Here, in the land of the free, it’s starting to feel as if conflicting desires cannot coexist. As if one story necessarily overwrites another.

Reader, I know. I know. Life is messy, right now, it’s a touch messier than usual. We have tried our best, and it hasn’t been enough.

As long as no one else knew, my writing could be worthy as long as I deemed it so. But once I left everything behind to move across continents for my MFA, the stakes shifted.

There are a lot of clichés about sopranos: how we’re loud, noisy, bitchy, and love attention. We were young girls, and accepted labels as synonymous with being part of something bigger than ourselves, being part of a group.

I’m always knocking on their doors, asking to put my plants by their windows. The guys have always been nice about sharing their portion of sunlight, but the fact remains that I cannot live in that square patch of sun, on the floors of their rooms.

I generally don’t like waiting. I don’t like unspecified periods of time wherein anything can happen; I don’t like limbo, and I don’t like amorphous anticipation.

Because I am a woman and not of America, my fiction is not like other fiction, my fiction is assumed to be autobiographical.

I was naive and I was an adult, which meant I believed I was past idealism. A dangerous combination.

A guy is drunk behind me. He’s gone hard on free airplane wine. He told me, in a slur, that he wanted to make the flight worth it. I envy him, briefly, his throughline from cause to consequence, the neat solution of it all. He’s snoring now, a low, consistent rumble, blissfully soaked in booze. How much wine do you have to drink to make the last year worth it?

We dream, too, of scenarios where the end is always slightly out of reach: swimming up towards the surface, lungs bursting, racing towards the end of a yawning tunnel, being stuck on a fire escape ladder which stretches to infinity either way.

I don’t care about winning; for me, the fun is in the competition, the same way I scream a lot on roller coasters, though I feel nothing about being flung around upside-down in midair.

There was a period of time, from ages eighteen to twenty-one, that my nails were perpetually coated with a hard layer of coloured gel. I had just started working as a copywriter in an advertising firm, and was hyper-conscious of my status as the youngest person in the company.

The landmarks of my childhood have evaporated, my alma mater too. The legacy schools will never dissolve of course, but places like where I’m from don’t have that kind of historical protection. It doesn’t quite matter to the overall brand if they go.

We were raised to see harmless aberration as texture, as colour. The strange things that happen in our sleep, they’re accepted as something to tease, to laugh about.

Ah, I was still sentimental. I gave up the Canon in favor of a fresh start; when I turned 22, I sold everything, I moved to Nikon.

There were plenty of people out, doing people things. People-ing. What did people things entail? It felt as if everyone was too loud, too unnatural, as if the world had become too bright in the time we’d been away.

I learned quickly that purchasing food that could be grasped in both hands, eaten while weaving in and out of crowds, was the best way to stretch your dollar.

Television, of course, can be very good. At its best, it is a work of art; at its worst, a mindless form of company, the friend that prattles on about nothing at all and doesn’t mind you sitting there, mumbling noises of assent once in a while.

That you’ll be surprised at how disappointed you are when it rapidly devolves into mud-slinging between fans; that the disappointment is mainly self-directed, for once again you’ve invested trust in confident, faceless voices on the Internet, a rookie mistake.

It’s the Lunar New Year and we’re all trying to get lucky.