Here are some of my personal essays, touching on themes of personal growth,
reflections on life, internal transformations, and expressions of emotional
experiences.
2:39 AM
It has been a long time since I last stayed up this late.
This weariness—adrift, untethered—exists only in the moment.
Once gone, it leaves no trace.
I feel awake. Or something like it.
Before me, vast fields stretch into nothingness.
Flipping through pages, beside my pillow,
a strange lightness settles over me—sudden, inexplicable.
How wonderful, to finally be still.
Once more.
On words—
Lately, I have been reading The Revenge of the Lawn.
Some of its oddities feel eerily familiar—
Jack, who hacked down the pear tree, dousing its roots in kerosene,
not out of malice,
but out of a fear of bees,
born from nothing but a trick of memory—proactive interference.
And the drunken geese, greedy and absurd.
Like me.
Except I am luckier.
At least my branches no longer bear green fruit.
Out of respect, even decay must be absolute.
There is nothing more ironic than hope,
when it is nothing but a hand that digs its own grave.
He said that in October, the water would take only six months to boil.
He said there was no saving them.
They said that in spring,
a young man’s fantasies would turn to love.
In his March, the water began to bubble.
In my May, fantasies could still cradle a cup of coffee.
A friend pulled me into a romance spun from fantasy.
Shattered families, yawning distances,
pride sharp as broken glass—
none of it could sever love.
She was enthralled,
perhaps drawn by nostalgia for the original novel,
perhaps swept up in the dream.
I only thought—
that modern people,
the love-hungry,
had already begun their dance with life and death
the moment they stepped into the theater,
caught between modernism and Qiong Yao-like dialogue.
Dull,
and yet, strangely, I did not resent it.
The last month before graduation, I read furiously.
As if to bury the emptiness of high school’s impending end.
More truthfully, as a form of self-redemption.
"At least, in my final semester, I read."
How ridiculous—
the way we chase the illusion of intellectual fulfillment,
only to deceive ourselves in the end.
Stopping to think,
I realize the words that linger most vividly in my mind
are from a book I once loved:
"I have always tried to place myself on sunlit soil,
and then hurl my will into it."
And yet,
somewhere along the way,
the meaning of sunlight
became blurred beyond recognition.
For my graduation message board, I left behind another beloved line:
"I mainly feel that I am becoming a servant of sorrow.
I am still searching for its beauty."
I could think of no words more fitting to encapsulate high school.
Like shifting—
solitary, melancholic.
But this is who I am.
I do not wish to erase it.
If anything,
I cherish it.
A very important person once shared this poem with me:
Suicide’s Note
Langston Hughes
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
And so,
I left it on my graduation message board—
whether in honor of the poem itself
or in honor of a fleeting version of myself.
And that is all.
For now.
On Scents
I have always loved scents.
The soapy innocence of baby snake powder,
the ripeness of persimmons,
the overused but undeniable freshness of grass after rain.
Roasted marshmallows,
hot cocoa in winter,
burnt cinnamon,
mint-laced tobacco,
even the damp warmth of a towel after a shower.
And yet, I am struck by the paradox of absence—
that humans, gifted with scent,
are doomed never to preserve a single moment of it.
And so, we chase its recreation.
Like the fleeting frost of an early morning.
And lament our own sensitivity.
Language, too, is the same.
Like the stillness that follows after breathing in something beautiful,
when words stumble, fail,
and the weight of an unshareable moment
leaves only emptiness behind.
As a child, I dreamt of becoming a perfume critic.
Now, I dabble in fragrance blending.
I remember watching Perfume and feeling its sickness rise through me,
its madness,
its pursuit of purity.
How does one measure purity?
Desire? Love?
Like the scent of the moon—
and then, nothing.
At noon today, a sharp, piercing smell rose through the air.
And suddenly—
memories I had either forgotten or willed myself to forget
came rushing back.
I recalled something Shi Tiesheng once wrote:
"Of all things, scent is the hardest to explain."
I thought of Horcruxes.
I wanted to call it
preserved nature.
Proustian memory.
Scent. Music. Light.
Pheromones.
Predestined abstraction,
a thread of desire at the borders of connection.
Harlem River
I find myself here again.
Few people.
Cross-legged on the ground,
wind in my hair,
a bottle of water bought for a dollar in Times Square after standing in line for too long.
Half-empty.
Music in my ears.
My right ear throbs—sharp, persistent.
Strangely, I don’t mind it.
The absurdity of pain,
the way it anchors me.
Reminds me that I am here, alive.
Faint. Fleeting.
Walking, I had been consumed by an urgent need to write.
Now that I’m sitting down,
I have no idea where to begin.
I think I have fallen in love with walking.
I don’t know if it’s because I’ve fallen in love with summer in New York,
or because I’ve fallen in love with walking alone.
Every time, aimless.
Every time, further than I intended.
Every time, until there is no road left.
Today, a strange fragility presses against my ribs.
Maybe it’s my cycle approaching.
Maybe it’s nothing.
On 6th Ave, I nearly burst into tears.
For no reason at all.
Or for reasons I can’t name.
The arrival of summer unsettles me.
A rush of something between exhilaration and panic.
I brace myself.
For the season.
For someone.
I tell myself I am facing it.
Embracing it.
So convincingly that I almost believe it.
And yet—
sometimes, relentless optimism is just another way to run.
"I am so happy."
And then, suddenly,
a great, engulfing void.
Streets hold memory.
Bryant Park.
Fifth Avenue.
Times Square.
K-town.
Broadway.
Rockefeller.
Places I have walked.
Places I have never walked.
Expectations, disappointments.
Compressed into a few city blocks.
I have walked these streets too many times,
with too many people,
choosing which memories to keep,
which to let fade.
And all at once—
they surge back.
Overwhelming.
Disjointed.
Cracking at the edges.
Someone once asked me if I would miss New York.
I hesitated before answering.
"I think so."
But maybe it’s not this place I will miss.
Maybe it’s the people,
the moments,
the feelings that lived within its streets.
And just like that—
a sudden, crushing emptiness.
I walk.
Aimless, nameless,
and inexplicably sad.
Memories of happiness surface without warning.
And then, they turn on me.
One. Two.
The flicker of car lights.
A saxophonist in the middle of a trash heap, playing for no one.
Two women drinking in their underwear.
Four pigeons fighting over a slice of pizza.
Six friends lost in conversation.
In my ears, a song plays.
"Let us decay in quiet stillness, together."
11:37 PM, on a plane.
An hour left to Shanghai.
My mind, thick with exhaustion.
Sleep evades me.
My neck aches,
so I write.
Yesterday, my mother and I fought.
No need to record the details.
She said, as always,
that she has carried disappointment in me for years.
We parted without resolution.
And today,
everything continues as if nothing happened.
A flight attendant just asked me how I feel about the airline service.
A small surprise.
Perhaps because of my seat’s convenience,
or perhaps for some other reason.
It doesn’t matter.
I can only seem to write stream-of-consciousness prose.
Scattered,
raw,
untamed.
I don’t want my writing to always tangle itself with love and longing.
And yet—
the moment I write the word Shanghai,
I am betrayed.
That word,
those syllables,
drag forth a grief from years ago,
a wound that still pulses beneath my skin.
It is what it is.
An inescapable part of me.
Too vast to ignore,
too deep to conceal.
The Maiden’s Dance once said—
"The carcass of a lusting she-beast, left to rot as compost on the wasteland of memory."
How apt.
And yet, the irony is,
my wasteland refuses to stay barren.
It bursts forth—over and over—
lush, feverish, unrelenting.
"Let me be pressed into your skin."
"I want to bloom with you."
"Let my lips grow into your petals."
"I breathe you in."
Daydreams of spring—
pitiful, feral, barely contained.
Still, Shanghai holds its own pull on me.
A city of contradictions—
glittering and ruthless,
its indifference disguised as charm.
It is chill, effortless, unbothered.
And yet, because of you,
I walk through its streets, restless, insatiable,
searching for something I already know I won’t find.
The goal—
to be the most at ease,
in a place that never stops moving.
"My troubles lie elsewhere—"
"A fractured soul in a fractured time."
To My Butterfly
How do I articulate this helplessness?
These emotions, this unbroken intent?
You.
I am frustrated.
My words feel insufficient.
Cliché expressions turn sticky and saccharine.
I don’t know if you like hearing them.
But whatever warmth rises from them,
I hope, sincerely,
that it reaches you.
So much of my life has felt untethered.
A subconscious isolation.
A distance I cannot explain.
And yet,
I think of you.
Unbidden, inevitable.
Like the song of cicadas in winter.
I once read an alternate definition of autumn—
"A season that can be resisted by embrace alone."
You said you didn’t like autumn.
But I hope,
through us,
through touch,
you might learn to love New York’s autumns.
I burn for the first autumn that belongs to us both.