strange the words felt in my mouth. i remember our first rehearsal. the character’s emotions, how they surfaced so readily, raw and immediate.

we’re now fifty performances in. the show has become second nature, every beat and cue sanded smooth by repetition. you could lock me in a room, blindfold me, cover my ears, and i’d still be able to recite every line forwards and backwards. what once required my full attention now commands very little, which i guess is a kind of mastery but also a kind of loss.

because there are nights, i’ll be honest, when the show feels difficult not because it’s hard, but because it’s too easy. words that once felt charged now feel hollow, drained of the power they once carried. fluency, it turns out, can become a sort of numbness.

in those moments, i have tried to summon the memory of how it felt at the beginning—the first time i read those words aloud, the feeling at that first rehearsal. i try to reenter, reawaken, that original astonishment.

but when i close my eyes and reach backward—nothing.

it took me some time to understand why this doesn’t work. it’s not that the memory is gone. it’s that the person who encountered those words for the first time no longer exists. i have seen this play; i have said these lines; i know this part. no man ever steps in the same river twice, said heraclitus, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man. the self who didn’t know cannot return; it is a door that only opens once.

so what i’ve been learning, night after night, is to stop reaching backward. to not relive the past. but to excavate the present.

although the text does not change, my relationship to it can. something i’ve said a hundred times suddenly has new meaning because i am different tonight than i was last night. a pause opens up. a word carries a different weight. a line about pride yesterday turns out to be about loneliness today.

material is finite. interpretation is not. language, if examined carefully enough, becomes inexhaustible.

perhaps people are too.

we talk about falling in love with the same person over and over again, a sentiment that sounds beautiful in the abstract but offers very little guidance in practice.

i’ve written about the honeymoon period before: the hormones, the electricity, the madness. but when the dust settles, and it always does, i think many of us fall into the same trap. we attempt to recreate what once was, chasing nostalgia, desperately trying to conjure a feeling that belonged to a version of the relationship, and a version of ourselves, that no longer exists.

but we cannot return to the beginning. we cannot fall back into the same love.

the trick, i’m beginning to realize, isn’t remembering what once moved you, but letting yourself be moved again, differently. the same traits can take on entirely new meanings depending on who you are when you encounter them. the stubbornness that once frustrated you becomes, years later, the moral conviction you come to admire. the levity you mistook for avoidance reveals itself as the resilience you can lean on. the generosity that once showed up as gifts and flowers now arrives as an arm around your waist, a glance in a crowded room.

there are always things to discover in the people we love, if we are willing to look at them with intention rather than longing. love never runs out, as long as we have the courage to see people as they are, not as they once were.

which, i suppose, is what i’m trying to do with this city as well. not to chase the thrill of last december, but to notice what this march might bring. to walk the same blocks, descend the same steps, but with new eyes.

to keep discovering first times inside of long ones—not because the city has changed, but because i have.

that may not seem remarkable, except that it is. for ten years, i have journaled nearly every single day, as faithfully as one brushes their teeth, as routinely as one checks the weather.

the last two months, though, nothing.

i sit down; i uncap the pen; i press the tip to the page; i wait for the ink to flow in the way it always has. nothing. i feel emptied of language, stripped of the impulse to arrange words into meaning.

this is new.

writing has always been the place where i feel safest, most at home. writing is cathartic, clarifying, comforting. it is how i metabolize the world around me. the day ends, i sit down, the pen moves, and something once formless and heavy transfigures into something i can absorb, or at the very least, carry. without it, experience just sits there—undigested, leaden, calcifying beneath my ribs.

there’s a common distinction people like to make: writing is an art; math is a science. writing, loose and subjective; math, rigid and exact.

i don’t believe this. i have always loved language for its rigor, its precision, its ability to capture a feeling, a moment, a person, a place. there is nothing quite like spending an entire afternoon on a single sentence, rearranging its clauses, swapping one word for another, and finally reaching its period, knowing: this is it. this is exactly how it felt to stand inside that kitchen, in that light, at that hour, with that person.

lately, that precision has eluded me.

for the first time in recent memory, language feels insufficient. mere ink blots on a page. words feel as though they buckle under the weight of what i’m asking them to carry. no matter how hard i try, i cannot make them mean what i need them to mean.

i suspect this is not a failure of language but a refusal of mine.

a refusal to craft a narrative. an unwillingness to extract meaning. i am not ready for the story to be told.

dr. michael levin writes:

selves are simultaneously a construct in the mind of an observer, including itself, and real, causally important agents that live, suffer, die, strive, and matter… observers interpret what they sense from their own perspective; their allegiance is to extracting meaning, not preserving accurate details… the criterion for being an observer is that an observer is fundamentally committed to reinterpretation and meaning, not micro-scale realism.

when i write, i become the observer. i take the day’s raw material and impose form. i decide where it begins, where it turns, where it ends. this has always felt like a gift—the ability to make sense of things, to interpret chaos and pain, to construct truth and meaning.

but heartbreak resists such gestures. it refuses proportion. it disregards sequence. it denies interpretation. what can language do with something that does not wish to be understood? what is there to say. what can you say. what words bring comfort to such loss.

to begin writing now would mean admitting it’s over. that our narrative is inching to a close, that our history stands to be distilled and framed, that a version of me without you has begun to solidify.

i don’t know if i’m ready for that.

if, as levin suggests, the self is the construction and reconstruction of experiences and memories, i do not know if i’m ready to meet that new self yet. i do not know what will remain once i rebuild the version of myself that does not include you. i do not know if i will recognize him. i do not know if he will be smaller. i do not know if the rooms inside him will echo.

i don’t write because some part of me—irrational, stubborn, still broken—believes that as long as the story remains unwritten, it remains unfinished. and if it remains unfinished, then perhaps there is still hope. the door stays open, even if no one is coming through.

the last time i saw you, you left your socks at my place.
you always took them off. your feet got too hot, you said.
the other day, i finally picked them off the floor.
i stood there, holding them, trying to decide whether to throw them out or return them to you.
a couple of months ago, i wouldn’t have had to think.
a couple of months ago, i would have taken a photo and texted, again?
a couple of months ago, you would have laughed, retrieved them on your next visit, only to leave another pair behind.
a couple of months ago, it would have meant nothing.
now, it’s all i have left.
a pair of socks.
and a story i have yet to write.

we put my brother’s dog down a few months ago. it was gut-wrenching, one of the saddest days in recent memory. i was grateful to be there at the end, to say goodbye. i was grateful he’d been a source of comfort and stability for my brother through so many seasons of life.

grief is so strange. one second you’re fine; then, a wisp of something—the smell of a park, the trill of a doorbell—and you’re doubled over, inconsolable. when you lose someone you love, you can’t help but rifle through the rolodex of your time together, pulling out the cards one by one, examining each memory in compulsive succession.

with mozart (a fitting name for a musician’s dog), i thought the tender moments would come back first: curled up next to me in bed, standing in as a scene partner when i practiced auditions, games of tug-of-war with his newest plushie. but grief had other plans.

the memories that surfaced most vividly were the difficult ones. the time my brother first brought mozart home and he chewed through my retainer, his tail wagging like a metronome of boundless joy. the night he got into some chocolate and we had to rush him to the vet, our faces pale with fear. the afternoon walk when he lunged for a stranger’s grocery bags, potatoes and apples rolling down the street like tumbleweeds.

at the time, i remember thinking: why on earth did my brother get this dog? maybe we’d all be better off without him. yet, when i brush against those memories now, my eyes immediately well up. i miss him. i can’t explain it.

why is it only struggle that sticks? why does ease vanish without a trace? maybe it’s because the hardest moments carry the deepest proofs of love: the cracked retainer, the frantic dash to the vet, the rogue attack on produce. those inconvenient, embarrassing, and absurd moments—maybe those are love’s credentials. maybe love can only really reveal itself when it demands something of us.

i once dated someone who had a habit of derailing conversations. no matter how serious or focused i tried to be, we’d somehow veer off on a tangent about the ethics of foie gras, a movie we saw ten years ago, or whether our recurring nightmares pointed to some unresolved childhood trauma. at the time, i hated it—it felt like a form of conversational terrorism. now, removed from the relationship and surrounded by conversations that march forward with ruthless efficiency, i ache for those detours. i long for someone to hijack my sentences, to lead me down rabbit holes of irrelevant wonder; i yearn to be lost again in the beautiful chaos of a mind that refuses to move in straight lines. just so i might, ever so briefly, glimpse you again.

it’s interesting. the very things we hate become the very things we miss most. maybe it’s because flaws are what make people singular, the watermarks of individuality. my mother’s nagging, my friend’s grating laughter, a lover’s clumsiness—these are the signatures by which we know them. perfection, after all, is indistinguishable.

this, then, might be memory’s most mysterious blessing: it preserves not our happiness, but our humanity. we mistakenly believe our legacy lies in our sunday best, but we’re actually remembered for tuesday’s worst. there is a crack, a crack in everything. that’s how the light gets in, sings leonard cohen. the cracks are how we discern one another in a world of manufactured perfection. they are the entry points for genuine connection, the space where love lives and thrives.

perhaps memory isn’t a perverse curator, but simply an honest one, knowing that love isn’t found in our flawless moments, but in our willingness to stay broken open for one another. in the end, it’s through these fissures—the arguments, the chaos, the mess—that something luminous enters, transforming our deepest wounds into the places where we finally learn to see.

i always figured growing older would be a process of metamorphosis, a kind of shedding of adolescent selves into more mature, self-actualized beings. like michelangelo, who claimed he never created david but simply chiseled away the superfluous marble that imprisoned him, i believed my truest self was already inside of me—perfectly formed, waiting only to be uncovered and revealed. but time has taught me that aging is less like carving marble and more like geological formation, each year depositing new strata of understanding, pain, joy, and compromise.

less subtraction, more addition.

i was an overweight kid. every playground argument ended the same way: well you’re fat! there wasn’t much left to say after that. somehow puberty came; six inches taller, precipitously thinner; the insult no longer applied. but the fat boy remained—in mirrors, at the edge of swimming pools; even now, i can still feel his phantom weight pressing against my sternum. no matter how much my body changes, he’ll never leave.

then there’s morality—perhaps the heaviest addition of all. in my younger years, i considered myself kind, honest, generous to a fault. and there was just enough evidence to make me believe it. i read to the elderly on weekends, i returned the extra twenty dollars when the cashier miscounted my change, i donated my favorite books to the local goodwill. these qualities felt immutable, woven into the fabric of who i was, permanent as the bones beneath my skin.

but three decades later, adulthood has finally revealed the truth: i am also petty, selfish, deceitful, jealous, and cruel. i know this because i’ve caught myself snapping at family members, withholding congratulations from friends, resenting a colleague for not responding quickly enough. each moral stumble arrives with its own weight, wandering in like an unwelcome houseguest, rearranging the furniture of who i thought i was.

my younger self felt so simple, almost schematic: son, korean, christian, shy, obedient. the labels fit together neatly, cradling me with a sense of safety and certainty. now, i can’t tell who i’ll be from one hour to the next. i am lazy and ambitious, callous and compassionate, fickle but trustworthy. each identity insists on its own reality, stacking one atop another until i feel like a tower wobbling under its own weight.

the result is a kind of crowding, a dinner table set for one too many guests. the timid boy, the people-pleaser, the perfectionist, the anxious one, the pragmatist. countless versions of me, all holding forks, trying to stab the same piece of chicken. i suppose these are the multitudes whitman wrote of, though i wish he warned us how relentless it feels to host them all at once.

sometimes, late at night, i wonder: who could love a person like this? someone so dense with contradiction. who could stay? through the shifts between kindness and cruelty, certainty and doubt? i imagine potential partners taking one look at my accumulated weight, at the tangle of selves i carry, and deciding that loving someone lighter might be easier.

i wonder if it ever stops. if at some point the tower steadies, the table clears, the voices coalesce into a single chord. or if life is only this: the long work of balancing a chorus, learning how not to be undone by the noise.

there’s a mathematics to aging that no one really teaches you in school. at twelve, a year accounts for one-twelfth of your existence, a significant 8.3% of everything you’ve ever known. but by the time you’re thirty, that same year shrinks to a mere 3.3% of your lived experience.

as we move further and further from the starting line, each passing year becomes a smaller fraction of the whole; decades compress into what feels like months, years dissolve into weeks. but time is never actually speeding up—only our perception of it is, like compound interest, each year moving quicker than the last. the more life we live, the faster it all seems to slip away.

i know part of this is the oddball effect, the phenomenon where novelty expands time perception. new experiences render time thick and viscous, while routine coaxes it into evaporation. as we age and life becomes more predictable, things become less novel; time hastens once more.

so what do i do? i slow down, i pay attention, i breathe. i look for wonder and awe in everyday moments and do whatever else mindfulness apps tell you to do. but still. i blink, and it’s july. this is life’s cruel irony: just as we finally learn to savor a moment, we realize there are fewer left to savor.

time doesn’t care who you are or what you do—it’s unyielding. even the most mindful among us are sure to miss more moments than we catch. maybe that’s just how it works, maybe we’re not meant to hold it all. i mean, there are things i’d gladly fast-forward: root canals and heartbreaks, laborious meetings and listless nights. but golden sunsets and belly-aching laughter, books by a fireside and fresh watermelons in the summer—those, i’d want to bottle up and slow forever.

perhaps, then, it’s not so much about trying to stretch time, but about distilling it. to know what deserves our attention and what does not. to discern when to pause and when to let things pass. to keep the important things weighty, while allowing the trivial to remain light.

i think about what c.s. lewis wrote in the weight of glory: “to be happy at home, said johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. as long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him.”

the beauty of ordinary days, the sacredness of simple existence. maybe that’s it. maybe that’s what we’re racing against time to preserve, why time even matters at all. to protect our dinners, cherish our walks, hold onto our inside jokes. not because these moments are extraordinary, but because they’re ours.

as for the rest—tomorrow’s chaos, the e-mail inbox, the dread of time’s passage—well, tomorrow will worry about itself. each day has enough trouble of its own.

she mentioned it so casually, like she was telling me about some new seasonal drink on the menu. “so yeah, today’s my last day.” like she hadn’t, for years, been the steady hands that started my days—two shots, light ice, extra almond milk. “i finally got a big girl job.” she laughed. when i first started coming here, it took her only two visits to learn my name. tomorrow, i’ll be nobody’s regular.

i hadn’t realized how much rachel had come to anchor my mornings. in a city built on transience—where leases are short, gigs are shorter, and neighborhoods gentrify overnight—she felt like a breath of permanence. every day but tuesdays and sundays, there she was: rachel, with her red hair, fine-line tattoos, glasses on mornings she hadn’t slept much, standing behind the counter, pulling the same shot, offering the same half-smile.

it feels silly, i know, to grieve a barista. a person i never saw outside of plastic cups and the whirr of grinders. but there’s something to be said about people who show up for you, even if it’s just setting aside a croissant when they know you’re running late or handing you napkins before you realize you need them. rachel didn’t just make coffee—she bore witness to my life, alchemizing something routine into something sacred.

our conversations were always brief. two or three minutes tops. once, she told me she liked punk rock. another time, i shared my disdain of sprouts. most days, we said very little. “the usual?” i’d nod. she’d hand my drink over. “thanks so much.” “have a good day.” “you too.”

we didn’t know each other’s middle names or childhood fears; we never shared about pets or parents or the people we texted when we couldn’t sleep. yet she saw more of my daily self than most people i call close friends. she saw me sleepy and sharp, triumphant and defeated, rushing and dawdling. she knew me before caffeine, which is to say, she knew me at my truest.

without even realizing it, rachel and i built a familiarity out of these brief, routine encounters, constructed a kind of intimacy from the simple act of showing up. i think we often underestimate how vital consistency is. we so long for depth in our relationships, those shared secrets in parked cars and tearful confessions at 2 a.m., that we sometimes forget the necessity of breadth. of longevity. of just being there, over and over again.

i think of how she memorized my schedule without ever asking, how she could tell by my outfit whether i had a meeting or an audition that day. on mornings when i looked particularly frazzled, she’d slide an extra shot into my cup, and when i tried to tip her extra, she’d just shake her head and say, “that’s not fair.” this is what steadfast presence offers: the privilege of being seen without explanation, understood without declaration.

in an age where everything feels disposable—messages left on read, plans canceled with a shrug, friendships ghosted under the guise of self-care—perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to show up. time and time again. to endure across seasons and moods, through chaos and calm, bringing whatever wholeness or brokenness we can muster.

maybe presence is its own kind of language, consistency its grammar. maybe the most profound connections aren’t forged through grand gestures, but from the accumulated weight of ordinary moments, the patient construction of trust with the people who stay. the ones there long enough to notice when your hair’s a bit longer, your voice a little more tired, when your coffee order’s changed.

tomorrow morning, 6:15, i’ll go and order from someone new. i’ll smile and say thank you. i’ll leave with a drink in hand, wishing someone still knew my name.

i may be misremembering, but i do recall a section on work—something about how the industrial revolution and the rise of hyper-specialized labor fractured us. the man who once built entire chairs now only turns screws; the woman who once tended whole gardens now only sorts seeds; farmers, cobblers, and blacksmiths are now lead conversion rate optimization analysts. with jobs becoming more compartmentalized, we’ve been reduced to using only slivers of ourselves at work, leaving the rest to atrophy in the dark. we’ve become specialists in our own diminishment, swiss army knives used only as bottle openers. this, the book suggests, is why work in the modern age leaves us perpetually dissatisfied: it engages us in pieces, never as wholes.

i’m sure most of us already know this to be true; career malaise has become something of a national epidemic. but what we rarely consider is how love, too, leaves entire parts of us untouched, while sharpening others into focus. because even in love, we’re hired for the parts that fit the job.

i think of s, who made me realize i could be a person who plans. before, my life existed in impulse and aftermath. i prided myself on spontaneity, on being the person who could book a flight at midnight or make dinner plans while eating breakfast. but s moved through the world like weather—beautiful in their changes but occasionally prone to storms—and loving them made me want to build something steady. so i emerged as the keeper of itineraries, the guardian of logistics; i opened google calendar for the first time. something in that relationship unlocked a part of me i didn’t know was there until it became necessary, the part of me that wanted to build scaffolding around the foundation of us.

this is the part we rarely talk about: we think we’re choosing our partners solely for who they are, but we’re also choosing who we become in their presence—the version of ourselves that surfaces in their particular light.

sometimes the person who emerges is a stranger. in certain relationships, i have been the one who holds grudges, though i believed i let things go. in others, i have become the needy one, though i always saw myself as self-sufficient. at times, i have found myself patient beyond my own recognition and petty in ways i didn’t know i was capable of.

after her breakup, my friend taylor said to me, “i didn’t like who i was with him, but i couldn’t tell if that was because he was wrong for me or because he showed me something about myself i hated.” maybe that’s what being wrong for someone is. maybe it’s not either/or, but rather, because/and. maybe every relationship is an act of revelation and creation—and the ones that don’t work are the ones that reveal or create selves we’d rather not meet.

yes, we contain multitudes, but perhaps not all at once. perhaps we contain possibilities, and our partners are the conditions under which certain possibilities crystallize into being. this may be why love is such a radical act of faith. we aren’t just saying yes to who someone is; we’re saying yes to who we might become in the presence of their becoming. we are agreeing to be changed by the very act of changing them.

so maybe the more important question isn’t “who is this person?” but “who am i around them?”

what do they call forward in me? presence or performance? curiosity or caution? joy or jealousy?

is this the version of me i’d like to be? the self i want to live with?

when i think about choosing love again, i think about the self i might become, the rooms that might be built, the possibilities that might take root. maybe that’s the miracle of love: that two people can come together not to complete each other, but to construct themselves—one version at a time, one key turning the lock after another, opening a door we did not know to exist.

and stepping into a life that feels like it might finally fit.

as children, we’re wide-eyed, wonder-drunk. we hold a kaleidoscope of dreams in our hands: different jobs, lovers, cities, versions of ourselves we haven’t yet met. we believe we can do anything, be anything, because, technically, we can. but the older we get, the more those paths not taken, those threads left unpulled, begin to thin. we seal our dreams into snow globes, each one a tiny universe suspended in false motion, visible but unreachable, guarded behind a pane of glass.

we soon discover the truth. that time is not infinite; energy, a dwindling resource. suddenly, possibility transmutes into a luxury good—sublime and coveted, but priced just out of reach. we realize the choices presented to us in life—to marry this person, to take that job in seattle instead of san francisco, to have children or not—ultimately prune away entire forests of potential selves.

a quote used to hang on my fridge, the one often misattributed to f. scott fitzgerald: “for what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be...” i still believe those words. i do. i believe in change, in second and third acts, in reinvention. but belief must exist in tandem with reality.

and reality lays bare the truth that we are bound. by age, circumstance, emotional and physical limitations. we simply can’t live out every one of our parallel lives. we can’t wander down every fork in the road, chase every love that titillates us, pursue every fleeting passion. we will never become all the people we once dreamed we might. because even if the multiverse exists, we can only ever occupy a single thread.

what i’m left with, then, is a kind of reckoning—not necessarily of regret, but of what’s been lost and what remains. that this is the life i’m living. the apartment with a leaking roof, the job where paid time off is an oxymoron, the friends who i don’t see often but whose birthdays i never forget. this is the self that came to be.

i guess what i’m trying to learn now is how to mourn the lives i’ll never live without resenting the one i currently inhabit. to find peace in this version of myself, in the people i’ve chosen, and the ones who’ve chosen me.

i was cleaning out my hard drive the other day, and i stumbled upon a law school application i’d completed but never sent in. for a moment, i saw myself there—arguing cases with practiced ease, redlining contracts in airport lounges, amassing billable hours in tailored suits. and in a flash, there grief was, brief but potent. not because life as a lawyer would have been any kinder, but because it remains forever perfect in its unrealized state, untarnished by the vexations of actual legal practice.

that’s the irony: those alternate universes, those parallel versions of me, probably suck too. maybe a little less, maybe a bit more. maybe in one, i wear my outdoor shoes in bed. maybe in another, i sell knives for a pyramid scheme, insisting it’s “a vertically integrated lifestyle empire for generational wealth” (fun fact: i did almost do this in my 20s). maybe in those lives, i’m the one looking over the fence, watching this present life unfold, wondering, what if?

i think it’s okay to be sad that we can’t do it all. to feel that we’ve spent years constructing a life only to find ourselves mourning all the ones we had to dismantle to build it. i think we’re so afraid to acknowledge what could have been because we believe we might start to resent what is. but maybe it’s possible for longing and gratitude to coexist. maybe real suffering lies in the insistence that we’re perfectly content, forcing ourselves to believe this is the best possible life instead of admitting it’s merely the one we chose.

in one of my favorite scenes from everything everywhere all at once, waymond wang confesses: “so even though you have broken my heart yet again, i wanted to say—in another life, i would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”

and look. here we are.

doing laundry.
paying taxes.
living a life that bears the marks of our choices.
not all lives. not every life.
but one.
and it’s beautiful.

would you rather be with someone you love or someone who loves you?

at the time, i stuffed an olive in my mouth, mumbled something noncommittal, laughed it off. but the question persisted, rattling in my mind like loose change in a washing machine. later that evening—alone, contacts out, lights dimmed, lofi on—i sat with it.

of course, the correct answer is “both.” we want to love and be loved. mutually, simultaneously, wholeheartedly. but this isn’t the time for perfect answers for perfect people in a perfect world. this is a thought experiment. so let’s play.

would i rather love or be loved?

my heart answers before my mind does: be loved.

it feels soft, generous, easy. and yet, for most of my life, i chased the opposite. love was a conquest, a tree to be chopped down. i was a woodsman of affection, calloused hands gripping the axe of persistence, chips of pride scattered at my feet. perhaps it was the refrigerator adorned only with a+ reds, the speech competitions that determined my weekend worth, or the family dinners that doubled as performance reviews—i came to believe love was something you achieved, won, earned.

in middle school, i had a crush on this girl, who wore puka shell necklaces and smelled of cucumber melon (thank you, bath & body works). i was sure she was the most beautiful person i’d ever seen.

for her birthday, i begged my mom, who worked long hours and never quite understood my american brand of teenage angst, to drive me to our local ralphs, so i could pick out a betty crocker box cake. i was up for hours, mixing, baking, frosting; i even used those weird little sugar letters to spell out her name.

the next day, cheeks red and palms sweating, i handed it to her. she blinked. a flat “thank you.” and that was that. to this day, i still wonder if she ate it. (i would’ve. betty crocker never misses.)

looking back, i wince a little, but i also see i wasn’t really baking for her. i was baking for the fantasy of being seen. of being chosen. i thought if she just saw me—the fun, the thoughtful, the capable-of-baking parts of me—she’d realize. she’d know. she’d love me back. (and yes, i’m using love in that very loose middle school kind of way, but you get the point.)

this pattern repeated for years. high school, college, early adulthood. i was obsessed with the idea of making people fall for me, especially the ones who were clearly never going to. i made playlists for people who barely knew my name, i drove hours to “accidentally” run into someone at their favorite coffee shop, i wrote poetry for a girl who studied literature. she praised my imagery while dating my roommate.

i always wanted what i couldn’t have, believing that if this person—this living, breathing embodiment of all my insecurities—could love me, i’d finally feel worthy enough to love myself. their affection, a kind of currency i could use to purchase my self-acceptance.

funny, how we so often run toward the ones who don’t want us, while the people ready to nourish and nurture us stand quietly waiting in the wings. adam and eve syndrome: we hunger for the fruit we cannot have. but in reaching for the forbidden, we miss the abundance. we ignore the hands that already hold us, we overlook the ones who truly see us, we silence the voices that constantly call our names.

i spent so many years baking cakes for people who were never hungry, offering sweetness to the indifferent, frosting my longing with the hope it might one day taste like love.

now? i choose the ground that welcomes me, the soil that waters me, the sun that warms me without asking me to bloom.

now, i bake for the one who stays long enough to enjoy a slice.

i could look this up or rewatch the movie, but that would require opening another browser tab, and i have zero interest in doing that tonight. so let’s just say, from what i do remember, the moral of the story is... although we might think we’re better off knowing what everyone else is thinking, it’s probably best we don’t.

my hot take: i’m not convinced—on this lesson that might not even be the actual lesson from a movie i haven’t seen since the bush administration.

and look, i’m not saying i’d want access to everyone’s deepest, darkest thoughts. i’m aware that ignorance is often bliss when it comes to these things. i’m not dying to know that you think my teeth look like tiny vampire fangs, or that you quietly lose your mind whenever i use “whilst” in casual conversation, or even that you find it morally questionable that i cycle through yoga studio free trials like some kind of downward-dog grifter.

i don’t need to know any of that. truly.

but sometimes, when doubt creeps in, i find myself wishing for a window into other minds—to peer past drawn curtains of decorum and politeness, to glimpse thoughts that never find their way to words, to see if i, too, exist in the rooms they keep to themselves. if only for a moment of clarity, if only for a second of assurance.

i wonder, wouldn’t it be nice to know? that i slip into their thoughts on a tuesday between subway stops? that when they stumble upon something beautiful, it makes them wish i were there to see it too? wouldn’t it be nice to be certain? that i’m cared for? that i’m loved?

deep down, i know i am. i know the people in my life love me. my friends, my family, the people i’ve given little pieces of my heart to—they’ve told me so. and i believe them.

but i also have the emotional memory of a goldfish; i collect reassurances only to watch them dissolve, each “i love you” a birthday candle blown out, its smoke carrying wishes that dissipate into thin air.

it’s in these quiet moments, when existing feels like work, when i’m folding in on myself, when the world feels heavy and i feel small—that i wish i didn’t have to ask. again. again. again.

i wish i could just slip into someone’s consciousness and see myself there, held in some small corner. and i would just know. i matter. i wish love could feel like ambient noise, a station i tune into whenever i need a tiny whiff of worth.

i suspect that’s all any of us want, ultimately. to feel seen. to feel as though we belong. to feel we exist, even briefly, in someone else’s reality.

but i’m too afraid—of seeming desperate, of baring the depths of my insecurity, of what it might mean that i need so much at all.

so i don’t ask. instead, i sit in the bog of not-knowing, mired in doubt and longing.

it’s strange how we carry oceans of feeling for one another, but only let small puddles spill out. how we think of someone with such tenderness and care but dilute that into passing pleasantries and talk of weather. how we hold back the very words that might bridge the distances we most wish to cross.

maybe the real lesson here, from the romcom i barely remember, isn’t about reading minds at all. maybe it’s about saying the damn thing.

so they don’t have to wonder.

so they don’t have to ask.

so they know, without question, that they are safe, seen, and loved.

the madness of falling in love.

it’s strange, isn’t it? the falling. into love, into madness. a single step, and the ground gives out. a hormonal circus cartwheeling through your veins—dopamine hits, serotonin spikes, flares of oxytocin. a skin-to-soul fever dream.

but the most striking part? unadulterated devotion. a willingness—an eagerness—to redraw every line in the sand once thought to be etched in stone. i would do the very things i hate: sit through a mind-numbing movie, choke down flavorless food, spend hours listening to a podcast mentioned in passing. i would become unrecognizable to myself. all to be near you, to impress you, to love you a little more.

when i was younger, i used to love the honeymoon phase. the breathless urgency, the falling into someone’s gravity, the all-consuming need for them to become your center of mass. but somewhere along the way, that thrill lost its luster. i chalked it up to growing older, reality settling in, the inevitable erosion of novelty.

but i don’t think that’s entirely true.

the feelings are still there. the raw materials haven’t vanished—they’ve just been bricked over. a disappointment. a heartbreak. a moment of vulnerability met with indifference. that’s all it takes. and then comes the hum—soft, steady, almost imperceptible. a numbness like a television left on in the background, a fog that never fully lifts.

you learn to build walls, install fail-safes, dig moats. doing everything you can just to survive, endure, stay upright. then, years later, you’re told—by therapists, self-help books, well-meaning friends—that the key to healing is dismantling it all. tear down the walls, disarm the fail-safes, lower the drawbridge: surrender.

there’s this beautiful quote by paulo coelho: “maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything. maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

but what if who i was meant to be…is just some frightened little boy? one who loves too hard, feels too much, shatters too easily. is that a self worth reclaiming?

i don’t know.

what i know is this: the whisper of your name opens me, then empties me; the blue in your eyes carries both harbor and storm; the caress of your hand, a balm and bruise.

i’m slipping again, softening in places i swore i’d sealed shut.

falling—into the familiar arms of madness.

on paper, they’re idyllic: no real expectations, no emotional baggage, no arguments about whose turn it is to take out the trash. they start suddenly and unexpectedly—a mutual friend’s birthday, an empty seat on a train, a casual-but-vaguely-flirtatious dm.

is this happening?
it’s happening.

it’s fine, though. he’s got a plane to catch, she’s taking the promotion, the clock strikes twelve, and everyone turns back into pumpkins.

i get it. fun is fun is fun is fun. and part of the beauty of short-term connections is their ephemerality. it’s summer camp: all highlights, no long-term logistics. so you kiss rather than critique, dance rather than nag, embrace rather than keep score. you become the self you always wanted, the version you deem worthy of care, attention, and love.

but what happens when the tents come down, the friendship bracelets fray? when you’re chugging the carton of milk the night before it’s set to expire?

me? i’m heaving on the bathroom floor.

the older i get, the more weary i become of these whirlwind romances. it’s probably why i only book direct flights now, too. layovers are liminal spaces, suspended between arrival and departure, and i’d much rather be at my destination than half-asleep on the terminal floor.

sure, it feels nice—if only briefly—to be loved through a filter, to bask in the inflated versions we project onto each other. but after a while, the sheen dissipates, leaving behind what feels like an endless loop of small talk at a party you never even wanted to attend.

to be loved for who you are not is to not be loved at all.

to be loved is to be seen—multitudes, contradictions, messiness, and all.

but this kind of love requires risk: a reckoning with oneself, a leap into the abyss of uncertainty. this is the price to play. but in return: a love that is weighty, rooted, and real.

i think i’ve had enough of the ember. i’ve outgrown the remnants of what once billowed and blazed—now only a dim flicker, subsumed in ash.

i want the whole damn fire.

birthdays have always felt like an opportunity to pause, take stock, and reflect on what’s happened over the last 360-something days.

and as i look back today, i finally understand the truth of the hackneyed but oddly persistent adage: the only constant in life is change. time and time again, i’ve heard this—offered as motivation, a kind of reassurance, a warning, even.

change has been, is, and will always be inevitable: relationships, bodies, careers, homes, emotions, ad infinitum. but for the vast majority of my life, i resisted change at every turn, convinced it was an existential threat, a tide i might somehow be able to outswim. i clung to old routines, familiar faces, the rhythms of sameness; i, of course, was the last of my friend group to give up on the blackberry. and when things inevitably changed, as they always do, i dove headfirst into nostalgia, mourning the past, replaying what once was, tracing outlines of fading memories.

eventually, though, i adjusted. the perpetual onslaught of change—dare i say—changed me. friends moved, family members passed, exes got married, people had children. i, too, changed: jobs 26 times, addresses 42 times, fell in love, fell out of love, and did it all over again. i started liking olives.

these days, change no longer startles me the way it used to—it barely even registers. i expect it, brace for it, assume it. but i wonder: is that emotional maturity? or numbness disguised as wisdom? have i simply inculcated myself to avoid attachment as a form of self-preservation?

i’m not sure.

is it healthy that i refuse to invest in furniture because i know it’ll eventually belong to some craigslist stranger who promises a venmo that never comes? does it make sense to make conversation with my barista, knowing she’ll probably quit next week after booking a guest star on ncis: idaho falls? is it worth getting attached to my favorite neighborhood bookstore, knowing it might be replaced in a year’s time by a place called still, we juice?

i don’t know.

maybe there’s a way to hold things lightly without letting them slip through my fingers completely. to accept that while change is inevitable, it doesn’t make the present moment any less worth investing in, savoring in, loving in.

and maybe, for now, that’s enough.