Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

I believe that the things you notice -- that you love, that make you pause -- make up who you are. And so it feels, in a way, like those things are a part of you, even though they are outside of you. Which makes me wonder if it would be more accurate to say, perhaps, that a piece of you is kept alive by a part of them.

You have your entire life to worry about the rest of your life. Just get through today. Don’t tell yourself ‘don’t worry’, but just, ‘worry smaller’.” Advice from Jonny Sun's wife, Elissa.

You can't outrun sadness because sadness is already everywhere. Sadness isn't the visitor, you are.

We cannot seem to escape the desire to feel productive with our time. I'm not sure if that's by choice or by trauma.

Happiness has to be temporary for it to exist. If it lasted forever, we wouldn't know to call it anything.

The selfish part of all this is that I want to be important—I want to be so important that the world here falls apart, stops functioning, after I step out of it. And of course this doesn’t happen. But there’s a part of me that tells myself that if I were important, if I were truly important, my leaving would have had an impact. It would have done something. There would have been a hole that I left behind that people would notice. Instead, everything just keeps going on without me. And it feels like the lesson is, you don’t matter. But of course any act of leaving creates that hole. Every act of moving is also an act of removing, leaving an empty space where what moved is no longer there. It’s just, the problem with leaving is that you’re never able to stick around to see what you’ve left behind.

I think that sometimes, we love, and we continue to have faith in the things we love, because the things that you love the most strongly are the things that will embarrass you the most deeply if you ever fall out of love with them.

One way of coping with my anxiety has been to imagine it as a tax. In order to do the things I want to do, in order to go about my life, or to get anything done, I just need to pay the anxiety tax first. The tension and soreness I feel in my shoulders that never goes away; the hour of preparation it takes for me to talk myself into leaving the house; the constant fear that I will say the wrongest thing or write the wrongest thing or do the wrongest thing without ever knowing it—these are all part of the tax.

There are past versions of me who believe in me, and there are future versions of me who are looking back on where I am and thinking, That's the version of me who actually managed to achieve something. There are always these people cheering me on, or, at the very least thinking about me. And that helps me feel less alone. And that helps me feel like I am right where I need to be.

I think perhaps what's so difficult about trying to witness our own changes is that we are not above the water. We are each just moving up and down in place, trying to stay afloat.

Maybe nostalgia is to feel a happiness about something that is over because it is over. That in order to feel happy about it, it must be something that you can't go back to and affect, that you can't mess up from where you are now, but also, that you can't really feel at all.

Even knowing that "most productive" should not be the goal of my years to begin with, I have still learned to be more comfortable with being isolated than with being unproductive.

Taking the time to be around nature is helping me understand that things can just exist, being what they are, and it's just each of us that gives them some sort of meaning.

The leaving is more joyous when you have become too full of the place where you are.

To be Asian in (North) America is to keep a short running list of places where you know you will be given the gift of being seen as more than a visitor.

I have started to let sadnesses visit whenever they come, because I know that trying to keep them out will just cause them to find another, more aggressive way in. And when they visit, I try to sit with them, and understand the different nuances between these visitors, to take stock of them and note how each of them makes me feel. It helps me realize that they are not all the same—that sadness is not just one consistently gray, same-feeling blob—but that there are different kinds of sadnesses, some more common, some more rare. And when they visit, I have started to find some form of small excitement in the fact that these are the only chances I get to feel them and to observe their details firsthand.

Sometimes, when something falls away naturally, it forms roots of its own.

Writing is a lonely act that summons all the people who have shaped you. You conjure them up to sit with you as you write so they can inform and shape your work. Writing is, then, to surround yourself with ghosts

See you later cannot be promised, but Goodbye, again reminds us that we've done this before. And after the last time, at least, we both came back.

Home, then, I suppose, is simply in the ways you take a strange space and make it feel familiar. Sometimes that means putting your stuff in it. Sometimes that just means putting yourself in it and giving it time.

Feeling lonely is for people who have arrived somewhere, I tell myself, not for people still on the way there.

Having a deadline looming is almost a peaceful thing because it feels as if the deadline simplifies all the variables of living. It forces everything not deadline-related to blur out of focus.

I can't face that ending, that feeling of finality, that no more of the song comes after it, so I play each song I know about halfway through, I stop mid-word, switch over to the beginning of another one...

And I will leave them the same way they leave their home every day, this being the last feeling of closeness I feel to them for a little while, because in visiting them, there was a deadline to this specific closeness—there were only a finite number of days I could see them in person—whereas after I leave, we might not speak to each other for months, sometimes even years, knowing that we are always one message away from each other but the ease of that closeness means we can talk at any time, and so there is no specific urgency to do so, and so we put it off, and we put it off, and we put it off.

Airports make everyone feel like passer-through, like a visitor, like an outsider, and this is comforting in its honesty because aren't we always, always just visitors, just passer-through?

So this nostalgia is, what, an echo of a happiness? Or a long-delayed one? Is it an outline of one, from trying to remember a happiness I knew I should have felt in the moment but that most likely wasn't really there? Or, maybe nostalgia is to feel happiness about something that is over because it is over. That in order to feel happy about it, it must be something that you can't go back to and affect, that you can't mess up from where you are now, but also, that you can't really feel at all.

During my visit, I tell my parents about this exciting new idea I came up with where I one day plan on taking a cutting from their jade plant and growing a new jade plant from it in my own apartment, so that something they took care of every day could beget something that I would take care of every day, which feels like a small and distant way for me to care for them by keeping a piece of their care alive.

I always worry that pruning these leaves will make the plant look empty, bare, noticeably missing something, and that it will leave the plant looking more unhealthy than it does with the dying leaves still attached. But as soon as you remove those leaves, all you see is what remains, which is a plant with green leaves, alive, and you forget about all the other leaves that were attached to it before.