nathan > Recent Status Updates

His body was flooded with warmth: the onset of lovely oblivion.

My whole life, she liked to think, is the preparation.

Uber, in turn, lobbied for Obamacare. No one talked about how the invisible mesh of surveillance and data control that surrounded the world was tightening. Time sped up, a continual stream of cascading events that meant less and moved faster.

Twenty eleven, 2012, 2013 were the years in LA when it seemed like everything escalated. Was it because everyone was online all the time? UberX, promoted by the Obama administration, was launched, driving medallioned taxi drivers out of business, into debt and suicide.

If the capital of her female adolescent body was the animating force behind all of these adventures, Catt was not aware of it. Or maybe only dimly. She wanted to escape, she wanted to try all the drugs, she wanted to know everything. Losing her virginity was on her list of aspirations but in a lower place than learning to read French and tripping.

That year, Time magazine published an interview with a famous psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, about Refrigerator Mothers and how they produced damaged children. Women who “just happen to defrost long enough to produce a child”; women whose maternal neglect lay at the heart of their children’s mental illness.

My husband’s arms are strong. Bones full of marrow and covered in tendons and muscles, striped with veins, and finished off with skin. He smells like woodsmoke and coffee. He smells like my children. Their small bodies are latched onto ours and ours to theirs, fastened into a family.

The tunnel is warm and tight, a regurgitation that I hope she doesn’t mind. Ahead there is light, and I move forward. Lucia’s jaws open wide, wider, widest to free me. I keep crawling out of the bedroom, out of the house, and into the dark night of the desert. I crawl until day breaks and the heat of the sun bounces off my back.

As my family sleeps, I dream myself born anew. There are no labor pains, no busting out of my daughter’s belly. Instead, I crawl upward through the long tunnel of her esophagus—the same path I took to hide inside of her and clear her gut.

Life is just a slow wearing away of the soul.

The problem, as you get older, is that you realize the world feels a responsibility to hate.

Start to finish sexy. My mother warned me. She warned me over and over again when I was growing up that a baby ruins a body, so my resolution to never have kids happened early in the fitting room of a Gap at the Coronado Mall.

I knew if I wanted a family, someone with a uterus—me—would have to carry the babies all the way up until D-Day—when you’ll be so excited to get normal-size fingers and ankles back that you won’t care your vagina is being ripped open by a presumably human skull. It’s super sexy. The whole process.

What do I do first? A normal mother would grab her child. Get the decapitated head away from her and take her inside to bathe off the blood. But a normal mother of a normal child wouldn’t stand and watch her daughter play with said head in the first place.

But she was like Ba—she’d chosen to make that her world. The goal was to survive each day: no dwelling on the past or the future. It was what kept them sane.

Mẹ had never planned to revisit the past—like Vietnam, it held too much grief, sadness, anger, and regret. None of it was worth the effort. For most of my life, Mẹ had been more focused on the practical matters at hand: the groceries, the meals, the laundry, the cleaning, the never-ending needs of her children. Her world was small and mundane.

This was my pilgrimage. I had to overcome the limitations of my body: its cold temperature, its lightheadedness, its hunger. I had to suffer to reach my destination. And I had the grit and faith and resilience to do so. I couldn’t simply take my reward like a spoiled child—I had to earn it first. That was how I would savor the fruits of my labor.

“Every Sunday, we’re eating someone,” I said. “So I think it’s fine to eat some raw beef.” The priest chuckled.

“Cormac McCarthy’s great,” said Tommy. “He really digs into the concept of human morality. And the complete lack of it. Like he’s not afraid to peer into that darkness and put it out on paper. It’s intense stuff, you know?”

And maybe one day, I’ll know love. I’ll pine for love, and lose it, I’ll laugh and cry over it, and maybe like my parents did, I’ll find a way to keep it. Even if that’s still far off in my future.

Until recently, I thought that love and longing didn’t exist. But love existed long before I was born, and longing was there in me, too. It was there in Misumi, and love and longing were definitely there in Tsugi. The world is overflowing with it.

“..This person can see the world free of love and emotion, I thought. That made a huge impact on me. Thanks to that photo, I was able to see my parents the way I needed to—detached from my own feelings.”

Sometimes you need money to fully enjoy a hobby.

“All poetry is accuracy,” she said.

Thought and Memory sigh in their sleep, dreaming their way through

“It’s a cliché because it’s true,” one of us noted sagely.
To our surprise, Dublinski gave what most cultures would decode as a nod. “You could say that ‘It’s a cliché because it’s true’ is itself a cliché because it’s true.” “Excuse me, Professor Dublinski?”

“all true aphorisms aspire to anonymity. They are the only gifts to civilization. When you say to someone, ‘That’s the way the cookie crumbles,’ it seems like the repetition of a cliché, but in fact it has value as the articulation of a truth.”

I thank her, give a slight bow, and shake my head. I say in Korean, I’m fine, and for the rest of the ride at least, I am. When she leaves I give her the folded piece of paper from my pocket and say mysteriously, Open it later. I don’t remember what it says, just know that I’ll remember her the rest of my life. It’s the last poem I ever write.

I’ve only skimmed the first chapter, about an actress who starred in a string of B-movies before her rejection of acting as a “falseness upon a falseness”—the second falseness being life itself.

“What if the story of your life, the one that you keep telling yourself, is not the right story?” He said to imagine a book in which the chapters could be read in any order, or skipped, erased, rewritten.