I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second. -- Virginia Woolf, (letter)
it's been a while since i've added something here. i haven't written anything since i came back and was able to see you again. how can i even begin to describe the way you've made me feel in the past 10 days? i crave your love so badly, i want, no, needed to be closer and closer to you, as close as possible. and i'm still greedy for your closeness now. i want more of you. i'm desperate for it. i can't sleep. maybe it's the caffeine or the horrible anxiousness i've felt all day. i felt like i've been walking on a tightrope since last night and that feeling has only since started to go away once we talked. i'm sorry for keeping things from you. you make me feel so okay and you're patient and good to me. thank you.
the time we've spent apart since i came back feels like a figure that has been looming behind me everywhere i go, in everything i do. it's so overwhelming sometimes, but tonight i felt comfort in its presence. in your ghost. your ghosts. your fingerprints on my bedroom window. finding strands of your hair scattered in my bed, a reminder of the hours we spent happily tangled together in each other's arms. isn't "happy" too much of an oversimplification of the bliss you've brought me? "bliss" isn't even the right word either. i'm not sure i can find one that encapsulates the depth of this feeling. i felt like i was basking in your love. i stared for a long time at your reflection in the window within one of the photos you sent me last night. i miss you. your ghost follows me everywhere in this house. i think when i spoke of being lonely in san diego, part of it was that i know there's nothing there to physically remind me of you. the absence of your ghost will make me feel lonely, i know it.
i'm kind of just rambling on and on but i truly do feel as though a part of my mind, or dare i say my soul (ok maybe thats a little cringe to say), was lying dormant for years before i met you, before i got to know you. and i think that's the part of me i feel i left in your apartment in davis. i'll be counting down the days until i see you again.
i'll share some of the notes i'd put down here because i was a little shy to read them to you in call:
- my heart does sparkle. when i was watching the sea coast by, listening to enchanted, the only thought in my head repeating over and over was: i’m so full of love for you. i’m in love. (i wrote this when i was taking the train back to tokyo from ito)
- i want to feel you near to me. maybe nearer than near. i want to know you completely. i want you to know me, everything about me. (forgot when i wrote that but sometime in japan. i'm so happy we spent these past days and nights together)
i love you too. i miss you. always.
i had several thoughtful conversations with my mom tonight. we talked about career, as per usual, but tonight we also spoke at length about love. about duyên. what it means to love someone, but also what the "right" kind of love is. and what traits to look for in a partner. somewhere along the line, my mom reiterated what it was that led her to fall in love with my dad: his heart, his drive, his determination and hunger for something more. she asked me carefully, "is there somebody you see that in?"
to my mother, duyên is something she shares with my dad. this unspoken, almost cosmic force that drove them together despite an ocean apart. they were in love, silently (âm thầm), yes, but something even deeper that embedded itself between silences on their long-distance phone calls (that cost a fortune back in the 90s) and within the ink and paper that composed their letters sent back and forth between continents. love, love can be felt all around, but duyên is something rare, felt only a few times in your lifetime, if you're lucky enough to have found somebody. i'm not a superstitious person by any means, but this notion that the universe might bless you with such a powerful connection... well, that's just so romantic, don't you agree?
you said what we have is hard to define; it is. but it is real. so real and tangible to me that i feel i can taste it if i merely extend my arm. i've been stuck all day on how you told me your soul feels nourished with me. what does that taste like to you? my face flushes when i think about that, and i've spent the entire day so full of love i feel radiant. heart sparkling. watching the sea coast by outside my window, drifting off to sleep on the plane, and the only thing i can think of is all this feeling, this love i have for you. how scary it is to acknowledge, simply because of its enormity, but i will push against that hesitation. i want you to know my love. i want you to be mine, to know your past, the inner workings of your mind, how you'd feel as well. something tells me this connection between us is exceedingly rare. how lucky i am to have met you. maybe it was some cosmic force that placed you right across the hall from me. somebody who grew up 20 minutes away from me, paths only crossing more than five thousand miles from home. or maybe it was just a lucky logistical occurrence. does it matter? i'll hold onto you anyway. stay with me, let this dream cement itself as reality.
i have to confess: i find myself rereading your writing from the past week and our text exchanges quite often, especially when i'm missing you. i think, somewhere deep in my head, i still find it difficult to grasp that you exist in the way that you do. that somehow i've met someone that embodies what i have been seeking, craving in a person. someone i'm drawn to so magnetically that i see you in each lovely thing. that you see me––so much of me––and love me anyway. i read, reread, re-reread all these words you've written to me to make sure i'm not dreaming. a pinch, if you will, that this isn't something i'm going to wake up from.
i think much of my hesitation comes from this line of thinking. this notion that encapsulates everything i'm afraid of that could accompany pursuing this with you. what a mouthful of a sentence fragment. oops. i'm not sure where it originated from but it's there. it's been chipped away (little by little at first, but now it seems like whole chunks are coming loose––like a cliff being swallowed by the sea). but it is still there. seemingly the only thing i can do to alleviate that feeling is to remind myself of you.
i saved this virginia woolf quote above, finding the last line to be particularly in line with my thoughts as of late. i am never empty of you. this warm but electrifying feeling that grows louder and louder in my head every day. i've said this before, but what touches my heart the most is how closely you'd pay attention to my thoughts and wants; even one-off details from an anecdote would be tucked away in your mind. i have to confess yet again: i think the first time i started feeling really sure there might be something more between us was the day you'd spent with me when mica left for okinawa. you told me at the end of the day (or maybe the day after) you kind of pretended to come up with a plan on the fly, but you'd really been thinking about it for a bit. that was kind of when i realized i might be starting to slip a little, like losing my footing on steep path marred with loose gravel. slipping a little here and there for a few weeks, then feeling like i'm tumbling down this hill, gaining velocity as i grow to want you more and more.
i have to ask, was it a coincidence you asked me while getting dinner at james kitchen (first name last name of course) whether there was an aquarium nearby? and i need to ask, what was it that compelled you to post the photo you took of me at the museum gift store? when i think of these moments, my heart flutters. i don't have much of a conclusion here haha this is all just to say i think of you and i fall more for you each day. despite this great big number of miles and timezones between us for the past few weeks. i want to tell you over and over until you know this as deeply as i feel it. and the days are numbering down. soon enough. soon :]
is it too naive of me to believe love will find its way to you once you let it in? you said you wouldn't know how i feel about your most recent update so maybe i can alleviate your worry, frustrations, whatever here. love isn't something that i just know. so many times, i worry that what i feel is not actually love but merely infatuation or momentary glimpses at happiness. but love, to me, is a choice. to continually choose to lay yourself bare, open your heart at the risk of being hurt. again and again and again and again. i've broken my own heart countless times, did you know that? and still i choose to let love in, to love something or someone or an idea that might never take root. loving the memory or a dream i might not be able to taste again because i cherish that warmth that grows in my chest when i recall it. because i know it might be worth it in the end. i'd rather live with cracks in my heart than to regret not spending enough time loving. sometimes i feel that i have so much love with nowhere for it to go. i started thinking about how i might've ended up this way after reading your words; maybe it was all the dear america books i'd read, diaries of girls my age from different eras who fell in love in their youth. or the tragic romances between heroines in once upon a time. the love shared by friends and comrades in epics such as the lord of the rings and grand adventures seen in harry potter and percy jackson. that unwavering, unyielding, undying love for those around you. i craved it more than anything growing up, and i've been pursuing it since.
i want you to know love. i want to show you love. we have the time to do so. you think this is all the love you have to offer for a while, but i say maybe not. love doesn't grow linearly; it's exponential. you might start taking baby steps now, but racing, tumbling, flying (!) might come sooner than you expect. and i will be there with you.
how strongly do you believe me?
here's a truth i should have realized: love is not always this grandiose thing that makes itself known. love is all around –– naive, maybe, but look, look closely and i find that it's harder to not find traces of love in each and every thing now. love is clear as day when you say it outright, yes, but it also shouts out its presence when you tell me you fixate on my childhood drawing of the sea and in every one-off detail of conversation you remember. love tangles itself in the margins of my diaries, where i scribbled hearts around my 5th-grade crush's birthday, and in the stories i created for my stuffed animals, giving them lovers and children and novel adventures. love follows me when i take the train from el cerrito del norte to berryessa station, riding for four hours so i might see a friend for two. it exists in the 0s and 1s we send back and forth to each other, unicode characters woven into declarations and desires and daydreams i blast across the whole wide internet but mean only for your eyes. love is tangible in each pearlescent scale of every rainbow trout and the dreamy hubble images of the pillars of creation i pored over when i was 7. somewhere in the backyard of my childhood home, a small avian skeleton slowly decays underneath a loquat tree, reminders of my mother's green thumb and the tears my sister and i shed when we held a funeral for some kind of chickadee or sparrow that struck our window. far out in deep space and hidden beneath the earth. love tucks itself away behind each "i miss you" exchanged and lingers with every wish for you to sleep well. love grows, day by day, beckoning my heart to speed up its cadence and conducting butterflies to flutter their little wings. when we speak, when i read your words, when i remember you.
go further, venture deeper. continue giving me ways to find love in everything.
i miss you. what an oversimplification. i wish i could write more grandiose declarations or flowery sentences to describe an ounce of what i feel but the words do not come to me. but know what i feel for you is immense. i can't say everything i'm afraid of right now, but that feeling will wash away with time. i know that much. i think my brain is still shortcircuiting and thoughts have not come, just the feeling of my heart beating so fast so this will have to suffice for now. i hope that's alright.
i’m picking this up from yesterday. i’m on the train now to the airport. it’s genuinely so easy to talk to you. pauses of silence don’t bother me and i could just listen to you speak no matter the subject. six hours will pass by in the blink of an eye. and i start to see a future with you prominently in it. i passed by a sukiya while on the phone with you today. i haven’t been there, either here in japan or back in taiwan, since you left. i see us sitting there together, just us in a city we aren’t from in a country we don’t belong to but it never felt foreign with you across the table from me. i haven’t been back there since you left because it’s a place for just us. that, the park, and chiang kai shek memorial. places where i can happily tuck away memories of you. i count down the days until i can see you again. what should we do? i daydream about driving around the berkeley hills, laughing with you at cheeseboard pizza, wandering around the aquariums at the calacademy together, watching the waves crash over the point reyes shoreline, how shy i’ll be when we meet again. i wrote in my journal a while back i think i’d end up falling deeply for you. i think i’m operating in understatements as of late.
all this to say, i dream of you when i’m awake and miss you no matter what i do or where i am. but it’s not an entirely melancholic feeling; rather, my heart soars with hope when i think of seeing you again. and so, i can’t say those eight letters yet but i can say that.
i find that im missing you very badly. when i pass by a sukiya or a 7/11. on the trains, especially, i think about how when a seat would open up next to me you would sit and we would sit together in silence, or listening to a spotify jam, staring off across the aisle together. or when i feel sleepy and i remember how gentle you were whe n you told me wanted me to nap when we went to houtong and how happy you are when you know i’ve slept well. i spent the entire day at the churaumi aquarium thinking of the day we spent at the aquarium in taoyuan together. thank goodness i havent been on a long haul bus at night because i think i would just spend the ride remembering the closeness of you on the way back from jiufen.
do you want to know a secret? the biggest part of why i broke down during the festival in fulong, and the reason i felt like i was struggling to breathe normally when we went swimming, was you. i said it was because i was feeling guilty for having so much fun with you all while my relationship was falling apart, but in all honesty i just realized how much happiness you bring me and how much i want to be around you. is it that much of a secret, actually? i don’t want you to go away. i could glean how much you paid attention to these little things about me, how much you remembered about me, and i feel butterflies in my chest. i didn’t realize i’d been craving that this whole time. nobody’s made me feel that the way i express myself and my emotions could be valuable before.
that was what i'd written together with the first part the first night i was in tokyo but was a little frightened to say then. i read what you'd written on your site. its 8:44pm; i came home early today. i think this is the closest i've ever gotten to being angry with you. how could you write something like this to me and ask me to not say anything? of course i understand and respect that request, but you have to know that it hurts. i feel physically ill to my stomach as i'm writing this. of course i feel guilty. but you knew that would happen. you telling me not to doesn't stop me from feeling so. you also said you want me to think about this on my own and respond in a separate block of writing so here it is. might i also just add that, while i do understand your intentions, i found these instructions to be mildly condescending. i think i am capable of thinking on my own whether or not you're actively talking to me! when you wake up, i can play along and not mention anything. but you must know by now how it affects me when i read something like this from you. and you must know that i find it hard to merely sit with those feelings without doing anything about them. so you might be annoyed that i've responded so quickly but i am going to anyway here. otherwise i don't think i could do anything properly until then.
i know i've been hesitant and to be honest my self-image has been crumbling a little from this guilt that has been feverishly growing. but you have to know i want you. i crave you so deeply; it's been overriding every other train of thought with each passing day since you left. you're on my mind constantly, incessantly even. god, i've even been writing down little thoughts and conversational topics i want to share with you because i feel like i spam you with too many texts when you're asleep. i'm not so eager to be genuinely vulnerable with people, and i don't believe other people when they say they won't judge me or the weight of my emotions. but i'm happy to with you, so so so happy. i want you to know me. everything about me. i'm not exactly sure what you meant when you said you think i misunderstand your feelings. maybe that's on me for taking so much at face value, but i just don't know what you want me to be for you right now. i'm okay with this most of the time, truly, but i feel i don't know if i can be who you want me to be for you when, like you said, this distance closes -- whatever your expectations are. i'm so scared of that, and i'm so scared that if you keep knowing me you'll realize there's actually nothing special. you're probably frustrated at me saying that, but it is a thought i just haven't seemed to be able to get out of my head for weeks. these kinds of thoughts have stopped me from fully expressing how i feel about you. i said this last night but for all the choosing love and happiness i preach, i might be the bigger coward here. i'm scared of the enormity of my emotions that have grown in such a short amount of time, and the possibilities of what this could be. for once, i'm at a genuine loss on how to even begin to express how i feel. me!!!! i couldn't have imagined i'd struggle so much to do so just a bit ago. this is how much residence you've taken up in my mind. not that i mind that (of course, an understatement) and i won't pull away from you or stop trying to figure us out, so long as you think i'm good for you.
but that's what's also been on my mind, swirling in my head is a voice that whispers, "am i really good for you?" i think i believed you a few nights ago but now i'm unsure again. i care about you so much. "caring" is an understatement for me as well. the terrifying idea i've had grow louder recently is that i should leave you alone. otherwise, i'll ruin you. i think i'm in too deep, selfishly, to do that, but it is a gut-wrenching thought, one that makes me feel genuine nausea. but if i'm continuing to speak selfishly, i want to hold onto you, for you to be by my side, i want to figure out what this thing between us is, and i don't want you to go. stay here with me. in these past few months, you've made me understand i've been missing something for years. i'm still trying to pin down what exactly that "something" is, but i know that when i talk to you, when i've gotten to know you, it just feels right. it comes easy. you made me feel seen and it was kind of over for me from then on. i'm not sure i ever stood much of a chance at resisting it, either. you'd say certain things and i'd just melt. i feel like i'm falling a million miles per hour, but i'm flying, soaring, as well.
i learned how to rollerblade today and it was awesome! ^_^ i think the reason i'd never tried before was cliché enough; i'd always been afraid of falling. i've iceskated a few times before and had a pair of barely worn rollerskates as a child, but i never felt like i could fully commit to the idea of just taking off and skating away without some voice casting doubt in the back of my head. and so, for 21 years and 8 months, i'd robbed myself of this joy just because i was too afraid to even try! i joked for years that i was my own worst enemy, but how much did i do over time to actually try and change that? how many joys have i stopped myself from indulging in because i was afraid of failing, falling, or more pathetically, just being mediocre at it?
rollerblading and swimming at the beach and writing here on this blog. all things that makes me feel like i'm free. my worries melt away and even if i have trouble breathing or a knot in my chest initially, i can untangle it little by little, unspooling all my doubts. you make me feel like this, too, like whatever knot of sadness, pain, discomfort, yadda yadda that's troubling me can be gently unwound until i feel at peace again. and i love how much you want to see me try and do all these things i said i'd do, things i'd wanted to do for a long, long time, things that might at first make me uncomfortable but will ultimately make me happier. i don't understand how you could be so determined to do all this for me despite not knowing me for so long, but i appreciate it more than words can describe. i just get so comfortable with only being comfortable that i forgot how rewardingly free it is to be able to dive straight into something a little bit scary. when i talk with you and share whatever's on my mind, i feel like i can sneak a glimpse of a future where i am so much more than what i've been comfortable with in the past few years. i'd wanted to write and journal and blog since high school but was always too afraid. in the past few days, though, i've been itching to update this site more and more! because i know you're reading and you care. despite all the turmoils i've felt in the past weeks, i've felt like i've been soaring. i don't want this feeling to fade.
i scribbled this down when i was a little bit drunk in osaka:
writing this here because im too chicken to say it elsewhere you'll see this when you do. i guess my whole everything just feels so off i think it's set in tonight how much it affects me how you feel. i don't know i do not know how to stop thinking about you it's incessant. do you stop thinking of me? what am i supposed to do? i'm scared. how do you silence that fear? what helps you keep going? more than anything, more of being hurt myself, i'm scared of hurting you. i feel so paralyzed.
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