08.11.25 simple things
this one is for trident booksellers, the mbta, lawrenceville summer scholars, studs in harvard square, the la dodgers, overland park, children of parents, carole king, and my mom
if you ever find me in trident booksellers on newbury street, you can guarantee i’m leaving having made at least one purchase. most recently, it was a denim blue journal i’ve rationalized as being an indispensable tool in my upcoming grad school inquiry project, and the best short stories 2021: the o. henry prize winners, edited by chimamanda ngozi adichie, whose opinion i have decided to hold in high regard after reading purple hibiscus earlier this year. it also helps that due to the fact that—if you’ll believe it—2021 was a while ago, the book was majorly marked down. just the way i like it.
i like short stories because i always end up feeling like i’m doing more reading than i am, and they curb my nasty habit of pausing books indefinitely with 20 pages left. additionally, i’ve been a red line regular these past couple weeks (any excuse to evade the sad fate of steaming in my crockpot of an apartment in braintree) and it’s nice to be able to chew and swallow a bite-sized unit of prose in the twenty minutes it takes to get to jfk/umass, and then another one if i’m lucky before i have to transfer at park street. it’s like literary omakase.
so far, it’s been a lot of musings on love, laments about family, nuggets of wisdom about aging, religion, gender, race, and everything else there ever was, really. some are uplifting, some are melancholy, and some are so unbelievably tragic that you have to sit and think and almost miss your stop. above all, i’m left with the reminder that each day, each moment abounds with things to be moved by. anyway, here are mine from today.
this morning, i woke up the same way i have been for the past couple weeks: to the unpleasant clinging of my duvet to my sweat-slick legs. i’ve been sleeping with the window open to invite in the drafty night air, but she’s usually long departed by the time i come to consciousness, and in her place is the stagnant summer heat. not many things from my mother’s incessant lectures from childhood have stuck with me over the years, but i’m sure she’d be proud of me for resisting the urge to turn my ac unit on at night. on second thought, maybe that would make her sad. she doesn’t pay my electric bill, though.
after returning from a highly chaotic but meticulously(?) structured three weeks of teaching at a boarding school in new jersey, i’ve gained a newfound appreciation for routine. i’m finding that i quite miss knowing exactly how my day will play out from what sonnet i’ll teach to what juice concoction i’ll cook up at each mealtime. i hope they have the good scrambled eggs at breakfast. i bet TC will be first to class again and make a snarky remark about his classmates’ tardiness. i wonder what will happen on the gaytimatum tonight.
as much as i resisted the concept of routine for many, many years (because, of course, i am a free thinker), i get it now. this year has been a year of getting it now. i made the same coffee and pesto toast as i had yesterday and thought to myself that i’ve gotten a lot better at eating the same thing over and over again. maybe soon i’ll like overnight oats.
it feels strange to have a rhythm without any reason. i’d already decided upon waking up that today would not be a productive day. perhaps my original sin was tying routine to productivity, as if days exist to either work or waste. as it turns out, productive or not, it’s nice to not have a raging headache to chase away on any given day.
on the t to an appointment in harvard square, it dawned on me that i’d misremembered the time and would be arriving almost thirty minutes late. panicking, i called and texted the studio to no avail. back to the o. henry prize winners, i suppose.
a few words and phrases sloshed around in my head, battered by crashing waves of how am i going to play this? apologetic? friendly? should i say that i tried to call? i’ll blame the red line; i always do (and can). why can’t i reschedule? does this mean they’re swamped? i hope they can still slot me in. totally understandable if they can’t. does this mean i need to come back another day?
when i arrived, the place was empty. i don’t think an explanation was solicited, but i still spent the first five minutes apologizing profusely because god forbid these absolute strangers think i’m rude and entitled. unpunctual? fair enough. but rude?
after the quickest non-ordeal of my life, i walked around harvard square for a bit. i don’t come up to cambridge often, and when i do i certainly don’t spend it in stuffy old harvard square. but actually, it turned out to be surprisingly charming.
at some point i passed by a bookstore between harvard and central, in front of which a child was taking a picture of his parents and (presumably) their friend. i’d paused on my walk to take in this all-too-familiar spectacle—i too was my parents’ resident photographer growing up. i don’t know what my sister and brother did to avoid being called upon for public-facing artistic endeavors; for whatever reason, that responsibility always fell on me. the real pressure was that it wasn’t even that they thought i was a good photographer. i was asked to retake many a photo, and it was a tiny dagger to the heart every time. you’d think after a few shaky frames and my pinky finger peeking in the corner, they’d start asking my siblings or something. instead, getting coached through awkward photoshoots for my parents and their friends (that, mind you, would never even see the light of day beyond a group chat or the occasional facebook post) became my personal purgatory.
anyhow, now curious about the bookstore, i lingered by the door for a few seconds to wait for the child to finish. and wait i did, for a good three minutes and multiple rounds of awkward, apologetic chuckling. at this point, i’d been standing there too long to not enter the establishment, so i spent a polite amount of time perusing new nonfiction titles and an impressive array of crystals in seven stars bookstore before continuing on my way.
i’d spontaneously decided to get dinner with a college friend, so i went to kill some time in central, where there are plenty of places to meander. of course, my first stop was hmart. at first, it was a stop of absolute necessity—i was looking for something to tide my hunger over: a pastry, onigiri, something. i settled on a japanese green tea with LA dodger shohei ohtani plastered on the label. i may be a relatively new ohtani fan, but i’d like to consider myself a longtime dodgers fan, and an even longer-time fan in general.
as i paid my $2.99 for the tea, i thought of (once again) my mom, but this time at a convenience store in seoul, where everything has someone’s face on it, and half the time it was the same guy everywhere (i’m looking at you, park seojun). she’d say something along the lines of “who’d even fall for this?” and i’d laugh nervously and shuffle away to reshelve all of the yogurt crackers with exo members i’d have been cradling for the entire duration of our conversation. later i’d end up insisting that i really just like yogurt flavored things, which everyone and their mom (and more pertinently, my mom) knew was a lie. anyway, ten years later, it appears i would (still) fall for this.
d and i aren’t usually feeling american food, but the serendipitous synchronicity of our cravings led us to a chain burger joint in central square. between me periodically falling off the face of the earth for grad school and actual school and whatever else that kept me tethered to braintree this past year, and d having been put through the meat grinder of life, it had been almost nine months since we’d last hung out.
it was nice to hear how they’d been. both of us had double-concentrated in music and something else in college and had found a career in that something else. during this past year, i’ve certainly felt the absence of music in my life, so it was nice to hear that cool musical avenues exist in the greater boston area, and i just need to go find them.
some mystical forces were at play in cambridge today because in entered a boy so identical to a childhood friend from kansas that i, being a freak, couldn’t help but squint and point until he too began squinting and pointing and waving and approaching and oh my god what are you doing here? how long has it been? i live here (ish) now! well i’m visiting for the weekend! what are you up to these days? what are the odds!
i’ve always been a touch more nostalgic than i’ve felt i should be. if with every childhood move came a pair of friendship bracelets we promised each other we’d wear for the rest of eternity, i was the idiot with my circulation cut off from my wrists down for months to follow until the thought would occur to me one lonely night that most people own scissors and memories fade. and for all i know they’re swinging their naked arm around, prime real estate for a new symbolic adornment. and how could i have been so stupid as to assume they’ll keep me on their mind and around their wrists if there’s nothing to sustain us beyond a memory, a woven chevron strip, and my mom’s phone number that doesn’t even work anymore because we’ve moved abroad? only then would i pick at the steadfast knot and remove the cuff of friendship binding me to a life i no longer lived and a friend i no longer saw and wonder if in ten years we ran into each other in the wild they would even recognize me.
before he and his friends headed out, he came back to my table to reiterate what a crazy coincidence it was to run into me here of all places—here in the great state of massachusetts, here in the city of cambridge, and here in this random burger joint i certainly wasn’t expecting to be when i woke up this morning, let alone mere hours ago. it’s foggy, but i recall him being like this back then too: affable and outgoing, someone who makes you feel known, and now, remembered.
sometimes i’m the one to forget, but i’m reminding myself that i’ve never been unwelcome to an old connection. so why, then, do i often pretend not to recognize, not to remember—to squint and wave and approach?
you know what? sue me! lock me up for remembering things about you! put me away for recalling how the only time i remember you raising your voice was when you were framed during a game of mafia, or how you’re the one who taught me how to play “river flows in you” (and thus earned my asian card), or how i learned that peanuts are legumes because of a presentation you gave on george washington carver!
i will be one who remembers well and unabashedly.
today concluded as many days have and many days will: sitting cross-legged on an empty red line car, bumping carole king as i descend back to the south shore area. with nothing to stare at in the darkness, i flipped through the progress i’d made in the short story collection. adichie writes in the introduction, “i am drawn to a quality i call heart, a sense that the story matters and has meaning. but matters to whom? to the writer, to the story’s own imaginative world.”1 great news about heart: that thing is always beating! and feeling!
there are eventful days and uneventful days. there are days that are damn near identical to the one before, and there are days that are unlike any you’ve ever lived so far. most days, i’ve found, are some combination of predictable and unexpected, novel and mundane, in your hands and out of them. the world is your oyster, whatever that even means. and therein lies the story!
from the Introduction to The Best Short Stories 2021