nathan > Recent Status Updates

If my existence were that cork that corks someone else’s mouth, like the mouth of a wine bottle, would it mean that I inevitably find myself, randomly, sitting on a stage, that dining or kitchen table, waiting to be impaled for a celebration or the death of a celebration? I want to love life, it seems like a benevolent thing to do, to love something that doesn’t love you back.

And, when I die in my sleep, as it is a gift taken away from God, I ask that he also invites my mother to die in her sleep as well.

Each day is an attack on this vision of release. And I don’t know if you feel this way about life, but if God were kind and if, near now, towards now, I am not at the door of success, meaning that each day I am not searching for a way to economically live, I ask that God puts me to sleep forever.

Perhaps now, your existence arrived to me like clusters of light before dispersing.

But you are now sleeping in the back of my subconsciousness and although I could wake you, I choose not to wake you. Love is dangerous to a species that has gone back to bed.

We think the riches are far and away from our reach, but what if your poverty came because you were too blind to see your already emerged wealth?

..if you experience emotional paralysis, you would see everything passing through you as if you were a throat of a sink pipe and water just washed through you. You would stand outside of yourself, watching yourself lead a vacant, dismantled, liquidated existence. Not even a pigeon would be moved to exercise its small asshole on you.

and my heart throbbed. It throbbed because the city was utterly beautiful and you were residing in it without me. It was the omission of my existence there, I believed, which made it even more beautiful than ever.

the umbilical cord of desire and need between us has been severed.

And, in an equal response to the binary code, if I die right now and right away, I wouldn’t have mattered just as the breeze of several days ago wouldn’t have mattered to the trees, which got to experience its tantalizing passing. We wouldn’t want to desire to go on because we were occasionally tantalizing.

I wouldn’t be able to hear Manh Quynh’s music pulsating through my heart or the riveting sound of my mother’s sewing machine breaking my heart each second of my expired breath.

After all, I don’t think there is much in life worth living for. I used to think it was love or the way leaves twirling in a sea of asphalt that made life worth staying longer, but as I sat in an incandescent ennui with my mother’s back to me while she sews, I think if I die in the immediate present..

Racism today has moved towards translation, not transformation. The law must be broken down. Prison walls must be broken down. We change our historical clothes all the time. We do this frequently and rapidly to give the world the illusion that we have a body and a soul. We are truly soulless.

Do we use our legs to dance? Or do we use something else? Or will terrorism and war make us all eventually bionic? As a collective human race, through the auxiliary callings of bombs and explosions, are we dispersing our flesh like debris now? Will this be the ultimate force that moves us? To get rid of the corporeal prison that prevents us from accessing other concealed, atomic corridors of reality?

Another part of me wanted to explore and differentiate the difference between desire and the collapse of desire.

My clitoris has stopped having a conversation with my desire. It reclined dormant in my body like a cat. For days, it had meowed non-stopped. After my LA trip, my body discovered the abyss in its abbess. I had found its silence annoying.

There was comfort and security in being with a woman as it brought me back to the concealed vessel of my childhood. Sometimes I wonder if I was born as a lesbian in order to escape Vietnam or if when my family escaped Vietnam, I became a lesbian or if the ocean or nuoc mam (fish sauce) turned me into a lesbian.

We were trying to escape Vietnam, my family of six, with other families, too. There were thirty of us in a tiny boat. The fish sauce seemed to coat and distill the salt water of the ocean. Going down on a woman reminded me of eating fish sauce. I often thought of my lesbian body and the lesbian body of others and the diaspora of taste.

In my cooking, I tried to reinvite my mother to embrace Vietnamese dishes more, asking her to not abandon the place where we had been born. I believe the reason why I loved fish sauce was because it embodied the sea for me. Specifically, the Pacific Ocean where I spent three days and three nights inside the sarcophagal body of the boat.

I had told my mother that this was unfair. To place the burden and weight of her error on me. Yet, it registered no guilt or sorrow in my mother. She blew it off as if it were nonsense.

I imagined that you were a page inside of another page and that you were torn crisply clean from its definitive signature.

..you were acutely aware of his subliminal sadness, like a pair of wet duck feet padding in melancholy without the surface of water knowing its sadness. But how could it not feel that the duck feet were crying, even if they were already wet, and that the current was crying with them.

The best love is unexpected. You don’t just pick someone and cross your fingers it’ll work out. You meet them by fate and it’s an instant connection, and the chemistry share is way above your head. You just talk and notice the way their lips curve when they smile or the colour of their eyes and all at once you know you’re either lucky or screwed.

I think about you intermittently like the way rain thinks about the earth. An intermittent desire.

I was black and white and these blackouts were in the place where my memories should have been. My life had never been a piece of cake and I had been reduced to a juxtaposition.

To push all my books out into the world and then die? A waste of life.

At least my mother still spoke of retirement, but I was not sure if I wanted to retire. I thought deep down that I didn’t believe that I ever wanted to live.

When he showed me the monk-like room with their wooden beds, I thought of a prison. I thought a prison had better living conditions. I smiled through the whole thing and asked them if this was a pretend place, not a real place, for a movie set or something. The Mormons told me: this was no joke. This place was as real as my skin and flesh.

I think life was trying to con me with irony. Or it was trying to spit in my face.

I had promised myself that I would not become one of those authors who would become famous after her death. That I would like my mother to enjoy my success, economically speaking, and I would like to indulge in my success too.