Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

My parents often like to go to Chinese restaurants, and I used to think this was related to a dietary pickiness, but I am learning that they just want to go places where they know they will be interacting with and supporting people who will talk to them like people, who will treat them and see them as whole.

And I think what is more relaxing to me than just having all these plants around me is following these watering schedules I had made, researching and then enacting everything in my spreadsheet, which is to say that my favorite ways to relax are to work, just on something other than my work.

I may have helped that leaf come into existence, but really, the plant is what did the growing. And here, the plant helps me in return. It helps me understand that, over the course of its own growing, I must have grown, slowly unfurling in some way or another, too.

To the plants, though, we must be exhausting.

Any drawing is—it must be—a portrait of the person who drew it.

Evidently I am a cat

we make music out of, and back into, thin air.

Everything turned out fine; all I needed to do was live under constant and overwhelming stress and pressure forever