who wants to live forever:
I guess I don't know how to live in the moment. Memories are my worst enemy. Focus on a year ago. Focus on five years ago. Focus on ten years ago. Focus on 15 years ago. Focus on the reality of certain moments still retained in my memory. Feel the reality like on a Star Trek holodeck in three dimensions. But they aren't real anymore. They are memory, and the recall on a holodeck doesn't make them any more real.

One year ago I was working. The recall is very clear, the cube, the flourescent lights, the team falling apart, still the appreciation for boss-lady. But I was emptied already a year ago. It didn't mean a thing.

Five years ago I had already lost myself in a wretched relationship that would be over within months. The violence and violations were soul-shattering. I would have been better off if she had took my knife and cut me up. That would have been far more preferable. But the images I hold are mostly the fond ones, the reasons why I loved her.

Ten years ago I spent a wretched summer with the love of my life. After two years of a perfect friendship, we went out for a year and fucked it all up.

Fifteen years ago, I was preparing to go back to college after being suspended for a semester for "psychiatric re-evaluation" and getting a clean bill of mental health, hehe. The night I was packing up to head out to Oberlin, my brother didn't like the look of me. Without telling me, he went to my parents and told them he was going with me and he needed money for the flight back. He drove the whole way. I call him "Bob". His name is "Rob".

I swear there were good moments, great moments through all this. It was the people. Always the people. As recently as Meghan with her sympathetic empathy. Madoka and the absolute, unconditional love, framed in an incomplete circle. I could go on, but I won't because it would take pages and pages. The names. Diem Nguyen, Hiromi Mizuno, Luyen, Josephine Chen, Pasha, Dilshan, Mark, Shiho Nakai!, Nobuko, Lisa SooHoo, Amina Chaudhri, Myung Soo Seuck, Tria Chew, Bangkok, Golden Gate University, Geneva, Tokyo, Taipei . . . San Francisco.

But I project myself into my past realities, things that happened, and they are still all past. I haven't held onto a single thing to turn in my hands and look at from all angles and smile and say "yes".