my case ended on friday and nobody staffed me monday. i'm still helping out — an email in the morning, a question about a slide someone else is presenting now — but it comes to about an hour a day.

i've been home most of the week. my roommates are around during the day more than i knew, and i feel closer to them than i did in july just from being in the same rooms that much. we start something in the kitchen, drop it, pick it back up two hours later. i'd forgotten a weekday could go like that.

nothing is holding the days in place. usually there's an alarm at 6:30 for the gym. i set it there because i can't count on the evening, since i never know how late the night is going to run, so the morning is the only hour i can promise. this week i turned it off. no reason to be up, and no reason to get to bed early either, and i've gone to sleep later every night since monday and woken up later every morning after it.

it's good. i want that down before the rest, because the rest sounds ungrateful. i also don't do well here. i can see where it goes: another week and i'm restless, a week after that and i'm grading the days by what came out of them and finding nothing.

i like working hard. i didn't know that about myself until i had a job that asked for it. the reasons i give are true — i'm learning, i'm twenty-two, i have no dependents and no mortgage and a lot of energy, and if there's a time to do this it's now. there's a plainer reason under those. when the week is full, i don't ruminate. there isn't room for it. a day spent on someone else's problem is a day i don't spend on mine, and i've been taking credit for the result.

this week handed my attention back. all of it at once, with nothing telling me where to put it.

attention

i deleted instagram this week. i'd been saying i would for months and this was the first time it felt like it would stick. my attention is in bad shape. i can't get through a movie anymore without falling asleep in it or skipping ahead, and i notice myself doing it, and i do it anyway.

midweek i went to passerine, an upscale indian place, with a reservation for one. it was my second time doing that. the first was balthazar.

seven courses, a hundred and fifty-five dollars, and i left convinced i'd eaten three thousand calories.

i was still finishing slides through the second course. when i closed the laptop i took out tuesdays with morrie. my most recent ex gave it to me right before i started at bain. she'd read it and wanted me to, and what she meant by handing it over was don't let this job take the parts of you that matter. i got three quarters through it and then work picked up and the book sat where i left it for five months.

i finished it between courses.

i haven't read a book because i wanted to since middle school, and i've forgotten how. the first stretch i kept getting to the bottom of a page with nothing in my head. when i was a kid the books came back to me as movies — i'd remember watching things i had only ever read. that's just what a child's imagination does with a page, but i can't do it now and i miss it.

the book is not remarkable. the lessons are ones you already have: call your family, don't let work take what it wants to take, money won't do the thing you're hoping it will do. the structure repeats itself after a while. one chapter stayed with me anyway, the one on culture, and his point is that most people accept the one they were handed and never check whether they'd have picked it. you're supposed to work out what you actually want your life to look like and then live inside that, instead of living the way the people around you live because they're the people around you.

then i put it down. there was another hour of dinner left and nothing to do with it. nobody across the table, no reason to reach for my phone.

what came was gratitude, and more of it than the evening called for. i thought about my parents. seven courses is nowhere near anything they had at my age, and what i wanted, sitting there, was for them to have a night like it — the food, the not worrying, the sitting still. i felt the same thing at balthazar and i didn't look at it then either.

and i liked being there by myself. i'd dressed for myself. i didn't have to keep anyone entertained. i ate at my own speed and left when i was done. traveling somewhere alone had been an idea i'd turned over before without doing anything about it, and this week it stopped being an idea.

ambition

i've been explaining myself to people more than usual, which is what happens when there's time to talk. a partner spent our whole conversation on it. he wanted to know how i'd decided to run my life, and he kept asking, and we never once got to work.

i'm ambitious. the word gets attached to careers by default and mine doesn't stop there. i want to be good at my life, at the person i'm turning into, and i've organized that around three things.

health, because it's what makes the rest possible. i move my body most days and it isn't about how it looks anymore; that used to be the point and now it's a side effect. lately i've been adding cardio and flexibility to the lifting, because strength that only works in the shapes you trained it in isn't much use to anyone. there's the challenge of it, doing something hard on a morning i'd rather not. there's improvement, which i can see week over week when nothing else in my life reports back that fast. there's discipline, which is mostly the practice of doing what i said i'd do. there's the long version — moving well at seventy, going where i want to go and being able to walk it once i'm there. and there's the daily proof, which is getting a fifty-pound suitcase up three flights without thinking about it.

learning, which i mean broadly: about myself, about the world, about whoever is in front of me. i ask why constantly. why something works the way it does, why someone said what they said, why i reacted the way i did. i want to understand things all the way down and the summary never satisfies me. sometimes the why isn't needed and i ask anyway. that's the part of it i'd defend least. it's also why the reading mattered. a book is the slowest way there is to learn something, and for five months i couldn't sit still long enough for one.

and relationships, which is where most of me goes. i'd rather have a handful of people i know completely than a wide field of people i know a little, and i've arranged my life to make that possible. it's the pillar i've done best at. it's also where this week ended up.

attachment

it's been about a month with her. we're both busy in ways that don't line up. i work the hours i work, and she's a medical assistant studying for the mcat, which is a second full-time thing stacked on the first.

she's newer here than i am. she graduated in the spring and moved to the city a few months ago, and she's assembling all of it at once — a routine, friends, a way to study that holds, some sense of how a week is supposed to go. i did that last year. i'm not finished, but the frame is up. so right now i have more room for her than she has for me. that's just where each of us is standing.

the volume changed too. the first few weeks we texted through the day and saw each other more than we do now. in august the studying got serious, and whatever the opening stretch of this was, we're past it. it's settled into less of everything. one night a week, maybe two, is what's available, and we've both said out loud that this is going to be hard. she hasn't done anything wrong. she's doing the thing she moved here to do. i'd take the time in whatever form it comes.

dating after college doesn't work the way it did during it. there's nobody to ask about her. in school somebody always knew somebody, and you could get a read on a person before you'd spent a month finding out yourself. there's also nowhere we'd both happen to be. no class, no dining hall, no party where the groups overlap. if we see each other it's because one of us picked a day and an hour and made it happen. all of it is deliberate or none of it occurs, and being deliberate about someone means knowing what you want from them, which is more than most people have worked out.

i don't like people easily. it takes a long time and it doesn't happen often, and then it arrives with no moderate setting on it. i think about her a lot. i pay attention to what she needs and i want to be the one who handles it. i'm more of a romantic than i'd admit at a table full of my friends. and it comes with the other thing, which is that i spend real time wondering whether she thinks about me the same amount. i've never been able to tell from the inside. the caring and the wondering show up together and i've never had one without the other.

i want this to work. the version where it doesn't is what gets me. not one where we found something out about each other, or turned out to want different things. one where we liked each other the entire time and the weeks just never had room in them. two schedules, two sets of priorities, a city that makes you book a person eight days out. that would be a stupid way to lose something good.

so i did what i do with anything i can't settle. i wrote down how i was feeling and turned it into talking points for a conversation i want to have with her in person.

it has headers. under the headers are bullets, under some of those are sub-bullets, and under a few of those there's a third level. it's the format i use for a case. it runs long.

in it: that i've felt less sure of where we stand lately, and which parts of that are anyone's to fix — some of it hers, some of it a phone that died. that i'm comfortable enough with her that it's pulled my expectations ahead of where one month should put them. whether i'm too invested this early. whether a month is too soon to be asking any of it. what i'd want if we only get one or two nights a week: to hear about her day, a call most days even a short one, word if she's going to be gone a while, good morning and good night. reassurance, which i typed and then put a lol after so it would look smaller. and near the end, in writing, i asked her to push back on anything unreasonable.

near the top, under the part about feeling less sure, i'd written that some of this might be because the week gave me more time to think. underneath it i left myself a note: underscore this.

allocation

a week like this makes ordinary things feel new, which is the part i didn't expect. a weekday afternoon. an hour at a table with nothing in it. my roommates in the kitchen at two on a wednesday. i noticed all of it the way you notice something you've never done before, and none of it is new. it's just been a couple of months since any of it had room.

thoughts do it too. one arrives and i don't recognize it as mine, and then i hold it longer than it needs holding, because nothing else is asking for the space.

i've spent the week trying to work out how much thinking a given thing deserves. i've never once set that number myself. work sets it. a full week keeps me out of my own head, and i've been calling that discipline, when what it is is occupancy. take the work away and the apparatus doesn't shut off. it runs on whatever's nearest.

some of the thinking was worth doing. i read, i noticed things, i got at a few things i'd been putting off getting at. but i know what i'm like. i'd rather be doing, and think in the gaps, and not let the thinking leak past them. weeks like this one are where it leaks.

what was nearest this week was her.

everything in that note is true, which is what makes it hard to throw out. i do feel less sure of where we stand. i do want to hear about her day. i'd want all of it in a full week and i'd want it a year from now. what i can't do is separate how much i'm feeling from how much room i had to feel it. and four weeks is too early to absorb any of it. a year in, this week produces nothing. there'd be enough behind us that a quiet stretch would just be a quiet stretch, and i'd have a hundred ordinary weeks telling me what her being busy means and what it doesn't. the thing missing is time, and effort doesn't produce time.

that's the trade i keep pretending isn't one. the full weeks take the book, the cooking, the calls home, the weekday afternoon i didn't know i missed. they also take the note. i don't get to keep the good half of either week.

what's actually available is small and i already know the list. show up when i said i would. say the true thing early instead of saving it for a better moment. be legible from the outside, so she isn't doing the guessing i've been doing all week. none of that needed headers.

i'm still going to have the conversation. most of what's in there is worth saying out loud, and it's better coming from me than from a month of her trying to read me. i just know what wrote it.

i'll get staffed again. maybe monday, maybe not for a few weeks. when it happens this quiets down on its own and i'll feel like i handled it. the reading stops too.

one of my friends put a night out together, pocha with a few of us, and getting a date that worked for everyone took her longer than it should have and stressed her out. i said yes early and i meant it. my week was open, i had energy to spare, and a table full of people i like is easy to want when it's still days away.

i asked about it three times before it happened — when, where, who else was coming. she wasn't chasing me down. i was one of the reasons she thought the night was worth the trouble.

then saturday came. i'd been up late the night before and the day was full, and by evening there was nothing left in me. i didn't want to drink and i didn't want to talk. i wanted my apartment with nobody in it. half an hour before i was supposed to show up i texted her that something had come up at my place and that i couldn't make it. that was true in the narrowest possible way. one of my roommates was hosting a pregame, so there were people over, drinking, planning to go out after. none of it involved me and i wasn't dealing with any of it. i skipped that one too. what i wanted was the apartment after everyone had left it.

• • •

she called soon after. she said she had to get it out or she'd keep resenting me, and then she got it out: she'd stressed herself out putting the night together, i'd bailed thirty minutes before it started, and i wasn't prioritizing her. it would be nice, she said, to see me once a week.

i'm usually good in conversations like that. there's always something i can say to keep it moving. this time i had nothing. i don't know if it was the tiredness or if the words just weren't there, but i sat with the phone and let her talk and nothing came up to meet it.

i disagreed with most of what she said. i work far more than she does, and i had the number ready: ten times. i don't keep a schedule on my friends. i reach out when i want to see someone, more often with the people i'm closest to, and by my own accounting she gets a decent share of that. once a week is a standard i've never applied to anyone. and underneath it, what my friends have floated more than once: that she might want something from me other than friendship. i don't think that's it. i think she's possessive of me, which is worse.

i said none of it. she was already worked up and there was nothing worth winning. after a long pause i apologized and told her i'd make it up to her. she hung up satisfied and i wasn't.

• • •

i like making plans more than i like showing up to them. saying yes days out is free. the week hasn't taken anything out of me yet, and the night is still an idea instead of somewhere i have to be. by the time it arrives it's somewhere i have to be, and the person who has to go is whoever the week left behind.

an empty weekend also makes me feel like i'm wasting something. i've never been able to look at unused time and see rest. it looks like time i failed to use, and the fix is always to put people in it. so the plans go in, half because i want them and half because a full calendar is evidence i'm living correctly. then the plans arrive and take more out of me than the empty weekend ever would have.

the hours behind the number are real. my weeks are full and i wasn't exaggerating. it just doesn't cover that saturday. i wasn't working that night. i was tired and i didn't want to see anybody, and no amount of hours explains that.

and her wanting more of me isn't new. she was part of why my last relationship ended. she wanted to see me one on one more often than my girlfriend was comfortable with, and she was more involved in my life than a friend needs to be. when the group met up she was the only one strange about it, quiet with my girlfriend, avoiding her. if it had been me in her position i'd have gone out of my way to talk to her. my girlfriend read her as a threat, never got along with her, and never had peace of mind while she was around. some of that is mine. i should have set harder boundaries and i didn't, because setting them meant a conversation i didn't want to have. but she should have known better than to be that involved with a taken man. i wouldn't do what she did with a girl who had a boyfriend.

once a week is the smallest version of a request she's been making for a long time.

• • •

i've known her long enough to see where it comes from. she's insecure about her friendships in a way she doesn't hide well. she's had falling outs, more than a couple, people who dropped out of her life and stayed dropped, and what she's afraid of is being left behind by someone who never says they're leaving. a friend cancelling thirty minutes out is the exact shape of that fear. so she called instead of letting it sit, which took more than staying quiet would have, and she was right about the part she called about. i stressed her out and then i bailed.

in most friendships one person wants more than the other, and usually the gap is small enough that nobody has to say anything about it. here it has a number attached, the number is hers, and i'm not going to meet it. she's one of the people i'm closest to and i'd say so to anyone who asked. i just don't run friendships on a frequency, and if i ran one on a frequency, hers wouldn't be weekly.

both times i handed her something true and let it stand in for an answer. people were over at my apartment, which was true and wasn't why i didn't come. i was sorry, which was true and wasn't an answer to anything she'd said. she took both, and there was no reason not to. none of what i think made it into that call.

i haven't made it up to her yet. i'm seeing her thursday. i don't know how i'll put it, but she has to get the version i didn't give her on the phone.

work has been quiet lately, and the quiet has gone somewhere good: more nights with friends, calls home, the hobbies coming back, new people. underneath it, more room to think than i've had all year. which is how i ended up sitting with a question i'd never asked directly. when have i felt most alive?

not content — content i have. the job is fine, the habits are healthy, the apartment is calm. alive is a different reading. alive is the thing that makes a day stick out from the days around it, the feeling with intensity in it. and when i went looking honestly, every instance i could find had another person in it. i have never once felt most alive alone.

that's an uncomfortable thing to notice, because being alone is where i'm safest. it's the place where nothing needs managing, and i've built a lot of my life around protecting it. but the alive moments, all of them, were moments of connection. understanding someone, being understood back, both at once. it's one of the few things i'd call a pillar: deep connections with the people i love. and if i'm honest about the whole of it, the strongest of those moments have usually come through one specific kind of person — a girl i'm drawn to. there are convoluted factors at play there. being known and being wanted arrive tangled together, and i've never fully separated them.

this past sunday, both showed up at once.

• • •

it started as a double date that never assembled. a girl from hinge, a plan involving my roommate and a friend of hers, and then neither of us followed up with our respective halves — partly forgetting, partly, at least on my end, because the texting was already good on its own, which almost never happens. i went in without expectations. i've learned to. the times i've let the idea of someone build before the person arrived, the person never fit the idea, and the disappointment was manufactured in advance. so the plan was small: meet, take her at face value, see.

i took her to the grass terrace above the restaurant at lincoln center, which is my favorite place in the city and a place i've mostly gone alone. we sat on the roof with the plaza below us and talked, and the evening went by without my noticing it go. who we are, where we come from, what we're troubled by, what we want. none of the first-date volley, or if it was, it didn't feel like it. around eleven a security guard kindly told us the terrace was closing, and instead of ending the night we walked to a park off the west side highway, the kind with swings, and had it entirely to ourselves. we stayed until two. at one point i was on a swing and she was on the ground in front of me, her arms and legs wrapped around my legs, and it was endearing in a way i didn't examine until later. i had work in the morning. it did not feel like a decision to stay.

what i noticed most, though, wasn't anything that happened. it was the absence of something. i'm usually running a version of myself in those settings — charming enough, edited, watching how i'm landing. six hours went by and i never once caught myself performing. things i normally hold back for months came out plainly, and they cost nothing on the way out. i've been on dates where i was never quite myself. i don't think i understood how much those were costing me until sunday, when the fee stopped.

and this openness had no exit behind it. the depth i've found with strangers before was made possible by a built-in ending, a flight home, a night with no sequel; unguarded was easy when none of it would follow me. she lives here. whatever i told her that night, i'd be living next to. and that turned out to be a reason to say it plainly, not a reason to manage it: i liked her, and if this was going to become something, i wanted her working from the accurate picture of me, knowing early what she was getting into and choosing it, or not. the edited version would have been its own small dishonesty toward someone i was hoping would stay.

• • •

monday, after work, i went over. at some point on her couch we asked each other for the hard stuff, the real histories, and she went first.

she was sprawled across me while she talked, and i was mostly silent, and the silence wasn't politeness. i was processing. the story she was telling, i knew. not the shape of it, not something like it. i had lived the same one, in a different house — the emotionally absent parents, the immigrant household where feeling had no place to land. i'd spent my whole life assuming it was mine to explain slowly, if ever. she was telling it to me unprompted, from inside.

then she asked if i had anything. i took a long pause. when someone hands you your own story, you can match it or you can keep it, and keeping it suddenly felt like lying. so i told my version. the whole time i talked i didn't look at her. i stared into her kitchen, at nothing, so i wouldn't cry. i wanted to get through it first. when i finished i looked to my right. her eyes were glossy, a tear was rolling down to her nose, and she was whispering something soft in response. she wasn't crying for me exactly, or not only. she'd just told the same story. she was crying at both of ours at once.

then last night, on facetime, it reversed. she told me something from her past that had cost her for years and cost her again to say out loud. the details are hers. i was in my bed in the dark, on my side, her face the only lit thing in the room, and as she talked i thought of my sisters, how sad i would feel if it had been them, and somewhere inside that thought the tears arrived. this time i was the one being watched having them. i didn't look away. there was nowhere else to look; it was dark everywhere except her.

she cried at my story because it was also hers. i cried at hers because i put it on people i love. neither of us was crying for a stranger. maybe that's how feeling moves between people: nothing crosses in the abstract. it lands where it already lives.

• • •

it's been less than half a week. i met her sunday. it's wednesday, and she is most of what i think about, and that scares me. not the feeling itself, the mismatch: the size of it against the four days holding it up. and i can't claim i'm new here. i have a history of fast arrivals, feelings that showed up overnight, burned for a few weeks on a face and a handful of facts and a person i'd mostly made up, and then ended without ever having been about anyone real. every one of them felt like the exception while it was happening. so "this feels different" is not evidence. it's the one thing the pattern always says.

the difference i actually trust is in what the feeling is made of. those earlier ones fed on the idea of a person; the person herself barely participated. this one has never had to run on invention. it was built in front of me — six hours of her history on a roof, her tears at my story on her couch, something she'd carried for years said out loud into the dark with me watching. there hasn't been time to imagine her, and there hasn't been a need.

there's something plainer under it too. we've said it to each other, half joking, that we'd make good friends. it's true. it's also moot, since i'm attracted to her and that door closes itself. but it matters to me that the friendship is real underneath, that the talking would hold up even with the attraction subtracted.

so we're pacing it on purpose. monday night we debated whether i should sleep over, and we said no. last night we debated whether i should come over at all, and we said no again, and then stayed on facetime long past the hour that made the no look sensible. i keep noticing how those sit together: the tears and the late calls, and right beside them the deliberate nos. nobody is pretending the feeling is smaller than it is. nobody is handing it the schedule either. she is as careful as i am, which might be my favorite fact of the week.

i don't know what she and i become. four days can't know that, and i won't pretend otherwise. and i won't shrink what the four days were because of it, either. what i know is the thing i went looking for. being alone is still where i'm safest. it has never been where i'm most alive. i used to think the first fact was the important one about me. as of this week, i've stopped.

i met a partner at an asians at bain dinner. same table, too far down it to really talk, so afterward i scheduled a chat through his executive assistant: a thirty-minute hold, his office, the following week. the morning of, the ea moved it to remote — he was staying home that day — and i found myself a conference room to take the zoom from.

these chats are a genre. you're supposed to ask about staffing, about how he thinks about development, about the path. i ask my existential crisis questions instead. why are you still at bain? what pillars do you live your life by? how does a person actually steer? i ask them everywhere, to anyone senior enough that the answer might have some road behind it, and mostly what comes back is polished. people at that level have answered everything before. you get the answer with the corners sanded off, the one that's been given a hundred times before, and you nod, and the half hour ends on time.

he was forty. taiwanese, michigan undergrad, consulting his entire working life. one industry, one arc, the resume of a man you'd expect to have the sanded answers. and for a few minutes he gave them. then one of my questions caught on something, and i watched it happen: a pause a beat too long for the format, some interior door swinging where i could see it. when he started talking again the polish was gone.

"it is so fucking hard to maintain your version of success."

• • •

what he meant, he said, was that the hard part was never deciding what success looked like. it was keeping your version yours. there are so many hands on it — family, prestige, money, health, the people around you succeeding in their versions — and each one adjusts it a little, quietly, until one day the thing you're maintaining doesn't match anything you chose. the people who end up where they actually meant to go, he said, are the ones who were thoughtful about it early — who did the deliberate steering in their twenties, grounded themselves in their own version before the other hands could get to it.

he was not describing a victory. that was the part the format had no slot for. he'd done the early steering himself; the career in front of me was the proof, clean, no wasted motion. and here he was telling a twenty-two-year-old how fucking hard the maintaining is, in the present tense.

then the daughters. they came up the way the biggest things do, in a sentence sized for a much smaller one: they're five and seven, they're getting older, and it was only last year he realized he wanted to be more involved. that was all of it. no story attached, no missed-recital scene, nothing offered for me to nod along to. a man whose job is structuring problems gave me the one-line version of what had to be years, and moved on. i didn't ask a follow-up. some compressions you don't unzip in a thirty-minute hold.

i remember thinking, while he talked: he doesn't have it figured out either. not as a criticism — as a genuine surprise. it had never once occurred to me that it wouldn't get figured out somewhere along the way. somewhere on the call i had stopped taking notes.

• • •

the call ran ten minutes over. i remember that because everything at that level ends on the half hour, the next hold always waiting, and instead he'd kept talking — a man with somewhere to be, deciding twice, at minute thirty and again at thirty-five, that this was worth being late for. then it ended the way zooms end, a click, and the room went silent around me. i sat there a second with the laptop open before going back to the team room and my afternoon.

i brought it up almost immediately. i'm close with my team, and i came in saying i'd just had an enlightening conversation with a partner, and started retelling it between tasks. the dinner, the questions, the way the polish had come off. it went fine until his line. i said it out loud, in my own voice, and my throat caught with no warning at all. the words had been fine in his mouth. in mine they turned out to weigh something.

i got it down before it surfaced. a breath, a reach for the water, the sentence finished at half volume. and i didn't hide it, that's the thing. i told them, honestly, that the chat had shaken me up a little. they took it the way you take that at 4pm on a tuesday: a nod, a "that's crazy," everyone's screens still lit with their own work. i don't blame them at all. nobody there was expecting anyone to have an awe-inspiring conversation on a random afternoon, and "shaken up a little" is what i said, not what i was. the words i chose were smaller than the thing, and the room could only respond to the words. i'd watched a man's real weight come through a format built to keep it out. now mine wasn't getting through either, and i'd even told them it was there.

why, though. he'd shared heavy things, but they were his — his forty, his daughters, his drift. nothing in the call was about me. none of it explains the throat.

• • •

that was this afternoon. by tonight the best explanation i have is one i don't love.

when he described the people who end up where they mean to go, the ones who did the deliberate steering early, he was describing the thing i've staked my twenties on. i am intentional about my life to a degree i rarely admit. and for a moment, hearing that named by a man that far up the road as the trait that decides everything, it felt like confirmation. except the man saying it was the counterexample sitting in plain view. he had done the early grounding. by his own theory he should have been finished with this. and he was forty, ten minutes over, telling a first-year he'd met once at a dinner how hard it still is. the trait i've built everything on was named and then, in the same call, shown to be nowhere near enough. i think my throat understood that before i did.

the reassurance has already arrived, right on schedule. i'm doing all the right things already. and the strange part is that it's true. i am deliberate, i do check my heading more than anyone i know, it probably will take me far. i just can't stop noticing that it's also exactly the sentence he would have said at my age, and that he'd have been right too. it was true for him, and it didn't cover him. true at the start turns out to be a smaller guarantee than i'd been treating it as.

i felt sorry for him for about an hour, and then the pity stopped fitting. sorry-for makes him a warning, and that isn't what i watched. most people never catch the drift at all; they wake up at some age inside a version of success other hands wrote and call it theirs. he caught it. it took him until forty, and he caught it, and said it out loud to someone at the very start of the same road.

i'll keep booking these chats. i'll keep asking the questions — why are you still here? what do you live by? — but i've stopped expecting anyone's answer to transfer. his didn't even transfer to himself across eighteen years. what he handed me was better than an answer: the question doesn't close. i'm twenty-two and answering it for the first time. he's forty and answering it again.

i met her on my first night out in new york. my friend — an old coworker, one of my roommates now — had put the night together: the two of us and four girls he knew, a pregame at one of their apartments, then a club. she was one of the four. i noticed the hair first, a wolf cut, stylish and a little alt, which is close to my own vibe; i dress emo some days. i thought she was attractive, and that was the end of the thought. i had a girlfriend. she had a boyfriend. sometime in the night one of the other girls told me she was getting close to me, and i brushed it off, easily, because there was nothing for it to be the start of.

• • •

after that she was just around. the friendship built itself the way those friendships do, in groups — birthdays, bar nights, somebody's living room — always with other people, which has its own ease: nobody carries anything, nothing goes deep enough to turn into real time together. in the better part of a year we never once hung out just the two of us. we never needed to. when a room put us next to each other the conversation was good, and then the room would shuffle, and that was the whole of it.

my relationship ended in october. with her, nothing changed, and i mean that exactly: no thought showed up to be resisted. she had a boyfriend, and the fact did all the work on its own. not thinking about her was effortless. the friendship carried on the same as ever, in the same crowded rooms.

besides, the foreground was never empty. it never has been; there's always a girl somewhere in it, taking up the thinking. this spring alone: one i couldn't get out of my head for weeks, one who turned out to be seeing someone, a stranger the night before her flight home. quick, bright, mostly imagined, gone.

she, meanwhile, was becoming ordinary. by summer she was friends with everyone i live with; she'd been by the new apartment a couple of times, visits that didn't register as visits, because she's one of the people who just comes through. if you'd asked me to draw that year i'd have put her in the scenery, and meant it kindly. the foreground was where things happened, and she was never in it.

• • •

for the fourth, six of us took a cabin in new paltz. she was one of the six, and i can't say the fact was nothing to me. the thought that something could happen had crossed my mind — not with any optimism; there was nothing to be optimistic about — but it had crossed, and i'd noticed the crossing. after ten months of not having to think about her, there was something to not think about.

late the first night, well into the drinking, i went sprawling across the couch and ended up with my head on her. i was drunk enough to do it; sober i wouldn't have. she'd barely been drinking, could register all of it, and she stayed. at some point she got up for something and came right back to the same spot.

the next day we walked into town before the drive home. new paltz is a hippy town. we drifted through a ritual store first, where the two of us got caught at the tarot cards, picking through the decks, reading them together, laughing at what we found. by the art shop the group had thinned out and it was just us — the first hour alone we'd ever had. i'd never asked for one. you don't ask that of someone with a boyfriend. or i don't. so it could only arrive like this, by accident, with nobody deciding anything.

we looked at little watercolors, individually wrapped and charming, and laughed at one called maneater. we took our time with all of it. across the street was a tibetan secondhand shop, where i fell into conversation with the owner, and she stood beside me and listened. after, she told me she liked hearing me chat with him like that: it's something she'd never do herself, but she likes listening in on it. and the whole hour, underneath everything, i was nervous. butterflies. i'd been easy around her for ten months without ever trying; that hour, i was trying.

we stayed so long our friends had to call to get us to go.

the thought waited for the drive home. six of us in one car, her included, and somewhere along the way it landed, word for word: wow. i might actually like this girl.

• • •

there's one small little problem: she has a boyfriend. she had one the night i met her and every day since. the fact never changed. i'm the one who changed.

i've always wanted it to arrive this way: out of a real friendship, the foundation down before anything stands on it. well. i have the organic version. the organic version comes with a boyfriend.

i've never met him. everything i know arrives secondhand, from people who were on my side before there were sides. my friend doesn't like him, doesn't understand the two of them together, says he's rude and that she doesn't seem to mind so long as none of it lands on her. she's mentioned, offhand, the way you mention things to friends, that the long distance has been a strain, that he's moving to new york for her and the excitement she's supposed to feel about it hasn't shown up. that's the whole file, and i can see what's wrong with it: it's thin, it's one-sided by construction, and the person reading it wants it to say something.

and under the file sits the plainer problem: i don't know her at the depth any of this would need. a year of crowded rooms, one hour of new paltz. enough to be sure of what i feel, nowhere near enough to be sure of the rest. i could be wrong about him, about them, about all of it, and i'd have no way of knowing.

then there's what she does, which i can list but can't read. the first night i ever met her, someone else had to tell me she was getting close. on the couch she stayed, and came back. in the store she told me she liked hearing me talk to a stranger. and around all of it, the chorus: my friends, the one who introduced us among them, keep saying we'd be good together, and nobody asked them. maybe it's interest. maybe it's how she is with people she trusts, and the chorus is cheering for a story, and i'm finding meaning because i went looking for it. i want it to mean something too badly to be the one reading it.

since the drive she's been in my head more or less constantly. and in a situation made of things i can't verify, there's exactly one verified thing: i like her. definitely. not the spring kind. this one has a real person in it, a year of her. i keep checking it from the inside and it keeps coming back true. what was a controllable urge is starting to feel like an uncontrollable one.

so, the question i keep landing on: is this a moral problem. i don't think the feeling is. i didn't choose it; for months, without trying, i kept not choosing it. if there's weight anywhere, it's in what i do from here — how close i keep standing, how much of this i feed while she's with someone. and there is something i could do. i could limit it: see her less, skip some of the rooms she'll be in, let the group carry the distance for me. it's available, it's obvious, and it would probably work.

i don't know if i want to.

• • •

in two weeks she takes the cats.

it's been the plan since spring, from back when she was scenery: my lease was ending, the new roommates are allergic, she said yes. she's already met them, made sure she wanted them. at the time it was nothing. a favor between friends.

my cats are going to live at her place. i'll visit them, of course i'll visit them, and she'll be there, and none of it will be anything i asked for.

and the cats are only the scheduled part. she's friends with everyone i live with. the plans keep including her. the rooms that built this aren't going anywhere. there will be more of her — nobody has to decide that. nothing between us has ever needed deciding.

i don't know what it turns into. the rooms will keep coming, and i'll be in them. we'll see.

i spent the holiday week at a lakehouse with people from work and never got in the lake. we'd gone remote for the week and rented the place together, and the plan mostly held, except for the part with the lake in it. the week turned heinous. three nights i was still at my laptop at midnight, the lake out there doing whatever lakes do without you, and i drove home from a house on the water without once having touched it.

the fourth was waiting at the end of it: five friends, a cabin in new paltz, one night. i'd been looking forward to it through every one of those midnights.

• • •

we drove up saturday: a rental car out of newark, a stop for groceries and drinks, a cabin with more window than wall, and then straight to lake minnewaska, because the whole point was water.

the "beach" was a strip of small rocks with the crowd of a much better beach, and the swimming was confined to a roped rectangle just off the shore. the lifeguards defended that rectangle like it was load-bearing. whistles for drifting wide, whistles for diving in. none of it was possible to take seriously, and we didn't.

we got in anyway. i hadn't swum in years, and it felt so good that for a while i just swam, back and forth inside the lines. then i stopped moving, lay back, and the shore was gone. ears under, eyes up, nothing left of the crowd and the whistles but whatever a lake sounds like from underneath. i swam through most of my childhood, five-thirty practices, meets, whole seasons inside roped rectangles with a clock at the end of every length, and then i stopped, all at once and completely. so there was something fitting about coming back to it here, in another roped rectangle, to do the one thing swimming never let me do: nothing. i gave the lake my weight and it took all of it. no part of me was holding anything up. above me there was nothing but blue and the slow traffic of clouds, and from down there the pen didn't exist. there is no rope in the sky. for as long as i floated there was no such thing as work.

• • •

the house was almost too nice for what we had planned: big rooms, bigger windows. the windows were also the catch, because most of them had no curtains. all afternoon that was the appeal. after dark it reversed: lights on inside, the lawn gone black, anyone out there could see straight in, and all we could see was ourselves. it scared me. all that glass, the woods on every side, six of us alone up here for the night. i've seen this movie. i didn't stop noticing the windows until i was too drunk to.

we played rage cage and paranoia, games i hadn't touched since college, and for a few hours the table did a decent impression of it. it was the drunkest i've ever been. for the first time in my life, i threw up from drinking. and still, around three, i found the alertness somewhere to take my contacts out before rolling into bed.

• • •

i woke at eight, five hours in, all the way awake and with no chance of getting back under. i left my phone in the house and went out to the wide front lawn.

i had no agenda out there. i stretched, did something i'd generously call yoga, sat for a while, stood for a while. the sun kept slipping in and out of the clouds, and each time it came back the warmth landed on my skin like it was being handed to me. little insects hovered just above the grass. the leaves rustled with each gust and quieted between them. at the far edge of the lawn a brown animal, possibly a beaver, went about its morning with no interest in mine. and when i turned back toward the house, one of the two cats the hosts keep in their kid's playroom had found the window and was watching me, the glass doing gentler work than it had the night before.

the hangover had come out to the lawn with me, and i didn't mind carrying it. i had nowhere to be and nothing to solve, and my head, with the morning off, went wandering: small thoughts, half thoughts, thoughts that dissolved before they finished forming. i was content, following them, at a speed the rest of my life never runs at.

behind the cat the house was full of sleep, five people i'd be driving back down with later that day, and standing there in the grass i was as grateful as i've been in years. for them. for the weekend that had arrived after the one that hadn't. for the whole pile of good things a life quietly gathers while you're too busy to look. i don't think new york is the place for me. the thought came the way the sun was coming, in and out, and i let it.

a cloud took the light again. i stayed where i was. there was still the car to pack, the drive ahead, a city at the bottom of the thruway with my whole life in it, and all of it could wait a little longer. the light came back. and this time it kept coming, the clouds thinning out of its way, until warm crossed into hot and i remembered i hadn't put on sunscreen. i wasn't trying to add a sunburn to the hangover. i gave the lawn another minute and went in.

i spent the last two weeks in singapore and malaysia, mostly seeing family and eating more than i'd thought possible. kway teow soup, assam laksa, satay, roti prata, bak kut teh. meal after meal of food you can't get the real version of back home.

the strangest part was how slow everything felt. the days stretched out, and by the end it felt like i'd been gone far longer than two weeks, in the best possible way. away from work and routine, i could finally see how much of my life they usually fill: how much of my attention they quietly take, and how little is left when they're done. for two weeks there was nothing i had to be doing, and the time opened up. i had room to ground myself, to sit with things i don't normally get to.

i also came away with a wider sense of the world than i usually carry. the trip put me around lives that share almost nothing with mine: family who built theirs on the other side of the planet, strangers whose worlds barely touch my own. seeing them up close stretches what you let yourself believe a life can even be.

it was the people, though, more than anything. i saw extended family i hadn't seen in years. my grandma made 粽子 (sticky rice dumplings) and 萝卜糕 (radish cake) for me — homemade, neither of which i'd had since she moved away. she made them specially, because she knows how much i love them. there's a particular warmth in being fed by someone who's known you your whole life, and i'd forgotten how much i missed it.

the last couple of years have been rough on my mom's side of the family, and getting everyone in one room without friction wasn't a given. so it meant more than i expected to see them all gathered this time, actually getting along, the tension set down at least for a few days. being all together, for no reason beyond being together, was the best part of the whole trip.

a big thank you to the people who made those two weeks what they were. to my parents and my brother, who flew out from the states with me. to my uncle, who spent a week showing us his malaysia. to my grandma and my aunt. i don't get time like this with any of you often, and i felt that the whole way through.

what follows are a few of the things from those weeks i haven't been able to put down.

a "rich" life

i want to be rich.

not in the way you're supposed to wave it off — the quick laugh, the line about money and happiness. i mean it plainly. and i've stopped dressing it up as something noble: i used to keep my distance from people who chased this, certain i wanted something cleaner than they did, and i'm less certain now.

it isn't the objects. i can see why people want the watches and the bags with the right names on them, and i mostly don't. what i want is the part that doesn't photograph: the life it makes possible.

the dinners were with people my parents knew and i didn't — a man who'd been cfo of a chinese bank, a woman who'd sat in singapore's parliament, the chairman of one of the banks the country runs on. jobs like those are why their families live the way they do: the schooling, the travel, the quiet assumption that the world will say yes.

at one of them, a dinner at the cricket club, i spent most of the night talking to someone's eleven-year-old granddaughter. she told me about skiing in chamonix and the trip to vietnam she was taking next week with her best friend, and she said all of it the way i'd have told you about a sleepover — no sense that any of it was rare, because to her it wasn't. she was poised and curious, quicker than most adults i talk to. nothing in her was showing off. the world was simply open to her, and always had been; she didn't yet know it was a thing some people had and others didn't.

that's the thing i want. not the chamonix; the open world behind it — a childhood where curiosity is never foreclosed by what it costs. i want to be able to give that.

and not just to a kid i might have. i want to be able to give to the people already in my life: to pick up the check without the small math running underneath, to help someone who needs it without the help costing me anything i'd feel. and, someday, a wedding where i don't have to cut the list, where everyone i'd want there is there, and no one was left off over the price of a seat.

after you

manners were drilled into me before i understood what they were for. greet everyone when you walk in. let the elders sit first, eat first, speak first. don't take the last piece, don't take the biggest one. my parents ran it into me so constantly that it stopped being instruction and turned into reflex. i still feel a small wrongness if i reach for the food before the oldest person at the table has touched theirs.

for a long time i half-suspected the whole thing was theater. manners are easy to dismiss that way: a performance of being good, a set of moves you make so people approve of you, nothing underneath. fake, a little fussy, maybe even a class thing.

i don't think that anymore, and it's because i've watched what their absence looks like. this trip i've been around someone newer to the family, who wasn't raised the way i was. it shows in small ways, none of them dramatic. she starts eating before others have been served, takes from the middle of the table without checking there's enough to go around. back at the apartment, she's first into the shower while the rest of us wait. none of it is cruelty; i don't think she means anything by any of it. that's almost the point: the habit of catching yourself was simply never built in her.

and watching her, i finally got what the drilling had been for. manners aren't a performance of goodness. they're the trained habit of remembering that the other people in the room are as real as you are — as hungry, as tired, as eager to go first. taking the most food, grabbing the first shower: those aren't etiquette slips. they're small ways of moving through the world as if you're the only person actually in it.

after you. someone reaches the door first and holds it; someone gets to the table first and waits. it's two words and a half-second of going second, and that half-second is the whole of it — the small, constant proof that you know you're not the only one here. i was drilled in it until it ran on its own, and of everything i was handed that way, it's the one piece i'd never give back.

escapement

i spent an afternoon working through the luxury watch stores on orchard road, pretending to be someone who could buy something. i told each salesperson the same story, a cousin's wedding tomorrow and a watch i needed for it, and watched the warmth switch on: the trays coming out, the whole performance of service a store puts on for someone it thinks is about to spend. none of it was true. i had no intention of buying anything, and after a few hours i hadn't seen a single watch that moved me. they were beautiful and they were boring. luxury with nothing behind it.

then i walked into breguet.

four people stood at the back, bent over blown-up models of watch movements, tinkering with mechanisms the size of dinner plates. one of them, french and maybe fifty, came over almost at once, and instead of selling me anything he asked, with real urgency, whether i knew what an escapement was. i didn't. for the next half hour he showed me. the escapement, it turns out, is the part that releases the mainspring's energy in tiny measured beats — the thing that makes a watch tick instead of spending itself all at once. the heart of the whole machine. he walked me through how this one worked, a movement inside a 490,000-dollar watch, and most of it went straight over my head. i caught maybe a tenth of the words. but i caught all of him. the man was lit up. he talked about the watch, and the two centuries of it, the way people talk about the thing they'd do for free, and that came across the counter perfectly intact even as the mechanics dissolved on the way to me.

the watch talk turned into other talk. somewhere in it we'd moved to a cozy alcove off to the side, tucked away from the people drifting past, and sat there another half hour, on to nothing in particular — life in singapore, how he'd ended up here. it came out almost in passing that he runs breguet for all of southeast asia, that he'd built a whole life around this: married here, kids in school here, decades in the trade. i'd half-assumed passion like that was a young man's thing, the enthusiasm you have before the work grinds it out of you. but here was someone at the very top of it, who'd been doing this longer than i've been alive, still stopping a stranger in his shop to make sure he understood why an escapement matters.

i walked out thinking about the look on his face. caring about something so much you can't not talk about it, so much it survives the decades and follows you home — that's what i envy. not the watch, not the expertise, just having a thing that does that to you. i don't know what mine is yet. i have things i reach for, but nothing i'd stop a stranger in a store to explain. i want, more than almost anything, to find the thing i would.

my first wedding

my cousin got married, and it was the first wedding i'd ever been to. a traditional chinese one — the tea ceremony, the long banquet, the whole family there. and i mean the whole family: cousins and aunts and uncles we hadn't seen in years, all of us in one room again. there were happy tears all over the room, and so much smiling that my own face ached by the end of the night.

what stays with me isn't any single part of it. it's that the day was happy in an uncomplicated way i'm not used to. families mostly gather for the hard things; this was the rare time we were all together for something purely good. i went home a little stunned by how much it had moved me.

langkawi

langkawi was nothing like where we'd come from. corrugated metal roofs, rusted at the edges. paint gone from most of the buildings. everything sun-bleached and salt-worn, like the heat had been working on it for years and winning. the people moved through it the way you do when it's just your life — bare feet gone black from the ground, clothes worn thin, skin scorched dark by a sun that never lets up. mosquitoes everywhere, feasting, and mostly no one bothering to swat them.

we walked through a food market. a few fans turned overhead and did almost nothing; the flies they were meant to move just settled back onto the food, which sat out uncovered in the heat. dogs threaded between the stalls. a couple of monkeys watched from a roofline. cats slept in whatever shade they could find.

my first reaction wasn't a kind one. i recoiled before i'd thought anything at all.

but none of it is unusual. this is how a huge share of the world lives, on almost nothing by the standards i'd flown in with. people are born here, raise their kids here, grow old here, and i'd flinched within ten minutes of arriving. i left embarrassed by how narrow my sense of normal had been, and reminded how much of the world i never have to think about.

doing hard things

it was my first real hike. bukit mertajam, a forest park in malaysia, with my brother, my uncle, and my uncle's friend, all three far out of my league. my brother had just gotten back from a month-long trip: acatenango, machu picchu, patagonia. my uncle and his friend have stood at everest base camp. i'd never done any of it, and the whole way there i was quietly worried i'd be the one slowing everyone down.

we'd been up since six, and i was carrying about forty pounds of gear i wasn't used to carrying.

i should say i don't really like hiking. you walk for hours and the scenery barely changes — the same green wall of trees giving way to the same green wall of trees, mile after mile. people talk about hiking like it does something to them. it mostly just makes me tired.

and this one was rough. malaysian jungle: the trail rugged and root-knotted, the air thick enough to drink. mosquitoes the whole way. a centipede the length of my forearm that i'm still not over. monkeys somewhere overhead, and things in the brush i couldn't name and didn't want to meet.

then, for an hour, the sky opened and dumped rain on us, and we kept walking through it, soaked to the skin. my uncle and his friend are almost sixty; neither of them broke. the last stretch got genuinely hard, hard enough that we stopped talking and it became one foot, then the next. and i made it. i kept up.

none of this was a surprise to me. i knew going in exactly why i was there, because it's the same reason every time. i don't do it for the hike. i do it for the end of the hike — for the fact, afterward, that my body did something i wasn't sure it could. and under that, something simpler and truer about me: i like having hiked a lot more than i like hiking. i like the done thing, the box checked, the proof i moved forward. it's just how i'm built. i'll never love the trail, but i'll keep doing hard things, because i like who i am by the end of them.

blood sweat money

my uncle took us to his friend's durian farm. the road up was barely a road — steep and tight and switchbacking, room for one car and nothing coming the other way. i spent the climb quietly hoping the engine would hold.

at the top a man came out to meet us, tan from a life spent outside, two teeth left along the bottom and a smile that used both of them. he lives on the farm with his brother and his son. a few dogs announced us and then lost interest. he was gracious before we'd done anything to earn it, waving us toward the food like we were the reason he'd gotten up that morning.

and then we ate. durian, mostly, though the trees around us were heavy with rambutan, mangosteen and longan too. a single well off to the side did everything out there: drinking, washing hands, showers, laundry. he kept pressing more on us. "还要吗," he'd say, "do you still want more?" already reaching for the next one before we'd answered. we tried black thorn, red prawn, musang king (the expensive ones, i'm only now learning), and i ate until i was sure i'd burst.

after, he walked us through the farm. i'd never once thought about how a durian gets from the tree to my hands, and it turns out the answer is: hard. someone climbs these trees. someone strings nets beneath them so the fruit doesn't smash on the ground when it drops. someone does it in that heat, on that hill, every day of the season. there's a phrase in chinese, "血汗钱," for money earned the hardest way — it translates, literally, to "blood sweat money." standing in the middle of his farm, i understood it as something more than a figure of speech.

it changes what the food is worth to you, seeing where it comes from. i've spent my whole life buying the cheap version of everything; i think now i'll pay for the local one, the one with a person and a hill behind it. and what stays with me is that the hands doing all that climbing were the same ones refilling my plate. he handed us the most expensive thing his body makes, by the armful, and kept asking if we wanted more.

i don't know anyone who lives like this. everyone in my life works a job at a desk, mine included. i'm grateful to my uncle for the day — for knowing a man like that, and for driving me up that hill to be fed by him.

a chinese time in my life

two weeks of speaking nothing but chinese and mine came back to me. i could hear the difference by the end: words i'd lost surfacing again, sentences coming faster, my ear catching things it would have missed on the first day. it turns out the language is still in there. it just goes quiet when i don't live in it.

and i don't, most of the time. i live in english, eat what's easy, keep the traditions i can keep alone and let the rest thin out. the trip reminded me how much of myself is stored in a language and a culture i only visit now.

i think that's the real reason i'd want someone from the same background. not anything i'd defend in an argument — something plainer. a home where chinese gets spoken without it being an occasion, where the food i grew up on is just dinner, where the traditions don't have to be explained before they can be shared, because the other person grew up inside the same ones. none of it would be mine to keep alive alone, or to soften for company.

there's an understanding that's there before you've earned it — present in the first conversation, because you both started from the same place. i want to build a life on that head start: to keep being chinese, out loud, with someone who doesn't need it explained.

last night i lost track of the hours with someone i'd just met. clicking with someone like that, right away, feels good in a way i don't need to talk myself into. what gets me is how far it goes, how deep you can get with someone you barely know.

it shouldn't be possible. the people who've earned the long version of you — who know the history, who've been around for years — should be the ones you can say anything to. often they're the last. somehow a stranger gets the unguarded thing first, before they've earned a minute of it.

part of it is curiosity, the real kind. when you know nothing about someone, every question is live, asked to find out rather than to confirm. and part of it is the nerve to answer in kind, to be honest early, while you could still get away with less.

the rest of it is less flattering. a stranger holds no record of you. there's no version of you they're keeping, nothing to stay consistent with, no one you'll have to face later. you can be that open because the weight isn't there yet — because you might never see them again. the openness is paid for by the exit.

which means the leaving was never the threat. it was the condition. she flies home today, the math was always against us, and that distance is the whole reason the night went where it did. nothing to protect, so nothing held back.

we stayed up until five, and i went to work on two hours of sleep waiting for the crash. it never came. i've been running on that night all day, more awake than the sleep has any right to leave me.

last night started small and warm: four of us tucked into a cocktail bar, the dim and low-lit kind, all amber light and small tables and a hush you could actually talk across, the hour before a night has decided what it's going to become. i ordered something called "colorful and fruity," which it mostly wasn't: a sweet potato shochu over ice, smooth and a little sweet, the kind of drink that goes down so easy you've ordered a second before you meant to. i drank more than i'd have liked. i usually do.

then the tipsiness made its case for going out, and out meant the loud place. you know the kind. packed body to body, the air thick and warm and sweet with perfume and spilled liquor, light swinging red and blue across a hundred faces, a bass line so low you stop hearing it and start standing inside it. i watched the room give itself over: the drinking, the dancing, the men leaning in close with their practiced lines, the whole hungry churn of a saturday night in this city. and i didn't feel above any of it. i felt the pull of it. i understood it completely, because it really isn't complicated: every person in that room was just trying to get out of their own head for a few hours, and a place this loud is how you do it. i know that wish. i've given in to it before and i'll give in again.

it's only that it isn't my way out. hedonism and solitude are the same instinct facing opposite directions. both are escapes. theirs is loud and mine is quiet, and standing in the middle of all of it, i wanted the quiet so badly i could taste it.

then the walk home, just the two of us, the last of the club still fading out of my ears, the avenues wide and nearly empty, all that earlier energy drained out of them. somewhere along the way we'd gotten onto telling each other something we'd never told anyone. i've only hung out with her a few times, so i don't fully know what made me go where i went, but mine came out anyway: that i want to disappear for a while. a few months. no plans, no one. i'd never said it out loud to a single person before. and she said, like it was nothing, that she already does exactly that. months at a time. that she likes being alone so much she has to remind herself to put people back on the calendar.

i didn't believe her at first. i think i actually said no way out loud. she lives the thing i only ever get to sneak for a morning at a time, and she lives it on purpose.

• • •

i woke up hungover. the light through the blinds felt like an accusation, my pulse keeping slow time behind my eyes, and somehow that helped: it settled the day before i could argue with it. i wasn't going anywhere. a saturday in this city is one long advertisement for everything you aren't doing, and for once i couldn't hear it over my own headache.

so i stayed in. i made a real breakfast and ate it slowly. then i cleaned — and i mean really cleaned, head and shoulders pushed into the dark of the oven, the sponge working at baked-on years of somebody else's cooking — until i put my hand somewhere i shouldn't have and the thing bit me. a bright electric snap, straight up the arm. i came out fast, sat down hard on the kitchen floor, and laughed, more awake in that second than i'd been all morning. then the gym, where i worked until everything in me finally went still.

and the whole time, in the gaps, i kept drifting back to the walk home. to what she'd said, and to the question sitting underneath it that i'd never really asked myself straight: why do i like being alone this much? what is it actually doing for me?

here's what i landed on. i'm a judgmental person. i size people up fast, and i assume they're sizing me up the same way. it's on almost all the time, and i'm only half aware of it. being alone is the one place it shuts off. when no one's around, i don't have to judge anyone, and i don't have to brace for being judged. it's the closest thing i have to a safe space. that's the real reason the quiet feels like relief, and not just rest.

it's also where i think, where i can actually hear myself. and it's where i feel in control of my own life. alone, the day is mine to shape: what i do and when and with whom, or with no one at all. every hour belongs to me. i got better at wanting this after college, when the days became more mine and there was less pressure to always be somewhere, with someone. i've learned i can be on my own without being lonely, that the two were never the same thing, and that i understand what i want far more clearly when the only voice in the room is mine. it keeps me honest. it keeps me grounded.

i'm writing this from the window now. it's been raining since i woke up, steady and unhurried, beading on the glass and turning the street below into smears of brake-light and umbrella. there's classical music on, low, the strings moving through the room. the cats have gone heavy and boneless in my lap, purring from somewhere far down. the new apartment holds its quiet carefully, like it hasn't decided yet whether to trust me with it. and somewhere in the middle of all of it my whole body has come loose, the way it only does when there's nothing left to brace against. i don't want to be anywhere else. i can't remember the last time that was true.

my lease is up at the end of may, and our cats need somewhere to stay for six weeks. my new roommates are allergic; so are my old roommates'. a friend is willing to take them in mid-july, but not before. someone has to take the cats until then.

one of my roommates mentioned bruce. bruce lives in the apartment above ours, has three cats of his own, and apparently said once, in passing, that he'd happily watch ours anytime. i had never actually spoken to him. he had knocked on our door once, months ago, because we'd dumped cat litter straight into the building's communal trash bin and the smell had migrated, and he hadn't been polite about it. if anything, he had been mean, in the way that older men in old buildings can be when they've decided you're a tenant who hasn't learned how things are done.

i had also, on rare occasion passing by his door, started noticing it. it wasn't a uniform blue, more like a blue that had been painted and repainted and let to peel in some places, with patterns carved into the wood and small metal embellishments hammered in along the edges. it looked like a door someone had been working on for a long time.

last night i knocked, and he opened, and behind him was an apartment unlike anything i had walked into.

i am extremely tidy, and stingy enough that the tidiness is partly accidental — there isn't much to put away. our apartment has a small couch and a dinner table. nothing on the walls, no decor of any kind. i had thought of myself, in a quiet way, as having taste. minimalism was the floor; more elaborate things, i assumed, got built on top of it.

bruce's apartment was not built on top of it. bruce's apartment was a different building entirely.

the first thing i registered was that there was nowhere to look that wasn't doing something. wooden planks ran above my head like a small subway map, one rail leading into another, all of them sized for cats. the walls were a faded painted green that was peeling in places to reveal another color underneath, and another color under that. dressers had been fitted into wall cavities, or maybe the walls had been built around the dressers; it was hard to tell which had come first. pots hung from the ceiling on chains, some with plants, some with what looked like small bells. books lined every wall that wasn't already lined with something else. a paint set was laid out on a low table as if interrupted. a dusty old macintosh, the original kind, sat on a shelf next to a stack of records. cat toys were everywhere — not in a basket, not contained, just everywhere, like leaves on a forest floor. nothing was minimalist, nothing was put away, and somehow none of it looked like clutter. it looked, instead, like someone had been adding to this apartment for a very long time, and had never seen any reason to subtract.

three cats lived there. one was seventeen years old, a tiny thing with patchy fur and eyes that didn't focus on me when i crouched to greet her, and she made clear without moving that she did not want to be petted. the other two were a pair of orange brothers, peeking down from the highest platform of a many-tiered cat tree, who melted backwards into the wood like the dark was a place they could enter whenever i shifted my weight.

an older woman was sitting in a chair toward the back, half-hidden behind a hanging plant. bruce introduced her, though i didn't entirely catch what their relationship was. she had moved in forty-five years ago, he told me, the first tenant in the apartment; the place was rent-stabilized. "you can do whatever you want," bruce said, "if no one ever comes to check on you." she smiled at me politely and went back to whatever she was reading.

we talked, and i made the ask. bruce was kind about it but hedged — five cats, an older cat against kittens, brothers against brothers, none of which i had thought through before showing up at his door. he wasn't really mean, i could see now. just quirky in his mannerisms, particular in his word choice — someone who could come across hard in a hallway and softer once you were inside. he said they'd think about it, and i nodded and thanked him, and somewhere behind us a cat knocked something over and neither of them turned to look.

before i left he showed me the roof patio. a small door at the back of the apartment opened onto it, and there were plants in pots and pots and pots — some thriving, some skeletal, some being convalesced from one state into another. there was a skylight set into the floor that looked down into the apartment beneath, where, he mentioned, a young jewish family now lived but where, decades earlier, a sweatshop had operated. i looked through and could see a child's toy on a rug.

walking back up to our apartment i thought i would not be able to leave my cats there. i had liked the place, and i had not liked the place. there was a film of dust on most surfaces. i had counted, on the way in, three dead cockroaches on the staircase, and i thought of the cockroach remains my cats sometimes leave for me on our floor, small reminders that whatever i pretend about being clean, the building has its own ideas. ming is feisty, and ming would start something. and even if he didn't, i wasn't sure my kittens would come back out of those forty-five years of accumulated everything in the same condition they went in.

but the practical worry wasn't what stayed with me. what stayed with me was that on the same floor where i sleep, in a building i thought i understood the shape of, a man had built a small contained world out of planks and peeling paint and pots, and a woman had been quietly living in it for nearly half a century, and three cats were treating the whole thing like terrain. i had been living a few feet from all of this for months without thinking about it. i had assumed, without ever putting it to myself in words, that the other apartments in this building were variations on mine — slightly bigger, slightly smaller, slightly differently lit. they were not. one of them looked like an antique bookstore with three cats living inside it. the apartment beneath it had been a place where people sewed clothes for money before becoming a place where a family raised children. two floors up, a russian woman is doing god knows what — though we found out once, when she flooded her apartment and water came dripping through our ceiling.

there are paintings, the kind where someone has rendered a cross-section of an apartment building, and in every window something different is happening: someone is arguing, someone is dancing, someone is sleeping with their mouth open, someone is making a cake. as a kid i thought those paintings were a joke about how strange people are; i think now they're closer to documentary.

i went in to ask about cats and came out wanting to knock on more doors. the small space of my own apartment, scrubbed and bare and pleasing to me, is one window in a wall of windows, and whoever painted the building did not stop at mine.

it's the highway at midnight, both of you in the car, no one reaching for the radio. the dashboard glows green. the road sound is a long held note. you pass a sign for a town neither of you has ever heard of and neither of you says anything about it. you look over once, see the side of their face lit blue by a passing truck, and look back. the quiet has weight. no one is looking for the next thing to say. no one has to. you arrive two hours later having said maybe thirty words between you, and you are not embarrassed about it.

or it's a saturday morning. you both got up earlier than you needed to. coffee is in two mugs. the radiator clicks. one of you is at the window, one of you on the couch, and good morning hasn't happened yet — not because it would be wrong, but because it isn't required. the light comes in slow and gray. a neighbor's dog barks once, far away. you stay like that until the coffee is cold.

or it's the walk home — after a funeral, a wedding, or an argument with someone else's family. two in the morning. the streets wet, your shoes loud. no one says "well, that was something." no one tries to talk it through. you walk. your friend lights a cigarette they shouldn't have. a cab passes with its light on and neither of you waves it down. you carry it together for forty blocks without either of you having to put it into words, and somewhere around block thirty it gets lighter.

• • •

people often think silence is the absence of something. it's the opposite. silence is what's left when nothing in you needs translating — when the other person already knows what you're carrying. most company is constant labor: the face to wear, the version of the day to share, the part of yourself you let into the room. with this person, all of it falls away. you are simply there. so are they. nothing else is required. when the moment ends, it lingers in you the way a dream does after waking — still there for a while, then quietly gone.

i say "trauma builds character" all the time. semi-ironically, mostly — at the gym after a hard set, when a friend is venting about something that went sideways at work, in my own head when i'm trying to convince myself that some inconvenience is going to mean something later. the phrase is a tic at this point. and like most tics, it's pointing at something i haven't fully looked at.

most of the things i call trauma aren't. the college decisions that didn't go my way. winding up in minnesota when i'd had bigger plans. a friend group whose ambitions felt smaller than mine — or that i'd convinced myself were smaller, which is its own kind of close-mindedness i wasn't ready to see at the time. these were disappointments. at 17 i called them trauma because at 17 every disappointment feels like the floor giving out, and i don't think i was wrong to feel that way. i was wrong about the size of it — about how much room a feeling is supposed to take up in a life.

one of them actually was. the second relationship was the real thing — the one that messed with me in ways i'm still picking apart, hiding in the same sentence as everything else.

and the part of me that built a life in response to all of it didn't bother distinguishing.

• • •

i played league of legends until four in the morning. swim practice was at 5:30. i skipped it more weeks than not. we had a saying among my friends: we could never end on a loss. so the next ranked game became three more games, then four, most of them lost because by 2am i was tilting and tired. some nights we were trapped, descending into madness, loss after loss after loss. homework slid off the desk. i'd start it at midnight and pretend that was a strategy. the fact that i was watching myself do this and couldn't stop felt, at the time, like the kind of suffering that meant something.

my first girlfriend, my second girlfriend — i don't remember the specifics of what i wanted from them so much as i remember the feeling of needing to text them. between classes, on the bus, while my mom was talking to me. needing to be hanging out, or to be planning the next time we'd be hanging out, or to be in their head. they were not the most extraordinary people i'd later meet. but at 16 and 17 they were the most-extraordinary-thing-in-front-of-me, which was enough.

i kept a journal for one year that grew past 400 pages. it stopped being a journal somewhere around page 150 and became a closed loop — me writing about thinking about feeling, each entry more granular and less honest than the one before. i had to force myself to stop. closing it felt like a small loss, even though closing it was the only sane thing i did that year. the death spiral was highkey depressing — that's a phrase i used at the time, in the journal, about the journal.

none of this was trauma. it was being 17. but at 17, the difference between "trauma" and "the most i've ever felt" wasn't available to me. those were the same word, said with the same weight.

• • •

freshman year of college, i was at the university of minnesota. i had not wanted to be at the university of minnesota. the schools i'd wanted didn't want me back, and so the next-best option became the option. the U was where i'd competed in high school — i'd swum at the jean k freeman aquatic center for years and never once imagined going to school there. when i became a student, i remember piecing the campus together for the first time, with those weekend-meet buildings becoming the route to my classes.

i'd visit friends at usc, at northeastern, and they were sitting at lunch with someone from italy, someone from san francisco, someone from dubai. i'd come back to my dorm and the people in it were nice. it's important to say they were nice. they were also from minnesota, and from the same neighborhoods in minnesota, going home to those neighborhoods on the weekends, content with that pattern in a way that felt, to me at the time, like a refusal to want more. my current roommate and i later coined a phrase for it: the minnesota mindset. midwest safe. it's not actually a fair phrase. the people we used it about were just choosing different things. but at 17 i was unwilling to grant that. i thought i could see something they couldn't.

i'd done well in school the way you're supposed to. 4.0 gpa. class rank three. 35 on the act. piano and violin since i was small enough to need a stool — the typical asian kid starter pack. extracurriculars listed two columns deep on the resume. i'd been good at the path because the path was the only thing i was given to be good at. and now the path had ended at a school i'd only ever known from the swim deck, and for the first time i had to ask why i'd been on it, and i didn't have an answer beyond because. my parents had wanted it. their parents had wanted it for them. i'd inherited the wanting without inheriting the reasons.

my second relationship was happening at me through all of this. it took things from me that i'm still finding again — capacity for trust, willingness to feel without flinching, ability to be in a room without scanning for threat. i'm not going to write the specifics. they belong somewhere else, or maybe nowhere. but the part that matters for this piece is that it was the only thing on the list that was the size of the word i was using.

the rest of it — minnesota, the campus, the path, the people i was unfair to — was disappointment. real, but the size of disappointment. except at 17 i couldn't tell. one of the things in my life genuinely was trauma, and so all of the things in my life felt like trauma by association. the air in the room had changed; i couldn't isolate what had changed it.

so i made a decision i had no business making: that i would, for the first time, focus on myself. on something. on anything. what something would mean i'd have to figure out by trying.

• • •

what i tried, first, was working out.

i picked it because it was the most legible thing on the list. mental health was hard to measure. friendships were hard to measure. being a person on purpose was hard to measure. but a barbell goes up by five pounds or it doesn't, and either way the data is honest with you.

i wrote a program. i had never written a program before. i put it in a google sheet with columns for movement, sets, reps, weight, RPE, total time, and entry fatigue rated 1-10. each lift had its own tab. each tab had a chart that updated as i logged. i programmed the exact movements i would do six days a week — push, pull, legs, push, pull, legs, rest — and the weights i'd hit on each. i hit them. when i missed them, i logged that too.

i started cooking. i'd never cooked before either. i went hard on the gym-bro template — ground beef, white rice, broccoli, tupperwared into seven containers on sundays. i'd tweak the macros each week. i'd weigh the rice raw. i kept this up for months and it worked. i put on muscle quickly. i'd been the skinny-abs guy my whole life. abs visible because nothing covered them, not because i'd earned them. now i was something else. i had energy at 6am that i'd never had at any time of any day.

i made my bed every morning. i set up google calendar. every meeting, every workout, every skincare routine, color-coded. i looked at it more than i looked at anything else, including my phone, including my own thoughts. i locked in for recruiting. i put together a spreadsheet of every firm, every contact, every deadline.

it worked. that's the part that has to be said first. i became the kind of person who could be relied on, including by myself. i was progressing — a word i'd never had reason to use about my own life before.

• • •

and then.

the same machinery that built the discipline started running on its own. i wasn't logging the lift to track the lift. i was logging the lift because i had to log the lift. the satisfaction had moved from the workout to the entry. if i forgot to log, i'd come back to the spreadsheet at 10pm with a low-grade panic, trying to remember what RPE i'd hit at 6am and writing it in anyway, even knowing i was just making it up.

a missed meal prep sunday felt enormous. a meeting that ran over and bumped my calendar felt enormous. an unmade bed felt enormous. these were not enormous. but the same temperament that had once kept me up until 4am playing league had found a new game, and the new game was discipline itself. the system had become the thing i was addicted to.

i didn't want to stop. what i'd built was real — it had given me a self i hadn't had before, and i could feel that self being real. but the structure i'd built was eating me. the thing keeping me alive was the thing exhausting me, and i didn't know how to keep one without the other.

• • •

the turn took longer than i'd like to admit. it wasn't a single moment. it was a slow re-asking of the question i'd never asked before about anything: why am i doing this? not in the existential sense; i'd done plenty of that. in the practical sense, the boring sense. why am i logging this entry? to track progress, or to feel like i tracked it? if i didn't log it, would the lift have happened? would the day have happened?

i still keep most of the habits. i still meal prep — same meal since last august, baked chicken, rice or quinoa, frozen vegetables. simpler than the gym-bro template, chosen for the version i could cook without thinking rather than the one that maxed macros. i still use google calendar. i still lift on a program. but the spreadsheet is less detailed than it used to be. some weeks i skip meal prep because i let myself live: plans to eat out, time to see my friends. the systems are still there; they just don't run me anymore.

some of this was probably just my brain getting older. less teenage angst. less raw need to log my own existence to confirm it. it's a humbling thing, to be 22 and realize that some of what you'd taken for hard-won self-knowledge was actually just being out of high school.

which brings me back to the phrase. trauma builds character. most of what i called trauma wasn't — i'd been over-feeling the size of disappointments, calling everything by its biggest available name. but one of the things in my life had actually been trauma. and the response i built to it didn't know the difference. the same machinery worked indiscriminately on the real wound and the inflated ones, and what it built was, unmistakably, character.

i braced for a year that would swallow me whole. i had signed up for the kind of job that takes your evenings as quiet collateral, and i made peace with the trade before it even started. so when march tipped into april, then april into may, i didn't know what to do with the surplus. the work stayed manageable. the weekends stayed mine. the nights kept opening up. you can prepare for a thing being hard. you can't quite prepare for it being easier than you expected.

i thought i'd care more about the job, too. i'm fine at it. i like the people (enough). but it doesn't pull at the part of me that used to want it most. that part is awake now, looking around for somewhere else to go.

a few weeks ago i was at lincoln center, alone, after what consulting calls a beach day — a day with no work to do. there's a small grass terrace on the roof of a nearby restaurant and i found myself sitting on it with my legs stretched out, watching the plaza below soften into its slower self. people met friends and tilted their faces toward each other. someone laughed too loud at something a date said. the fountain caught the last of the light and held it there, glittering, for longer than seemed fair.

what i kept noticing, sitting up there, was how easy it would be to miss all of this.

i sat up there thinking how good it would be, eventually, to write something here. to put words down somewhere quiet while the city kept moving without me. the last time i'd written anything for the pure fun of it was sixth grade, a fantasy story about a life inside minecraft, written with my friends, taken very seriously by all of us. somewhere between then and now i had stopped reaching for words to make sense of my own life and started using them only to perform a job. that was the first time this, whatever this is, felt like a real idea instead of a passing one.

nyc was supposed to solve the social part. people warned me it wouldn't and i didn't believe them. but you really can be in the densest place in the country and still spend most evenings alone with your own head. that isn't a complaint exactly. it's just the weather i've been writing from.

i've been more reflective than usual lately. some of it is the unexpected time. some of it is a girl i met recently — limerence, as a friend put it: the involuntary state of being mentally fixated on someone, turning the volume up on every other thought you were already having. either way, the noise in my head got loud enough that it needed somewhere to land.

i watch college friends disappear into investment banking, into routines that sometimes ask a hundred hours a week of them, and i don't think they're wrong. they've made trades i can see the logic in but can't make myself want. i pity the version of myself that would look up at thirty, blink, and find that he had paid for the last decade in installments he barely noticed making — a quiet life of weekends he doesn't remember, friendships he let thin, a body that started to ache in places he hadn't earned yet.

i've always been growth-oriented, which is a slightly embarrassing way to put it. i have a tattoo of a flower for it, which is a more embarrassing way still. but the truth underneath the embarrassment is that i want to be a more thoughtful person at thirty than i am at twenty-two, and i don't think that happens by accident. it happens by paying attention. and writing, for me, is one of the few reliable ways to make myself pay attention.

so. this. a place to notice things. somewhere to put the noise.