She Is a Haunting

Who am I but someone others define? It's easier to be a stereotype. It hurts when you are yourself.

Just because you feel lucky to be alive and fed doesn’t mean you can’t be angry.

Sometimes, the things we want to hear, it's better that we don't ask for them. It's more meaningful that way.

Anger is a fire. Anger is adrenaline. It's kept me going for so long, burning for so long, with ambition, with pettiness.

Don’t know why I’m telling you this, except to say adults guess what’s best for their kids, and sometimes they’re wrong. Maybe even a lot of the time.

It sounds ridiculous and yet real and threatening—every house learning as you learn to live inside it. Every house listening. If Nhà Hoa learns anything from me, it’s weak mind games and bisexual panic.

Revenge has always been easy to understand, but hunger implies that something can be filled. What is a ghost's limit when they have no real body?

It isn't about me. Like people, places change over time, desperate to stay relevant.

Neither of us has the language or time to figure it out yet, and there's a power in never being known because no one can use you against you.

Everyone is someone you owe something to or who owes you from a previous life.

They teach us boys want and girls are the ones who are wanted, but what about people like me? Quietly burning in want and to be wanted.

I’m lost for words over the million little ways we can still hurt for family we hardly know.

And Florence, well. I really look at her. Her hair is windswept and wild, shining down her back. The cold has lashed her cheeks red during the drive to me. I can’t help but smile. When those clever eyes brighten, I know that she’s noticed.

My jaw is locked tight, so the heart can’t escape upward in a panic.

Anger is what she deserves to hold in place of self-deprecation

Mountains rise from the mist like candles in an uneven buttercream. I want to smash them down with my thumbs. It’s ridiculous that Đà Lạt is so beautiful when I am this angry.

Blood slides from the sill and onto the wall, where it inches toward the floor. I'll let it stain, because it's exactly what he wanted: a mark on Vietnam.

There's something animal in the way I want her —chest as fragile as an overfull teacup. I still don't know her well, but like a dream, she's every girl I ever wanted and was afraid of.

We walk through cathedrals where she was told she must lay her sins, but it's me who hears them, me whom she trusts with a whisper that starts with who I could have been.

Want a souvenir?" Florence asks when we near the clothing stalls, her hair shining over a shoulder, as if I want anything but her.

Our parents save such stories for the most random and disorienting moments to share, like while peeling hột vịt lộn.

Like the cliche, she's different from other girls. She'll change me. She'll make me brave. She's dead.

I know this is a dream because I am not afraid of my father.

Hydrangeas climb the crumbling walls beside tall and thin windows, their white blooms kissed with lazy bees. They're the most loved things here.

I am a tourist in the country where my parents were born. Even my clothes have been here before me.

My heart is here, the Lady of Many Tongues had said days before. Here, where I see how beautiful Đà Lạt is. I had thought the same of Saigon, despite the smoke and lights and buildings—how it could've been mine in another life. A different one, not necessarily better or worse.