nathan > Recent Status Updates

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.

With my mother’s quotidian mantra she rehashed everyday about wanting to die, not wanting to live, jumping off the bridge, I felt that her suicide was a way for me to silently speed up my progress of success.

What I meant to say without revealing too much about my existence or my mother’s existence was that my mother was suicidal and I wanted my book to economically explode so that I could give my mother the kind of retirement she desired.

The last day I was there, I met up with a publisher. Before we settled to talk, he told me he had to make a piss stop. I had heard that expression before, but in the context of us meeting up at a round table inside the book fair and with my mother speaking to me all the time in Vietnamese, language dislocated itself from my consciousness.

If I only had had several bites of cake and coffee for the entire day, at 5pm I would have confused the lake for the sky or Jesus for Elmo.

She had been the one to introduce me to Angry Birds, though our relationship could not be compared to an addictive game made by a famous Vietnamese game programmer.

At the bankruptcy lawyer office, I noticed my mother’s hands. Her hands were very beautiful, but my mother didn’t think they were. She was always hiding her hands whenever I took photographs of her. These were hands that endured decades of hardship. Seeing her hands, they pained me like watching a deer get torn apart by the slowmoving bullets of time. A panic state of mind sent me into another state of delirium.

I haven’t been telling you about my clitoris today because it continued to have its own mind. It continued to throb.

It was grit, we discovered, that shaped our success in the things we did.

The public shaming. The unerection of his penis. And, then I thought, if I had a son who had an erection in front of his peers, what would I do? Would slapping him be a compassionate way to allow him to exit the shame? Or was it to punish him publicly for the way he behaved? Or perhaps the situation could only be understood with a slap?
…

an erection didn’t purchase him his manhood.

I asked you what would you do if your child had an erection during his birthday party?

I was trying to teach the Ben Marcus’s quote to my students: “One basic meaning of narrative, then: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depictions of time.” You were trying to picture this. How stories make time.

You told me that you loved the narrator’s voice. That it didn’t change even when he talked about himself when he was older. Then I learned that you had read a John Updike story where he told the story of himself when he was young and you could tell when he was talking about himself as an older man and when he was doing it as a teenager.

Each time I read this story, I discovered something new about it. That this was a story that had five or six dimensions. All taking place without me and later with me.

I thought the boy was trying too hard to be an adult. He had imagined what love between adults ought to be like based on his first hunting experience with his dad. As I read more and more across time, time barriers, details of his love life with Patricia made me think that he was telling the past from the future.

When my mother sipped the phở broth and nibbled on the sautéed pork, her heart rate increased at an extraordinary level. She fumbled into bed to rest, to calm herself down. In bed, she turned to me and asked, “What would you do if I passed away? What will be the first thing you do?”

When my ex abused me by throwing boiling phở at me, when she hit me, when she threatened to kill me, when she threw liquid detergent all over my head and face and my eyes burnt with utter agony, I stayed with her. She even made love to me afterwards.

He had taken his penis to the podium. He had spoken of its size. Our military would be in great trouble if Trump decided to go to war using his human penis against North Korea’s nuclear penis. It seemed so surreal to me. What is happening to this country?

And for the fourth day in a row, it seemed, my clitoris hadn’t left me alone. It violently throbbed at the base of my womanhood. I am charged with this constant desire that felt systematic with the way the ovulation of the world works. In that, when changes came, they were unstoppable and the clitoris, or my clitoris, knew this too well.

There were long gazes into the unknown, where you made yourself a void and I was also a void.

I was still in bed, imagining you sleeping next to me. Ever since I opened up to you, my clitoris hasn’t left me alone. I think often of our bodies as laundry sheets, taking turns folding in and out of each other. At other times, our bodies are linens, twisting, rubbing, slapping against the flat rocks and wooden slats made to remove stains and smells.

My mother’s body had become a Catholic church where wailing and oblations were being made.

I could hear her wailing through my earphones. Sitting on the toilet like a cave, trickling with urine and tears, my mother moaned to God to exonerate her from this torturous life.

I soaked you into me and the image of us sinking into an embrace traveled with the train through the desolation of my imagination.

I love the person I am becoming even if it means having less books, less friends, less family.

Sometimes, I imagined all of your selves lining up against a lake and I could see all the reflections of the people you encountered dancing in the fluid surface, like rain. We would all rain down upon you.

elongate our existence, or my existence of you, I imagined that you were atomic, that you could split yourself into two or three or four selves. There was the self that you could devote yourself entirely to your Italian husband. The self that itself devoted to me. The self that devoted itself to your poetry.

I find myself constantly throbbing with desire. My breasts are engorged and my skin is sensitive to light and caress. To the sylphlike movement of the wind. Like a glass of water sitting on an empty counter, I get stirred easily. I had imagined you in between my thighs. I had imagined you curling up to me. I had imagined you pulling me in your arms. I had imagined you eating me until I was in and out of ecstasy.

After hearing of your wonderful news, I told you that I hope your dreams swim like a fish tonight as tomorrow the eclipse will greet you.

You told me that your heart was full with my words.