PEARS / Of Feelings

ON THE BODY LONELINESS

/ Of Feelings

PEARS

&

OF

CITRUSTREET

PEARS / Of Feelings Ten consecutive alarms gone unheard Finding new ways to love others and the world My body as a boat A TEAR IS A LONELY SOCK... my little naked orange You do not exist if only our imaginations could remain so fertile, if only i could have a taste Ways of knowing the self There are so many ages I want to be (first introduction; first heartbreak) Re: Pears

4 6 7 8 10 11 12

Say my name (Don’t let it fall short) EAT / BODY / MOUTH Your Sign to Give Up sleep paralysis (i feel everything so deeply, i do.)

I WISH I HAD A NAME FOR THIS FEELING NO COMPROMISE I WISH WE WERE ROCKS ON THE CLIFFSIDE Hug her at the waist The time spent away from one another is a matter of the ocean

20 22 24 26 27 28 32 34 36 38

Author’s Note Refs

42 43

14 16 18 19

December 2023.

Collection #2

I want to eat these feelings like the first bite into a pear, In memory of dirty freckles Unhyphenated and beloved and round I want these feelings to be a prefix Weak enough to melt into rock-sugar soup Every brief encounter with every bit of stinging happiness, As in sore throat boiled eggs, garlic on the bottom shelf, and The trickle of a tear long forgotten by consumption I will eat your please. I will eat your sadness.

I will eat and eat until feelings are no longer connected to the body. (I am blessed by droopy willow eyes as much as I am cursed by them). The sink of a dialect is like biting into Chinatown — like saying you don’t belong here except I do.

Chinatown is where Canto lives, and Canto is where we find connection outside of ourselves.

But I can only speak in southeast port city little island fish bone lotus root, the language of the heavy knead of thumbs, and imperfect rounds of tacky dough (because) You could never afford to be anything but fast And my fast is only ever angry I wish I wasn’t always so angry I wish my idea of feeling wasn’t so defined by moments of heat

No more pineapple, baby (No more lamb chops)

4

Ten consecutive alarms gone unheard

I think conceptually I can understand and try to embody all the kinds of love that I know, but if I truly knew how many forms it might take, it would break me.

In a good way, if that were possible.

I look at a mother and a daughter and a boiled egg rubbed gently against a weeping bruise. And there is something so heartbreakingly poetic about their connectedness. About all mothers and their children.

I think about the fallen tree near our bus stop and how it forces me to look back at her. Trees as in Columbus Park / summer rainstorm blown twigs / blue closets.

Every friend I know has gotten into a romantic partnership lately. And I always learn late. Or from a friend of a friend. But I know I still touch you because you once loved me. Meaning I will stake claim over every heart you come across; Opal angel, life is moving too quickly. September is aging, and we smelled the rising heat of red wax together. I don’t have enough subscriptions for whatever it means when the sun rises early but our days don’t have suns. The universe reminds me to love others when I forget how to. Every daytime moon my tired dry eyes can capture, I will bound tightly into an envelope and mail it like a postcard to wear.

I love how you love. I love how we grow up to love. To throw it around like a paper airplane because sometimes it is just a word. And I love when I cry without words to explain why.

Because I cycle back to you anyway.

6

Finding new ways to love others and the world

I want to be the metal clanking against your thigh — it is the only way I know how to be. And because girlhood is the confusion between body and voice, when you are on top of me, I never know what to say: Your tonsils have bled into the thing that I’m meant to be. But my desire to keep you afloat weighs heavier than my desire to be next to you. I want to touch you the way girls do. But I’m a boat, not a boy. And that’s the problem.

If you know me to be pliable, I will let you mold me into your shape. (So maybe girlhood is touching, and boyhood speaking) And if girlhood is only womanhood, what do boys become but a skinny mast slammed against the body of jealousy? (I want you to nail me to the helm, but how am I meant to fit into myself the way people do?)

If grief has taken hold of the crow’s nest, can I count on this body to remember the motions behind boyish attempts at girlhood? (I will be the donor of your lips if ever the rusty propeller decides to drive me toward a secondary desire)

A

8

T E A R

IS A LONELY SOCK IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM a fist that weeps when being used the recall of a dream and its sudden dissipation is proof of why we cry. it is the memory of two boys lying next to each other and the way your thumb in my mouth did nothing but wordlessly pray for my silence — and it never helped, but i tucked myself under your chin and held your hand anyway. for us, together can only be surmised through a question of did you eat yet’s and takeout containers. i pull on your ear because today is happy. i have so much to apologize for but today i sit with the image of skinny calves balancing on a metal tunnel at the playground. if you gave me the time, we could have poached chicken together with ginger scallion. we could drink together even though i’m not meant to. i followed your mouth then, because i didn’t know what to do with mine. i wish i was better for the both of us you could even lie to me the way you used to.

MY LITTLE NAKED ORANGE

I want to live in [your] lines, which is to say I wish I was your child.

A sharpened kitchen knife dances in your mother’s palm, guides flesh against the greedy water droplet off a blade. Your name tastes weird, the same way cash registers and annual check-ups do. You’ve grown greedy, biting at thank you’s and goodnight’s as if they ever meant anything more than sounds from a leaky mouth.

And yet every night, you insist on it.

What more could a girl at 15 going on 16 do while life was still hectic and all you knew was the soft touch of fingertips on chapped lips? That you could kiss her between the brows, and you wouldn’t be scared of a boat clinging to the water (as in the moon) (as in me) (as in you). How much would a translation-app eraser-eroded card even convey?

How can I write in a way you might read: you deserve every bit of happiness.

You laugh because you are 51 going on 52, and there is such an impossibility to new language / where the only you that can exist is a number split between 8 and a daughter.

Yesterday, I felt the weight of 40 years floating.

I want to be the sebum of your orange, the blood on your thumb.

There is a commitment to love that I am both so intensely connected to and yet isolated from. You hold me against the naked heart inside your pocket, insist you are happy. That this oneness is a matter of eating enough names to be normal, even if it means feeling like a tangled necklace rattling inside a porcelain wedding bowl. (I will be whatever you want me to be.)

If I say I cannot walk without right hand following right leg tomorrow, you will simply hold back that endeared laugh of yours and tell me ‘you can.’ And I say I can’t because I love so many things that I cannot say, and you will tell me you can. I will love enough for the both of us.

10

ONOT EXIST YOUD ONOT EXIST YOUD ONOT EXIST YOUD ONOT EXIST YOUD ONOT EXIST YOU DO NOT EXIST

The firstness behind the mirror does not matter because more than anything it is the camcorder that sinks its teeth into you and gnaws at your ridges like the gaps in a film stock. And when I cling to you, what else are we meant to be but a crinkle and a fold bandaged together in a way that takes me back to a swollen big toe rubbing against a metal door?

Before you turn one, your existence is supplemented by a passport photo in a red bind. It is here where your hands are still ripe and fat and directionless, so she utters out ten thousand goodbyes before your mouth knows what to do with itself. (I wish I could devour you. I wish airports still reminded me of yellow cardigans.)

If memory is only the image, and not the thing itself, you are four before all other ages — sometimes it can only go as far as the camera that records it, so I never remember what happens after plucking those roses out of that public park bush. If memory can be reconciled by food and circumstance, what happens when the little island we’re born on is no longer little?

Writing is a series of compulsory comparisons, negotiations of the body for the object. (I write about my body as a moon because it is the only way I know how to take form). What else can I take from you but an image?

(A memory?)

How do our dialogues on the collective and the personal find themselves existing in tandem, at sites of gravity?

When I visit a museum, I am looking at a month, a half of whole, a fragmented hand, a blank canvas, a collage that will never make up a person.

How does our insistence for a collective memory turn into a mutilated one? How does our recounting alter with words? With utterance?

IF ONLY OUR IMAGINATIONS COULD REMAIN SO FERTILE, IF ONLY I COULD HAVE A TASTE

It is a matter of woundedness, a politics of round[ed]ness. An affinity toward our likeness (read: unlikeness).

Here is the child, eyes meeting that lonely rock floating in the abyss, still aching to be happy. It is the ever-present wonder of chasing the moon in the backseat of a car.

It is forgetting. I tremble at forgetting such love.¹ 1.Hiroshima mon amour (1959) dir.

Alain Resnais writ. Marguerite Duras

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But love is all around me. In still images and shaky videos and proclamations of my love for the moon. I forget her, and yet she is still so beautiful and big and bright.

My love, you are grounded in rolls and curves and seduction. And so I can never write about my body as a moon because it banks on more than the horrible embarrassment of revealing, for the first time, an insecurity of calves. What more do I have to offer than an insecurity of jean marks on skin, clumps of abandoned black hair on the side of a tub, and the weight scale collecting dust under our TV? What more can my insecurity balance on if not the question caught in between taking a shape or taking up space?

The curious case of blinking Brakes slammed and still moving in my peripheral: My body will be Moon.

My body is every round thing in this household: every cap, every wine glass and clock, every stained opal and jean and wooden coaster painted.

Every round thing we find is going to be Real: My body will take a shape, even if I’m scared, even if I don’t want it to.

Because it’s not my job to take a shape for you, It’s not my job to walk into the gender closet.

It’s my job to love you, in all our (un)likenesses and in spite of all.

WAYS OF KNOWING THE

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SELF

1. Height marks on a door frame a. Personhood is the unrecognizable greed behind tick marks smudged on a door frame, collecting the years it took to catch up to your mother. It is the thing that defines you in the same sense of a soiled naivete spurring on a head turned in the wrong direction. b. A chapped lip in front of a metal screen is called being lucky. In a few years, you will be 20 bordering on 8. It means you need a haircut.

2. The bathroom mirror a. Mirrors are places of willing disembodiment— where I become a left ear, or a crooked top row of teeth, or the space between my breasts. b. Fear is how babies learn to differentiate between white and gray (and how every day I negotiate a reality of rotting eyes) c. When confronted with a naked body in a fogged up mirror, I am taunted by a sadness beyond recognizing pores and wrinkles and dark circles: I am saying goodbye to someone I’ve never met. d. What if the thing that terrifies me more than anything else is a face seesawing between realms of knowing and touching? How come on days I wake up with a foggy peripheral, my blinks feel slower? e. I want the ritualized mirror in my hand to tell me I will only be subjected to fragments of the body.

3. Memory a. Reflection is the result of living outside of my body in a way I can’t recognize, because it means you will have the capacity to unknow me and untouch me. b. If memory is a feeling: The self is restricted to the things I allow myself in absolutism, because I can’t know myself if my heart isn’t heavy. c. If memory is a photograph: The self is a pair of eyes directed to you, the onlooker. d. If memory is a thing (object): I want to disappear. e. If memory is a dream (haunting): You will be immortalized in bouts of fear that yearn for conversations with a stranger. And maybe I will answer.

When I strangle the sadness in the mirror, will happy return to me?

And if I am happy, will I be me again?

THERE ARE SO MANY AGES I WANT TO BE

Eighteen, where life was September rotting, a scale of new playlists disguised as adulthood, and peach-fuzz face pinched between polymer and glass Seventeen, where love was the warm press of teenaged-back, the year sun kissed December on the forehead, like winter was her child “Why are you suffocating yourself, baby?”

As if sleep could only exist in folded-face imprints, habituated elbows, and sore forearms

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And it’s true: you curl your body inward, fetal and dark and warm, blanket pulled over, as if hiding a dirty secret Your spine contorts into a language, it calls upon being twenty one, dreading twenty two as much as you dreaded twenty one before you turned twenty one You want to be tired turning at 9pm, Sit quietly, with bloated eyelids, on evenings of barely-chapped rippled-water lips, the sort you get from breathing your own breath: “Why are you suffocating yourself, baby?”

Thirty two, plane rides no longer elusive, eyes pitted against darkness, desirable like the treasured womb of your childhood bedroom & Eight, dirty secret unraveled, naked blanket, you taught yourself how to force sleep, sunk back to a little girl on a crowded street in a big city You wish you knew how to sleep as cheek met pillow, To be all the moments except now.

Save

Edit profile Name xiao Bio

I do not deserve this name. It is an action against the first time I left you; an insistence on what we call originality.

How unlike the sea in Helen, my little red passport reads unregistered. I wish I could tell you that my dawn meant something more than a prefix. I wish the choices we make in

self-introduction

weren’t

harassments

on

treasured

memories in our old apartment. And what does it mean when I trade easy for real — is it enough to call myself Chinese when my tongue is lost between every grunt and pause; Twenty-one is a blister from my favorite shoe.

It is not just a number, just as I have built myself up to 20 this year, and 20 is kneeling. 20 is a plea. 20 is not just a number because I am 20 for as long as I am writing about being 20. And today, I am 21. And today, I meet an online biography,

a

location

fixed

in

time.

From

today,

I

introduce myself as 21. I write in and about a body that has lived 21 years. And what does that mean but a rearrangement of outdated poems that keep me stagnated (waiting) (for) Location 21

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REGARDING PEARS after Ocean Vuong

there is only so much an I can do, am I to wait for the permanence of writing as proof, that you would believe me if only my words were sent from inside Inside of which hides a secret desire — a whole person, barely a body, every naked offer that we used to plead against being read, to apologize for every may-be sat vaguely on the tongue, yours and then mine, that hovering question mark is left blinking, say it to my face instead, whisper it into my mouth, say I am sorry for every failed afternoon together, I am sorry to force your I AM rolling into PM, writing as if to say I have been gracefully granted girlhood, as if to forget every time you placed a a handful of chopped fruit into my hands, your son’s

SAY MY NAME

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(DON’T LET IT FALL SHORT)

Fish lie at home, marinating in China plates the size of early moons.

I split a piece in half, find a bone following the curve of an eyelash, and swallow. The pitter-patter of the shower on my left arm feels like salmon dinner; I live vicariously through a memory of shallow cuts laid on their sides. And the problem of itchiness is that I feel it on my right arm, as if our bodies are connected enough to a will.

I love through water, just as the rain reminds me love can swim.

A look up and then down on the subway: You are very pretty.

Every word punctuated so I can make it last longer. I want to treat life with sincerity — to tell the world daily that I love it because I love the people that inhabit it and the love that binds us.

This summer was very pretty. I found bike helmets and tan lines: I never realized that you didn’t have your ears pierced.

I hope this city treated you kindly.

My forever radiance; Warm Year of crumpled-up dollar bills & sunset piss I miss you! I already miss you.

Cherished feeling [bound in red hair]

Don’t drink the rain unless your eyes are already glass.

Sit up straight and chase it with fervor and ecstasy.

There is no greater rain than summer, no greater love than good. ⸺

EAT / BODY / MOUTH

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If I could, I’d suffocate you Let the pillow caress and chase the hollow of your cheek and watch as it consumed whatever iron grip followed If I could say “I want you”, sit rotten Let the soft carcass of desire stay melted and sticky in the tendons, forgotten in whatever preserved jar of feelings, felt There is meaning to a word Stored in flaky metallic heartbeats and wavering pleas gone unheard Quiet ants bloated on wrapping-paper sheets Waiting for an answer I cannot give: I mean it when I say “if”

Black molasses seeps into an abyss, The kiss of a 6-year-old sunset marinates in the confusion between means never minding crooked a vibration and a deep sigh smiles or crooked teeth Baby tooth lodges deep into baby gums, (Baby tooth, baby teeth) dreams of falling out A mouth is only a mouth in the Like a cheap dollar-store jewel falls off a paper crown, deep crevices of Like a banana-split best-friendship unravels, A mouthless monologue between leaving behind moths and their affinity for charred yolk and the milk-white Ticklish napes, dangling feet, ceiling of stubby fingernails and the warm embrace of syrup’d lips The morning after, milky pith kissing a velvet tongue. strings will gather onto my tongue / Filthy reminders of a spring-loaded slingshot to my gums.

To Xiao From My loneliness Re: What’s your favorite color?

Permanence tells us that guilt and regret are the only things standing between the ego and the self. But sometimes indecision is just a matter of lemon tea or darjeeling. So to answer your question, I know your favorite color is blue. But I can’t tell you mine. A few months ago, I wrote about this revelation that liking blue was the easy route. But what exactly was easy? In distinguishing favorite from most important, I mean. Maybe it was the fact that blue was your favorite in name only. You know that it’s selfish to think of other colors when you already set your mind on one years ago, don’t you?

Our parents decided to throw away the old TV. I’ve written about it before, how it cast a shadow of a man’s profile when you went to sleep at night. I know it’s for the best, but it feels like the same in-betweenness of being 20 yet still having sat in a car that made you manually roll down the windows. Should I make a formal request to change my favorite color to static? In memory of the TV; a salute to moving on in the face of forever.

It’s a sign, I think. A reason to believe that a phone can give me pleasure the way Fourth of July rain showers do. I’m begging you to confront me because I’m too afraid to do it myself. Meld me into a person patient enough (brave enough) for the talking phase. Because if anyone can survive the things in my head, they’re the one for me.

I’ve outgrown imaginary affairs with your favorite color. I want to embody the moving stillness of static—to say that I can still be with you even if I don’t want to.

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Ysiogunr to give up

SLEEP PARALYSIS

What do you do when the habitual 5am is no longer a case of blue light — And your perception of bad is confined to the extent of your hand blurring against tanned book pages? Your fist is at best a palm tightening around a nameless feeling, meaning you have no choice but to be afraid. You have forgotten how to sleep with silence. You need every noise to possibly exist banging against your eardrum to drown out the panting of the shapeless thing you finally confront at 20. You think to yourself maybe it might leave you alone if you stayed still but it only laughs and you can only cower in fear because blue light has never done this to you, and you wish things were back to third grade 9 o’clock bedtimes. You wish you were still good.

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1.

A few months ago, a man left his check-out receipt behind, tucked into the back flap of our shared book right underneath my newly-printed one. It reminded me of the serendipitous manifestation of love following. If you listen closely, the click-clack of shoes on library tiles will strangle you; frustrated sighs and fallen lunchboxes will possess you.

2.

You are my beloved child, bones steeped in what we call bothness.

3.

The specificity of my turning century is drawn on first smartphones and slinky toys. It means manual windows and physical library cards. It means running around on dirt roads, washing our hands in the kitchen sink on our tip-toes, and water leaking from the side hose.

Happiness confined into a dull-tipped Hello Kitty colored pencil. And the necessary mourning of childhood. (Because it is a thing we can hold — so real it feels like a knocking on my forehead).

4.

I wonder how difficult it is to unlearn.

5.

They lay on the couch, shirts rolled up to their chests and eyes locked onto everything they could possibly know and learn. This will never negate their incapacity for 2001 countryside wagons. In my petty yearning for guaranteed proximity, I revisit the neighborhood playground. I pull this body onto gappy tunnels and imaginary ship decks and tire swings I never learned how to sit in. There is a universality to laughter; it is why my first destination is this park. So my friends and I laugh. We laugh enough to guarantee a fulfilling childhood as 21-year-olds. We go back to being reminded of our tall-child-ness.

6.

What else could it mean when we grow endeared by a snotty-nosed kid approaching our stacked limbs?

7.

What else can we do but sit with these feelings and wait until they become loose at the back of our minds?

There is so much damage within me, without a manual on how to fix it. And in the war between my two sides (a dying third that’s both subject and obliged bystander), there arises a question of speaking through translation apps. The third becomes a baby — tripping and waddling on soft limbs — sounding out things that can’t be reproduced by text or character strokes. What I mean by all this is that there are not enough resources for me to understand this person. So when I talk about food and community and love, I am lying. I am trying to let everything else (the fantasy of it) act as refuge for my unbelonging. My “lack of urgency” is sadness, and the truth is: I have unknowingly enacted a betrayal of the self.

I am lying when I tell you that food is love, and I am lying when I tell you that love is all we have. The bitter truth is: I am scared of the dining room table. I am anxious about eating with my parents. A part of me thinks it’s because their proximity will break me, and I will have no way to answer their why. I still remember the ache in her brown eyes, the crinkles that can only be worn by the selfless love of a mother. To be honest, I like crying. But I am finally 21, and suddenly I am confronted and scared and caught in my own web of pseudo-okayness. What’s eating away at me, I realize, is a permanent character flaw (an unchangeable, immovable, irrecoverable fault of mine that can never be summarized by a universal word like “depression”).

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There is so much damage within me, without a manual on how to fix it. And in the war between my two sides (a dying third that’s both subject and obliged bystander), there arises a question of speaking through translation apps. The third becomes a baby — tripping and waddling on soft limbs — sounding out things that can’t be reproduced by text or character strokes. What I mean by all this is that there are not enough resources for me to understand this person. So when I talk about food and community and love, I am lying. I am trying to let everything else (the fantasy of it) act as refuge for my unbelonging. My “lack of urgency” is sadness, and the truth is: I have unknowingly enacted a betrayal of the self.

I am lying when I tell you that food is love, and I am lying when I tell you that love is all we have. The bitter truth is: I am scared of the dining room table. I am anxious about eating with my parents. A part of me thinks it’s because their proximity will break me, and I will have no way to answer their why. I still remember the ache in her brown eyes, the crinkles that can only be worn by the selfless love of a mother. To be honest, I like crying. But I am finally 21, and suddenly I am confronted and scared and caught in my own web of pseudo-okayness. What’s eating away at me, I realize, is a permanent character flaw (an unchangeable, immovable, irrecoverable fault of mine that can never be summarized by a universal word like “depression”).

3 I don’t hate you, But every day is a desperate show of dependency; I wish I was okay forever, So that I wouldn’t have to teeter on the edge of barely.

My sadness (decidedly not depression) is awake / Is alive / is a ghost that festers on the insecurity of naming.

I wish someone could tell me it’s okay. To Call myself anything would be enough.

4 The first time I sat down to meditate, I cried.

It was at the very end of the (guided) session, when I was asking the instructor about… something. I can’t even remember. And isn’t it funny that I’m in my early 20’s struggling to remember? I wish I was brave enough to ask out loud. Because as much as I love the act of questioning, the hands typing out these words can only take me to the edge of the water. And I wonder if this fear is the lazy or the impossible part of me? Because I can’t just up and go say “I’m over 18! Let me live my life! Let me seek out help!”

I’m scared, is the problem. Not of the voice telling me that I might have a problem, but the possibility that these problems aren’t even real. That my suffering, though occasional, is something that just happens. That it is a thing that inflicts all of us, but for me, it just happens with greater intensity. I feel things so deeply, and that is a part of me.

5 It was: hollowness Masked by fleeting moments of tenderness Akin to sudden bursts of laughter Immediately followed by a hand covering crooked teeth

6 I wish these categories of answer, forever playing dress-up on the back side of my pillow, were things I deserved to utter.

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Tea egg / walnuts / your arm looped into mine / a warm back.

This year, I’ve had to contend with a perpetual loneliness that crept up on me weekly, if not daily. It was a routine of bad posture and a broken laptop and a seat in the front row of my mental health class. A distant memory of a shirt sleeve stretched taut against a tanned bicep. Hazy as I rest my chin on your shoulder — grasping at that familiarity that would never scream come closer, rest harder, press into me like an overdue eye-exam.

I wish friendless-ness wouldn’t confront me when I’m most vulnerable and blind and dry-eyed.

That my anger wasn’t so wet.

My body would be an unfeeling void of muscle and fat. Its anger no longer a mess of shaking limbs and the uncontrollable measure of a beating heart. The faucets on my waterline clutching onto the “OUT-OF-ORDER” sign would not leak like a broken boat torn at the base. I wish my sort of calm was not my second-nature; where calm would be close enough to a snore / the beeping of our microwave / the clap of a car door closing / the sea crying in place of / your trembling voice.

Mine.

How do we stay afloat when neither passenger nor vessel care enough to try?

When we say we will be something, why do we always seek out the worser familiar? As in my body could not live by itself but only as a comparison. An extension cord of tangled alternatives and yes’s and no’s.

I can’t speak the way my mouth desperately needs me to.

Sometimes it is a matter of how these tones don’t fit onto my tongue and sometimes it is calling myself 20 and too young.

And I am. I am. I think.

I miss the nonchalance of a hand on a thigh.

Are you scared of your daughter? / your son? / your child? / Yours.

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NO COMPROMISE NO COMPROMISE NO COMPROMISE

I wish we were rocks on the cliffside You are 10. And you are a girl. Sometimes your voice doesn’t come out the way it’s supposed to. You hate yourself. But your body still demands girlhood. Helplessly, you are a girl, surrounded. Threatened by papaya and skinny elbows drawn inward from the dinner table. You confuse papayas for mangoes. You confuse a shared lunch box for a crush. Maybe it was never about girlhood or boyhood, but the difference. Because you are 10. And you’re not supposed to be different.

You are 13. And there is no greater humiliation than girl talk in the bathroom about periods and calves and the boy you like. Because you hear about the necklace he buys for you and dump him. You are not a girl, you are grown.

You’ve started bleeding the way you’re supposed to, and you wear bras that make others laugh. (This is the year you stop being different). You are never lonely, and you dream of high school with your best friend. Of walking home together in the evening.

You are 17. And you think you are a woman. You think you like boys and girls. This year, you and your mother bicker constantly. Because you’ve always been a curious child asking why, like a pit that never registers tired eyes and the ridiculous fear of your midriff. You wear men’s shirts; they never pull tightly at your body. You forget to hate yourself. You write earnestly, as if only for yourself. But admittedly, you wear your heart on your sleeve.

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You are 20. And you are not a woman. You are a collection of memories and betrayal and a desperate insistence on piety. You’ve moved between realms of masculinity and femininity. Sometimes you are nothing, sometimes everything. Your bothness is a gray area that begs for androgyny, not because you don’t like being a girl, but because you want to perform gender in a way that makes people understand. And you know the solution isn’t a haircut or wearing your brother’s old jeans, but it helps.

Hug her at ON TURNING

TWENTY-TWO

the waist 36

And the most terrifying thing is that I love her.

I hold onto my mother the same way I insist on laughing. I am 22, and I rub her shoulders as we stare at each other in the mirror. She smiles — corners of her eyes crinkling like red candy wrappers — and I give her my hands to touch.

And the thing is, I think I’m supposed to be happy.

We inch toward the end of September with bated breath, waiting for blisters and crooked teeth. I sleep with my bedsheets blanketed over me: a beating cocoon. So I cry as we approach 19 then 20 then 21. As always, the sky will be swallowed by the moon. First all-consuming, then waning thin enough to fit into the crescent of my fingernail. I watch the year go by through moons captured in the favorites tab of my photo gallery.

My tears are eager to make a home out of my skin. I cry easier now than I did then. But maybe that’s a good thing, too. That I embrace laughter like a child and cry when I know I should. So I cry when I read about the caring and maintenance of food. Then of warm hands.

I don’t know why I was ever ashamed to be warm. But I am.

I want someone to tuck their arm under mine, like linked paperclips and tangled pretzels sitting on stained napkins.

TO HANDS, MY OLDEST FRIEND: I have lived in you, through you. I have seen your swollen knuckles and protruding wrists and clammy palms. November says hello and suddenly you are hidden flesh bitten from an old crosswalk. The stink of ginkgo tells me to count the lines dressing my veins until we’re home.

You are the crease of a shoe as much as you are mine. And so you will never have the chance to hate me.

TO HANDWRITING: WHAT CAN WE MAKE OF A RECURRING ONE NIGHT STAND? It means I will love you for as long as you are mine. But handwriting also belongs to every person I have ever loved — When I write to you, you read me twofold. First my words. And then my hands. Unlike either of these companions, however, you are the almost-there ripples sleeping on reservoir autumns. Fallen leaves floating above the water as if to say they are only yesterday’s & we hung up loose hairs fallen from yesterday’s scalp onto bathroom tile. Arranged like half-cursive half-wrinkle.

I kiss the knot in the letter ‘x’. Draw saliva into gum.

Mail us to the next person brave enough to tell me they love you.

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The time spent away from one another is a matter of the ocean

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

This second collection is steeped in the feelings of my early 20's. Here lie my attempts at navigating loneliness and anger, love and desire. I learn about myself through a language of orality: that I love to write about and within and in relation to the body.

PEARS/OF is a journal more than anything else, and I am incredibly grateful to have the space to indulge in that. While writing between early 2022 to late 2023, I often felt detached from the world but I also felt love intensely and all around me.

I hope you found connection to & solace in at least one of these entries.

Thank you so, so much for reading.

XIAO

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REFERENCES

[NEW MUSEUM] Pepón Osorio, Convalescence

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[NEW MUSEUM] Wynnie Mynerva, Remnant of the first cut [NEW MUSEUM] Pepón Osorio, En la barbería no

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se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop) Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

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Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

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[NEW MUSEUM] Pepón Osorio, Mi corazón latiente

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(My Beating Heart) New York Aquarium, Moon Jellyfish exhibit

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Yoshifumi Kondo, Whisper of the Heart (1995)

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“If you listen closely...” (Mimi o Sumaseba) Mitski, “First Love / Late Spring” Rockaway Beach, 2019

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[WHITNEY MUSEUM] Jay DaFeo, The Rose

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Gravesend Bay, 2023 [MET Museum] Lionel Wendt, “Bachelor Cruising South”

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