writing my poem an hour before class again
dyeing my hair fuchsia again
ion semi-permanent brights from sally beauty
on sale for $2.50 before taxes

isn't life beautiful?
the man i love loves me too
just not himself, not nearly enough
he thinks my love is deadly and 
i have no consolations for him

sometimes there's nothing you can do
but to stick to your word

i've left him a million times before
thinking he was the one half out the door

sometimes it's beautiful to realize how wrong you were

there's no changing the past
but the future is ours to build

you can't choose who you love 
i'm happy to say that
i no longer wish it was someone else

i think i knew it the night i met him
something i've never felt before
after class, he'll read this too
try not to believe me for his own sake
tell himself i don't know what i want
or what i might want tomorrow, next year
he's not wrong about that, of course i don't know either

but isn't it beautiful how wrong you can be?

you can love rabbits
and still not want to live like one

sometimes when i eat servery chicken
i'm reminded of the food chain

how you can think that you are the prey
when it's you from whom they run away

what if you're not the warm light of flame
but the wind that threatens to snuff it out?

for years i've had these dreams
where suddenly everyone hates me

i'd wake up with relief and yet
the feeling would tend to stay

maybe being loved changes you
by yourself most of all

i've started wearing my headphones fully
snug over both my ears

i don't try to eavesdrop anymore when
i suspect my parents are discussing me

i used to think i ruined my mother's life
cause it was only for me that she stayed

now when tension swells and voices rise
we listen to lana in my room, my sister and i

i hug her close so that she will know
in this world, she'll never be alone

don't think about what he might be doing.
don't think about whether he still thinks about you.
don't lurk through her instagram.
don't check what artists he's been listening to.
don't think of him when your professor says the word love.
don't look for him in interested, interesting strangers.
don't think about the ambivalence in his eyes.
don't wish things had ended differently.
don't wish you hadn't let him go.

don't wish he missed you enough to call.
don't wish you loved yourself enough to not care.
don't wait on a man with a broken watch.
don't lean on a man who limps through his own life.
don't write with a pen that rips through every page.
don't drink caffeine in the evening.
don't sip on things that stain your teeth.
don't apply vitamin C serum before walking under the sun.
don't replace one problem immediately with another.
don't waste your life knocking on an abandoned building's door.

don't fall in love with men that remind you of your father.
don't forget how beautiful you felt when he looked at you.
don't tell yourself you could never love someone who loves you back.
don't give advice you've never known how to take yourself.
don't say things you don't mean.
don't say what you really mean.
don't bet on losing dogs.
don't bet on winning ones, either, if you know that they will win.
don't tell a lie knowing they won't believe you.
don't tell a lie knowing they might want to.
don't tell people what you think they want to hear.
don't tell yourself that you know what they want from you.

don't fucking tell me you love her, i don't care how many times i asked.

the day after i realized that i’d been drunker than usual, dancing and existing more freely than usual, and you commented on it the next day over greasy burgers. when i automatically assumed the worst, that i’d embarrassed myself somehow, you saw that shift in my face and added that you’d meant it in a good way.

i remember how after we’d left the club i wandered away from you and M #1 in a drunken haze until i had suddenly felt the urge to sit against a wall, any wall. how i had been trying to gather the energy to get up again and call a taxi when my phone lit up with a call from V the liar with a girlfriend. i was still deciding whether to pick up when you found me there.

i remember it was well past 3 am and there were artificially vivid pink flowers snaking over the random apartment entrance where we hid with M #1 because some people — armed with (baseball?) bats, mind you — were having a standoff just down the street.

i remember not peeking out the way you two did — out of security or stupidity or indifference i have yet to decide, in my recollections of that night. maybe i felt safe enough with you two to not worry too much, though we were definitely outnumbered. maybe deep down i didn’t care what was happening, not really. but who’s to say?

i don’t remember how we got past those people but i do remember us saying goodbye to M #1, getting to your place nearby in Beşiktaş and how quickly our lips met in the darkness of your room once you’d shut the door behind you.

i remember feeling then that this night had always been inevitable, that it had always just been a matter of time before we both snapped.

i remember the thud of your brown leather jacket falling off your shoulders, the way your hands roamed hungrily like they knew we were running out of time.

i remember that B’s name came up at some point when we paused for breath and you said with sincerity that she has “always been jealous” of me. how i’d asked you why without really needing or expecting an answer because i already knew why.

i remember the roughness of denim on denim, of you on top of me before we eventually passed out from exhaustion.

i remember finding myself in your bed thursday morning with a parched mouth and how you’d been sleeping next to me, sort of spooning me. how you’d had nothing available to drink except a mostly-empty bottle of Lipton sweet tea, lying tipped over on the floor under your desk for who knows how long.

i noticed then in the daylight the way your entire floorspace was littered with piles of clothes, and for a moment i wondered at how foolish i was, hoping for love from someone who had never been capable of giving it. there’s a saying that comes to mind, something about the act of ordering wine and pasta at a McDonald’s. you won’t be given any, but it’s not because you don’t deserve it. you’re just at the wrong place, asking the wrong person, probably cognizant of this already. but you play your part anyway. maybe a part of you doesn’t think you deserve wine and pasta, and that’s why you fixate on the person least likely to give it to you.

i think i’ve been living out a battle that perhaps had never existed or had resolved years ago without my noticing. but we are pattern-seeking creatures; loving you was a familiar hell i almost let myself drown in.

i remember smoking a cigarette on your balcony while you showered, not sure what else to do with my hands.

i remember you coming back with damp hair, a white muscle tank and blue jeans and how i’d been perched on the dresser beside your porcupine-looking ashtray, overflowing with dozens of cigarette butts. i joked about it — of course i did — and remembered that you’d once admitted back in Cappadocia that you smoke a pack a day.

i remember remembering then how you’d brought cat treats stuffed in an empty cigarette box to Cappadocia with you, and how i liked that we had that in common because i’d brought a bag of treats with me, too.

i remember the taste of ash in my mouth while we smoked on your balcony, how we’d both stared out the window at the spring branches and the pigeons cooing like they had opinions of their own.

i remember finally noticing the blotch of hickeys i’d accidentally left on your neck, how you probably hoped i’d reassure you that you hadn’t really cheated, and how i denied you of the lie.

i remember placing my hand on your shoulder for comfort as you told me that you aren’t the type of person to do this, that you’ve never been put in this position before, how you’d probably have to sit out the next night’s event and maybe even cry a bit after i left.

i remember all the times since of you telling me that it has nothing to do with me, it’s just unfortunate that we met when you were already in a relationship. i wanted so badly then to believe you, to let that explanation be enough, but the ache persisted regardless of the specifics and it has always been so, so easy to drown in my own fears. there is a part of me that still feels fundamentally unloveable, but in killing her i would be killing you, too.

in retrospect, it never sat right with me that you had to cut me out of your life but not B, who for all i know kept flirting with you until the day you flew back to Berlin. months later i saw an insta photo dump of hers — you were in it, and so was a picture of her wearing your flannel ascot cap which i’ve seen her steal and try on more than once. like at shaker night, when you’d interrupted me mid-conversation to place a black turban hat you’d gotten from Cappadocia on my head. she’d taken and worn your cap, but you came and put that one on me. i still wonder what made you decide to stay away from me in the end, but not her, though i think i might know why.

i remember how for a second the air between us suddenly became charged again but by then i was too raw and sober to keep adding to our list of mistakes.

you had to buy concealer for the first time in your life that day, so we went to the nearest makeup store and i did my best to pick out your shade without the option of testing a swab of it first.

we ate islak — ‘wet’ — burgers for lunch, which was usually only consumed at ungodly hours of the night when mobs of hungry drunk people would stumble in and savor every bite, laughter and cigarette smoke rippling through the atmosphere. maybe it was just lingering discomfort in my stomach from drinking the night before but i remember taking a bite and thinking it was somewhat disgusting, with too much sauce that had made the bun both soggy and oily. we ate in silence and you shared your fries, though i didn’t want more than a few. i pitied you inside for having bought two burgers and now having to finish them both, though i’ll never know if you were able to enjoy the second one as much or not. i’ve tried not to think about it in metaphors, something about how everything tastes better when you’re inebriated and ravenous. secretly i hoped you didn’t think of me like that, too: the wet street burger you would only want to taste at night, too much of all the wrong things under the sun.

(not my photo i was too f-ed up to take pics around this time LOL)

i’ve thought to myself more than once that my memory is too sharp for my own good. i still find it to be true. it comes in handy in academic success, the feeling of taking a test or studying for one and having the exact wording of the teacher’s lecture replay in your mind, further crystallized again now for having re-remembered it. it’s a beautiful thing, knowing your mind is sharper than your eyeliner. yet it’s also a curse all the same. it’s why you spent almost every day of your sophomore year of college smoking around the clock, the first and last one to leave the knuckle. you do your math and coding homework high most of the time and wonder almost self-mockingly why your brain feels like a cloud, why your thoughts seem stuffed within a thick syrup that hardens just as fast. never mind that sobriety is its own curse. never mind that your thoughts, unobstructed, always seem to be weapons pointed inwards, often not even needing language to weigh you down the way they do. you feel it too deeply when daisy jones notes that sobriety is like returning to sanity, to reality. but before long, you’re reminded of why you’d wanted to escape it in the first place.

i am undoubtedly the cruelest person to myself in my life right now; i have been for years. but it’s false to say that’s always been the case. it’s just that i learned how to treat myself from them and have continued their job since. sometimes i wonder what type of person i would be had i not spent the first couple years of my life in china. probably still myself, but softer, and stronger, the way an unfractured bone will always be more enduring than a poorly healed one.

i could start by trying not to write to you in all my lines, only occasionally switching to address myself or the reader, the only ones actually in the room with me. i could decide to go on a walk or something, actually step outside to some cool january air, one of the only months in houston where the weather isn’t outright unbearable during the day. i could take in the breeze that sways my hair in the same way it does the tree leaves, feel the sunlight warming my scalp, pockets of energy like steady streams of gifts we forget to be grateful for. but getting my legs to move towards those ends is another battle entirely. i journaled something the other day in my notebook, the one with sunflowers and lana stickers on the cover, bought on clearance from barnes & noble a few years back; something about the act of waiting for healing to come to me when deep down i know it has no legs. there’s a saying in uyghurche, used in response to someone who’s asked you to get or do something for them. it roughly translates to, “were your legs left in the womb when you were born?” i’ve only been on the receiving end of this phrase, always by my parents and especially as a child, but it comes to mind now. years later i still catch myself saying this to myself, every time i end up choosing to do something on my own instead of bothering someone else by asking for a favor. it’s probably what led to me, the day after finally getting a cast for my broken ankle during my semester abroad in istanbul, to make my way down the spiral staircase of my third-floor apartment building without an elevator or even railings balanced precariously on my crutches and saying “bismillah” before each step, though i’m not a religious person anymore. all this effort to make my way, step by step, to an eczane or pharmacy down the street to pick up bone-softening medication or something that i then had to inject into my arm myself for the next ten days, despite my lifelong fear of needles. my sweet flatmate had offered her help, more than once, and i’d watched myself decline each time, a sense of dread and shame at having her feel obligated to ask me these things already creeping into my limbs. there truly has been no physical pain worse than having to ask someone for help, and that’s something i’m still working to rewire in my mind. that’s how i went about life until i cut that cast off less than a week after getting it and kept on walking for the weeks after, always ignoring the pain, despite have been advised to keep it on for at least four weeks. my ankle and the sole of that foot still hurts when i walk too much, and a hobby i had begun to get into in the months before, jogging, is now basically not a possibility for me without having echoes of pain for the next few days.

whenever i see people now, making their way step by step with dedication and a seemingly minimal amount of shame and self-hatred despite having to use crutches for their injury, i feel an ache for the girl i was just a couple months ago, with a freshly broken bone who still chose silence over having to admit dependency even to people who had offered it. i never resented others for not stepping in, because i know i didn’t let them. instead i resented myself, the whole time, for having broken my ankle in the first place — though this makes more sense in the context that i’d jumped out a window with an already sprained ankle, because you’d told me not to that night on our friend’s balcony. i’ve always found a way to blame myself, because it’s honestly easier to see it as something wrong with me because then it is, to some degree, in my power to change. overall it’s a dark place to limp out from, and it’s my first time writing about that day now, finally pushing past the shame to get a good look at the hurt girl i had been underneath all that armor. i don’t know why it’s come to mind now, but maybe i should remind myself of moments like these more often, especially at times where i find myself shaming myself again for not walking towards healing when each step might hurt more than it’s worth. grace is a language i’m teaching myself day by day, word by word.

maybe i’ll start here: you’re not a star, or a planet, or even just a boy. you’re far too inconsequential to be a black hole. i wrote this in a poem once, and it returns to me now: maybe you’re just a Chinese satellite. maybe you’re the part of me that will never feel satiated, content. maybe you’re the part of my mind that wants me to wallow, to spiral, to live in the past so i don’t think too much about the future. to lower my expectations to the bare minimum so i won’t be disappointed again, a pain as physical and strong as any other i’ve felt.

it’s easier to waste your time when you’ve convinced yourself you’re merely nursing your wounds, not picking them back open again. it’s easier to forgive yourself for slacking when you can see you’re still in pain, whatever its origins may be. but the scary part is also the most freeing: the door has always been unlocked. the handle has always been waiting for your hand to dare to turn it. it doesn’t have the language to tell you how, but you already know it in your bones. maybe the lesson here is to take your time with it all.

i seem to always catch myself taking my metaphors way too far again, embellishing you with power and magnitude you never even had. there were slivers of time where i’d get to see through this warped view of you, moments where you’d coughed annoyingly or let me down in ways i hadn’t known i’d been hoping you wouldn’t until you did, and for a moment i’d see you as the disappointing person you’ve maybe always been, just a flash of clarity quickly replaced by the old narrative: it’s my fault i’m unlovable. it’s true that maybe i’m attracted to this, i suspect i’ve always loved the door more than anything else, i might as well learn to cope with the fallout. but if i’m being honest for once i think i might hate the door. i hate knowing that nothing lasts forever, that the longer we stay the more i’ll love you, and the more it’ll hurt when it’s over. i always leave first, i think, but i’ve also always been the last to let go in relationships with people who i know don’t feel the same. attraction repels me still, though i wish it didn’t. i wish soft love and steady presence didn’t feel like slow asphyxiation when deep down i know it’s what i’ve always needed. it’s gotten better, but i see the pattern at play still.

sometimes i see that you’re not a black hole, you’re worse. instead of the mercy of distance or obliteration i have to live with the knowledge that we both inhabit the same planet, we watch the sun rise and set at different times of day, look up at the same cosmic vastness sometimes at the same time, though i’ll never know when those moments occur. i’ll probably never see Berlin or Germans or a million other things indifferently again, and i know a part of my mind might always be calculating what time it must be for you there. i catch myself wondering whether the sun is shining down on you, whether it’s typically cloudy or snowy in your hometown this time of year, how nice the sky is being to you today. i wonder whether you ever look up at the moon and think of me, whether it feels like a curse you try and fail to fight whenever your thoughts float naturally to me. in any case, i hope you wonder sometimes if i’ve cursed you somehow, and in all honesty i don’t know the answer myself. i don’t really know what things i should consider magical versus ordinary, whether my act of sending you the horse was named V landed as a curse more than anything else could have. i hope you struggle and fail to forget me, too, and i’d like to imagine my wishes have come true so i can fall asleep at night without wondering what your last thoughts before you fall asleep might be, whether they ever drift a continent away to a girl who still burns for you. now that i’ve let you know, will you take the effort to choke it out of me? extinguish my flames? (is that what i’ve been hoping you’d do this whole time, a flickering light in the corner of your mind?) or are you just as selfish as me, looking around for more propane or a lighter to keep yourself warm just a bit longer? the worst possibility, i fear, is also the closest to the truth: your cool indifference. perhaps not in your inner world, that’s something i’ll never know for certain, but in your actions for sure. i remember what i’d once written in a poem to you, back in istanbul, though i don’t remember if i sent it to you or not and it would hurt too much to check:

i loved you like a monologue / all breathless, no reply.

i tell myself i’m grateful for this, that your silence only grants me more liberty to spin your memory as i please, but i know it’s only so i won’t cry at the thought that you might have nothing to say to me.

these days i keep asking myself: did you read it all? did you have to google any of the words if you didn’t know what they mean? did you ever reread it, and if so, how many times? which parts did you keep coming back to? which parts refused to be forgotten, pissed you off with how stubbornly they stuck with you? are there sections that made you hate me, miss me, love me, regret ever meeting me? i don’t know why i ask these questions now and try to answer them on my own, knowing i’ll never reach a satisfying answer within this echo-chamber i’ve locked you out of. did you try to call her, apologize or explain yourself away, or is radio silence your go-to method in these situations? do i even want to know?

did you want me to unblock you on WhatsApp so you could call and condemn me more directly for telling her, so that the sound of your disapproval could leak out of my speakers and drip straight into my ears? would you feel a rush of contentment after finally hanging up, feeling like you’ve said all you needed to say, made me feel an amount of guilt you think i deserve to feel? i don’t even know if i would try and defend myself, to tell you my reasons all over again when we both know i’ve long since said enough. or if i would simply be too hurt or preoccupied trying to remember every word you spoke, the particular way in which you said it. would i be able to see the interaction as two-sided, a conversation where i’m actually a participant, the way you’d probably intended it to be? would you intend it to be? that’s another unanswerable question of mine, and i doubt even you know the answer. i haven’t forgotten the way you texted: “you don’t need to answer that”. maybe a part have me has always known that it was never about making myself understood in the end. maybe such a thing is futile, even the entirety of your love had you given it wouldn’t have been enough. i think i learned that the hard way with someone i thought was all i could ever need, but that’s something i’ve yet to get myself to write about. oddly enough, writing about and to you is easier right now than facing that truth.

would you understand why i told her even if it was months later, or are you too caught up with your bruised ego, the lasting impacts of my truth finally being spoken on her view of you? in a way i’m still glad i didn’t unblock you in the end, didn’t respond to your long and almost hateful text on insta after you read and belittled two of my poems. i mused to a friend the other day that i want you to miss me the way i miss you. they pointed out that missing someone comes in part from a place of being denied access to them, that reaching out to you would probably make you miss me less. of course i agree but there’s a stubborn, foolish part of me that refuses to give you up, that doesn’t know how to let you go without feeling like i’ve lost a part of myself, too. or really, that’s not even true. i’ve let you go a million times but not really, you’re still repeating and replaying in my mind almost mockingly. i know it’s my own thoughts telling me i’ll never be enough, but i still hear it in your voice. sometimes i think to myself, thank god we never fucked, i don’t know how much worse i’d be feeling now if we had, if i’d let you enter me in such a visceral way that one night in your apartment instead of us passing out in your bed, clothes intact. maybe my imagination is too vibrant and careless for the rest of me to keep up sometimes. maybe that’s why i keep killing my time with substances every day, whatever i happen to have at the moment, something i’ve done for years before i met you and which i don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. maybe this is entirely an issue of me learning how to relax, how to stop squirming so i can finally find myself afloat on my back, shocked but eventually relieved that that’s what i needed to do all along. and yet in the deepest sense i don’t trust that my body will float, i’m afraid there’s too much weighing me down that has manifested itself physically somehow, in the curve of my shoulders, the cross of my arms, the purse of my lips, my awkward and averted gaze. i feel things so strongly i’m almost convinced each and every time that the feeling will never end, never let go of its hold on me. but when i look down it’s my own hands wrapped around my throat. my body has always had a mind of its own, one that i suspect loves me more than i might ever learn to love it. a part of growing up for me has been trying to learn her language, but often even that isn’t enough, she’s just as clueless as i am.

even after everything you’ve said, after sending the entirety of the unsent letter i had written to you months ago as my only response, i think i still want to hear from you. hell, now you know my email, i tell myself if you really wanted to you would reach out and i know it’s the truth. i even checked if you were blocked on my main insta account too but you haven’t been, so there’s that. i have to say, about a year ago i was on the receiving end of a digital block for the first time (that i knew or cared about), had been blocked on insta but not on iMessage. reaching out still felt wrong so i never did it, as though i’d be intruding somehow, sneaking into a place i know i’m not supposed to be just bracing for a bullet that might’ve never been coming. i’ve even blocked you on Spotify, for fuck’s sake, i keep surprising myself sometimes with how neurotic i can get in these situations.

my mind, i know, is merely fixating on this one ache so that i may have some tangible corner of my problems to pick away at. my familiar hell has perhaps always been loving people like you, random once-strangers who almost never have anything truly special about them, just the average amount of remarkableness that could be found in anyone through the right eyes. i’m aware of the role of my romanticization of you, but it has never stopped me from doing it anyway. deep down i know some other troubled-looking, emotionally unavailable, somewhat intelligent man could replace you. i’ve said this before and its truth rings all over again now, reverberating within the corners of my skull: you never needed to have a face. in fact sometimes i wonder if you ever did.

i think i miss you more than i hate you. i wonder if i hate you more than i love you, whether that’s the reason i’m keeping you out of my life now. i can’t tell if i love my memory of you more than i l*ve you, whether this intensity i feel can even be considered love, or if it’s more aptly described as an irrational obsession. all i’ve ever wanted, i think, is to be held and relaxed and safe in someone’s arms without a deeper part of me feeling the tick of the clock, dreading and anticipating and rehearsing the moment their hold loosens.

i hope you live the rest of your life with an ache, an emptiness you can’t explain. i hope you can’t drink or smoke or fuck or party it away no matter how much you try. i hope no substance will relieve you of this pain, that you’ll always look for me in other people without ever wanting to do so and fall back into a familiar disappointment when they eventually fall short, an intimate and embarrassing and endless dance only people like you and i might understand. in the end perhaps i’m not a good person at all because in all honestly, i don’t want you to be happy without me. at some point i know i felt more merciful towards you but in the process of healing perhaps i’ve begun to lean towards a certain spitefulness, especially after our last interaction where you both lied shamelessly and minimized my perspective and my writing. the truth is i don’t want to let this wound scab over for you when i’ve watched mine try and fail to close over itself for months now, my fingers inching to pick at them the second i move my attention elsewhere. maybe the truth is i don’t want to let you go, i don’t even remember when i picked you up like this in the first place. i never want to think about you again. if you do get a call from me one day, i have no idea if i want you to answer it or not. which one would be worse for me in the long run i feel i already know, but it’s one of those questions you try to avoid asking, already knowing somehow that you wont like the answer.

whenever i start writing i have nearly no idea what i’m wanting to say, but im learning the art of taking it sentence by sentence, word by word. i try not to ask myself what the point is for these things if at the end i may only understand my ache just a bit more, may have flowered it with words that get read by people i’ll never meet but who seem to understand. in a way i feel im almost making it everyone else’s problem, too, reminding them of their own regrets and aches and what-ifs, the things they try not to think about after the song stops and the next one starts playing. is it selfish of me to promote my writing when i can’t imagine someone coming out from reading it happier than they were before? but maybe that’s the wrong metric, maybe it’s not about feeling happier but about feeling understood, i don’t read and love substack posts that are all sunshine and rainbows because no amount of such content might ever touch me as much as feeling seen in such a way.

at the end of another night spent wanting to call you and repeatedly reminding myself of all the reasons not to, i worry i still won’t love you any less when the sun rises again. tonight i caught myself asking the moon about you, while smoking the second half of a cigarette outside my hotel building. i thought about how i’ve passively watched her wax and wane, wax and wane, indifferent to all the happenings on our planet, steady and certain (to an extent) on her gravitational dance through space-time. i couldn’t tell you why but i’ve been meaning to search up what the moon phase had been the night we met, when we’d smoked a cig together and you’d asked me where im from and i’d pointed up at her and smiled. a part of me doesn’t even want to know, realizes that it genuinely doesn’t matter in the end, but the thought that i could search it up if i really wanted to never truly dissipates. maybe some things never fully dissipate.

has the moon sent you my regards yet?

i think i've thought about you
every day, maybe hour since
when i fall asleep you meet me there
instead i stay up most nights til daylight
some days i find it beautiful
others it just makes my eyes hurt

one december night i caught myself
being a fool again, but differently

now it's the next morning and im journaling 
at a park watching a squirrel eat an acorn 
even for just a moment, the view might be
enough to balm my mind
i breathe in the air you left behind
at least i can say now with honesty:
it no longer hurts nearly as much that you 
weren't who you never claimed to be

i bought a pack of menthol Marlboro 100's
for the first time at a corner store
i couldn't decide, said i didn't care 
which wasn't a lie
now im smoking with the squirrels
eying me like they might have something to say
they're probably not wondering what's up with me
they're squirrels, after all

i caught myself speaking turkish 
to some ducks at the pond
afiyet olsun, i remember i said
having just shared some bread
my present overflows with abundance so great i almost forget
the days of my childhood though i doubt
they have forgotten me

afternoons in italy, walks along the coast with my parents
grocery store-bought yet still expensive bag of bread in my hand
i gave the last slice, the butt crust to an italian duck
trying to make each piece last, crumbs carefully tossed into the wind
my mom was standing hungry next to me
waiting to see what i would choose
i was only six, and now sixteen years later
i still wish that i could go back in time
turn towards her with a smile
and offer it, palm flat and open
no words to say as i'd watch the ducks waddle away
i would taste the sun glistening 
off rippling aquamarine waves

i’m not god though sometimes i wish i were
the worst part has to be knowing i could taste you again
i can already imagine it, feel the regret seep into my shoulders and stay
i don’t need another lifetime when i can live it right now
catch these glimpses of what could have been
what might still be
i see it in the way you texted me, maybe you still want me
but i've already paid too high a price to know you
i don't want to find out if i could survive you again

our love was bloodred but 
it was blue sometimes, too

you burned so hot you were blue 
like the fieriest of stars
flames that die fast
phenomena never meant to last
most nights i think that
a slow death would be worse

blue disguises itself as coldness
but really it scorches so strong
it fries your nerves into
numb expectancy
i think that’s what your silence
did to me

i’m sorry to her, but
i'll never be to you

don't you know you'll
never be painted 
/ preserved
like this again?

tell me now
should i pity you for it?

sometimes i catch glimpses
of a future where i'm still around

i already suspect 
you will live on in my art but
i think i might've killed you 
long ago

i read something once
in a book i can't recall
maggie nelson's, maybe
how she's never stopped
loving anyone
never learned
how to

i think i have 
the same ailment
nights like this i wonder
will it ever feel like anything
but a curse?

i imagine your days lurch on
unsatisfied
drinking with friends 
depthless smiling faces 
blurring into one smiling face

dont you know
no one asks mona lisa
what her favorite colour is
not only because 
she’s long dead
but maybe because
such things never mattered
in the end

how can you tell me i've "reopened" a wound 
when mine never got to close?

don't claim you told her everything when
we both know that’s a lie
she said she’s always wondered
what you’ve been trying to hide

you'll never know the extent to which
i've erased you from your image

just believe me when i 
tell you this: 
i've loved far better
liars than you

i spoke the truth for her sake, so
i won't explain myself now
to a man who’s only ever cared
for love that's built on truths unshared

there are things i only think about
under the right conditions
meticulous chemical cocktails, like
a never-ending experiment

i've lingered here for far too long 
you've loitered around for long enough

in my mind's master bedroom
i can't tell if i've 
locked you inside
or if i'm the prisoner 
waiting for your knock so that
i won't have to step out alone

i'm not sure how to tell you
i need you more than i want you

but anyway
i’ve kept the door unlocked
hoping that one day 
you'll finally walk through 

i know i'm being a fool again
asking a dog to fucking fly
yet it still fucking hurts when you 
aren't who you never claimed to be

did your heart jump a bit there,
faced with your faceless depiction?
were you scared for a moment?
what if i said that i 
wanted you to be?

holding my heart has been exhausting lately
i keep writing for reasons unknown to me

a part of me hates you still
but it's calming now, knowing how
people see you through my eyes, so
i'm no longer the only monster

i think i've outsourced my emotions
you never needed to have a face

hi,

or hello,

or hey girly,

or what?

i wanted to say
it’s been half a year at least but
i’ve been meaning to say
what i didn’t know how to say
how to even start
the way i kept his secret like
it wasn’t mine at all

a good friend told me yesterday
he can be sorry, but
that doesn’t mean
it didn’t happen

she told me to
finally tell you
but in the morning, once
i’d slept on it first
so here i am
telling myself i will tell you
though my mind blanks when
i think of it all

i see your face now
in insta-sized proportions
pixelized perfection 
glowing on my phone screen
the only version of you
i’ll ever meet
i know that you’re real but
my body can’t imagine yours
how your presence might feel
entering any room
how much he might've
missed it all those months
sitting across from me
brown eyes that maybe saw
slivers of you in me

maybe all he saw was
the cuts on our arms
i’ll never know if he has
ever carved out his own scars 
is it wrong of me now
to envy you for knowing?

my friend is right
if he hasn’t told you
you deserve to know
if he has told you
you deserve an apology
from me as well

i feel insane
for someone who was never mine
don’t worry, love, i'm sure
he always loved you more
maybe that’s just 
how they come and go

if you don't mind though, 
i really want to know:
can i ask you how
it feels to have him stay?

you look fall-in-loveable
i think i might some nights as well

are you still together?
did you ever suspect?
were his friends from Berlin
your friends, too?
do you pity me the way that i
think i might pity you?

what if i
told you how
we talked about love,
our dating history and
his crazy ex
not once did he
mention you to me
not once did i
try to acknowledge thee

the ghost in the room
you’re what i assumed
you’re definitely pretty but
he thought i was, too

what if i told you that
it was me who convinced him that
a six-month relationship
is actually considered “long”
i think he’d downplayed it
but for my sake or his own,
i still can’t say i know

i looked the other way
every time i saw how
he minimized you
“i miss my dogs more”
when someone asked him
if he ever missed you

i tell you now because
i think i’d want to know
what’s been my secret to keep
is now my truth to speak
my silence would be worse 
than a homewrecker’s letter
slid under your digital door
(when all is said and done
i hope he loved you more)

i talk about you randomly to friends, usually when i’m under the influence, who in the end feel bad for me and/or judge my morals for not walking away the second i learned you were taken.

i remember the exact night i did: shaker night at Liberta pub, at an exchange student mixer held just outside campus. we’d planned beforehand for you to spend the night on my couch because buses don’t run after midnight on weekdays and it was on some random monday, only a few hours after our talk at the cafe.

at one point, someone at our table — Ö, president of the exchange student org — asked if you have a girlfriend and you said with some amount of sheepishness that you did. it didn’t occur to me until later that she had asked already knowing the answer; she and B, another officer, definitely knew that much about you by then. she always had the look of someone doing the right thing but mostly for the drama of it.

do you remember when we left the pub at its closing and Ö tried to drag me away by the arm to leave you alone with B, who has always flirted shamelessly with you despite knowing your relationship status?

the whole time i was distracted by a wordless conversation with you, not sure whether i should just walk away and let you figure your lodging out. but in the end we walked home together, occasionally sidetracked by neighborhood cats that i saw every day, the sound of our footsteps on cement the only thing cracking through the silence between us. except, of course, when we’d come across a cat and i’d try to catch its attention with kissy noises, telling you its name or personality if i happened to be familiar with it.

i know a lot of what we shared had been our love for animals — the cats and dogs we would feed, gushing over them with a fervor i think only pleasantly intoxicated people are able to reach. i’ve always been this way and i think you are the same: there’s nothing quite like the feeling of enjoying something so much that you’re beyond the point of feeling like you have to put words to it. to name something is to pin it down and hope it makes sense, but to experience it is to let the moment be enough for you.

we smoked one last cig on my balcony before bed, you on the couch in the living room and me staring at the ceiling of my bedroom like it might tell me what i should do. while we smoked you’d commented that my view of the bridge was nice but you’d assumed it was closer when i’d told you about it before. months later, exchanges like that make me think about the prevalence of misunderstandings, the accumulation of subtle discrepancies when two people use the same words but imagine something different entirely.

you’d explained to me earlier that day that you were in a relationship but it wasn’t a super serious or long-term one. i didn’t ask then when you’d started dating and looking back sometimes i wish i had, because how was i to know that a six-month relationship isn’t considered serious to you when i’ve never had one last longer than two months without the disturbance of some emotional crashout on my end? some nights i find myself wondering whether you downplayed those months with her in a failed attempt to tell me something without having to actually say it. wondering about these things now is pointless but i do it anyway, even though i suspect i’ll only stray farther from the truth the more i stir it into something probably more meaningful than it needs to be. but that’s something i’ve learned from my venture into writing: there are different levels of truth, and it’s alright to write about what still lingers with you, which parts outlived the connection and stay with you still. because they often tell you more about yourself, and maybe that’s where the real lesson is.

we were late to our morning classes but it was alright because a campus cat curled into my lap during our trek to class and you offered to take a picture, seeing my attempt to take a selfie while exuberantly cooing Turkish pet names at her. so i handed you my phone and the moment was immortalized: my unlit cig in hand, your red scarf you’d draped over my shoulders because you thought it was chilly for what i was wearing; my smile wide across my face, a furry white and orange bundle of love napping lightly on my lap. i have that picture months later on my bedroom wall now, among others from my semester abroad, because of how magical it felt in the moment to be chosen like that by a cat, known to be selective with who they show affection to. and because of how genuinely i’d been smiling at the camera, because for a few seconds there i think there was truly nowhere else i’d rather be.

not everything i remember tastes like honey. i remember my blurred vision and simmering rage about a week later when i changed your contact name to “V the liar with a girlfriend,” feeling like i needed that reminder. though in the end i doubt it ever helped. i’m not even sure what would count as “helping” in this situation, considering that i was stuck in a power struggle between parts of my mind that wanted to either pull you in as close as you’d let me, or chuck you out of my orbit entirely.

completed:

• in the dream house — Carmen Maria Machado

  • 5/5 i loved this book

i’m writing you another letter i don’t intend to send in hopes that retracing my memories will satiate the part of me still clinging to the familiar ache of loving you. (also because i have a writing assignment for a class, but that’s the more boring reason.) maybe i’m finally ready to tell this anecdote in a way that might capture the surreality of those months in Istanbul, at least or especially in relation to you.

i still miss you sometimes and by that i really mean this: i still project my dissatisfaction and worthlessness onto all that happened and didn’t happen between us.

sometimes at night when i’m alone and more lenient with what i let myself get away with i search up your Spotify account again, always with an appropriate amount of shame.

i examine the profile picture of you mid-cig inhale and think of how i’d thought it was kind of ugly when i first saw it, back when we’d created a blend playlist to see what music we both like — the playlist you would go on to silently delete at some point before making one with/for her.

i guess now it’s how i’ll remember you most — not as a flawed man, but as an idea gone sour.

~~~

i remember the night we met: you smoking a cig during a snack stop on a trip to Cappadocia, and me coming down from a spontaneous acid trip i’d taken earlier that day, asking to borrow your lighter even though i already had one. no ulterior motives on my end, really; i tell myself i was just lazy and intrigued by your face, how your smile and eyes reminded me of someone i knew back home. specifically, you struck me as a pale, frail, German echo of a boy from my Age of Islamic Empires class the previous semester, a cowboy of sorts from some rural armpit of the state i call home — someone i’d had a brief fling with in the months before my time abroad.

i remember wondering afterwards whether i would have fallen so hard if i hadn’t met you in such a state to begin with. but fallen isn’t the right word. rather, i let you in, not foreseeing the extent of your infiltration until it was too late, until i was left alone and hating myself for breaking my own heart again.

i remember you asked where i was from between puffs of smoke and i said the moon. i wasn’t lying, exactly, and sometimes it still feels like i can see your reflection in its smile if only i pay enough attention. sometimes i think about how the light it reflects at night is from the same source as the rays that kiss your face.

within hours you stole our mutual friend’s bus seat to sit next to me for the rest of the long road trip. after only a few conversations, a few cigs, a few jokes, we would become tethered, if not inseparable — two celestial bodies orbiting each other in an ebb and flow that only we could feel, though most everyone else saw.

that first night neither of us was able to sleep but by morning we had arrived at Pigeon Valley, which (unsurprisingly) had a fuck ton of pigeons.

i remember our group exploring Cappadocia, how at one point we’d climbed up some snow-covered rock formations and you scraped your hand on the way back down. i don’t know why but i had shown concern initially but went on to make fun of you whenever it came up in the days afterward.

i remember being tipsy and laughing with our friends at the hotel afterparty in Cappadocia, a few days after i’d met you. we had just come back from a Turkish dinner party, where i’d been too eager to try raki for the first time so i’d taken a sip before realizing you’re supposed to dilute it first. needless to say i’m never drinking raki again.

but overall that night has stuck with me as a good one, because when we’d entered the Turkish dining hall there had been flags hung up around the room, and it was an unexpected surprise to see the Uyghur/East Turkestan flag hanging there, too. an odd relief had come over me then, a soft reminder that there are still places in the world that can make me believe, even temporarily, that i might also belong.

the question where are you from? gets complex quickly, and to an extent my response has some level of randomness to it, or at least an outcome that can’t be predicted in advance by just knowing how each individual factor plays a part. do i assume they’ve heard about Uyghurs before? how do i even pronounce it in a way that doesn’t confuse them? what if they recognize wee-gur or uy-ghur but i choose to say the wrong one, the one they don’t know? this has the simple solution of just saying both, but not everything does — in fact, the interesting things usually don’t. sometimes there’s a point past which i can see people have stopped trying to understand, and i can’t always blame them; in fact i usually can’t.

when a guy meets a girl who looks ethnically ambiguous, as i’ve been told i do, he doesn’t want or at least doesn’t expect it to become a conversation about China’s modern-day genocide against its minority populations. sometimes i don’t want that either, so i make simplifications that they can choose to ask me to elaborate if they want me to. oh, i’m basically turkic. no, i’m not turkish. i’m central asian. like, similar to uzbeks and kazakhs. (i only recently realized i need to pronounce those in an americanized way too, or i end up just confusing them more.) or sometimes it’s inconceivable to people that we speak a language that’s vastly different from mandarin, that our closest lingual neighbor is a nearby country instead.

i try not to underestimate people’s ability to understand. usually, and increasingly more lately, it’s me who simplifies the conversation, who moves on from the topic, because i don’t always want to start thinking about ethnic cleansing. doing so sometimes makes me want to take a bong rip so fat i forget what their question was, what our conversation was about, how to process speech. yet it isn’t lost on me how much of a privilege it is to be able to do that; to divert the conversation to something mundane or at least more interpersonally relevant, something that doesn’t leave you with a sinking feeling in your limbs, examining the heavy silence that ensues, no one really sure what they wanna say because what is there to say? inside me there’s almost a battle of sorts between guilt and exhaustion when it comes to not talking about this stuff. i’m not sure how many times i’ve explained my ethnicity in my lifetime, but you tend to form a script, or at least guidelines for what to say next. the simple, dismissive answers often feel like both betrayal and self-care, in a game you’ll lose no matter what you choose.

i remember how i’d sat on the window ledge of the hotel room surrounded by other exchange students back at the hotel, and you were sprawled and seemingly somewhat hammered on the only couch in the room. i want to say it was brown or burnt orange but i could be wrong and it also doesn’t really matter. i remember i went to say goodnight to you before leaving with a hug that turned into me pecking you on the lips, something i hadn’t planned until it happened. i remember you didn’t escalate the kiss but you didn’t pull away either, and in no time i was headed for the door, caked with exhilaration at what i’d just done. i still don’t know who all saw it happen since we weren’t exactly alone, and i realize now in retrospect that i may have been the only one in the room that night who didn’t know you were taken.

i remember the next morning, us waiting outside the hotel for everyone to gather by the bus that would take us more places to sightsee. how you may or may not have muttered “good morning,” my memory fails me there, but you handed me your lighter before i even asked. i hadn’t needed one right then but i took it and used it anyway.

i remember how we smoked there in silence, then boarded the bus, and at one point i might’ve fallen asleep leaning on your shoulder. we quickly went back to talking as if last night had never happened, though there were moments that morning that felt especially liminal, like there was a fork in the road and neither of us was going to be the one to take the first step.

i remember us drinking coffee and talking about our relationship experiences the day after returning from Cappadocia and how you didn’t once mention that you had a girlfriend back in Berlin, though a part of me might have always suspected it.

i remember when it was my turn to share my dating history, how evasive i suddenly became, not sure how much i wanted to tell you about my history of short and intense attempts at intimacy. i didn’t want you to see me differently from all i could have told you, not realizing then that shields can be more repulsive than the truth.

in the end i said something vague about my lingering feelings for an ex, how it had been a right person, wrong time situation, which was true but not as true as i wanted it to be. maybe my averted gaze said more than language ever could have when you asked me why it ended and i couldn’t find the right words, the right version of events that i could recount without feeling like i’d revealed too much too fast too recklessly.

but if i’m honest with us both, i caught a glimpse of your phone wallpaper once that first day when you moved to sit with me on the bus. i thought i saw a picture of a girl, but i couldn’t be sure, and i remember immediately wanting to assume it was your sister or something (but who even does that?). i guess that deep down i wanted to not believe it, so i must’ve willed myself to forget it, convincing myself that you would’ve told me if it actually mattered.

it didn’t help that the next time i glimpsed your phone background, no more than a day or two after, i saw you’d replaced it with a picture of your dogs and were acting less vigilant than before about angling your screen away from my view.

i remember the wooden rosary in your hand, wrapped around your wrist as you fiddled with it, and how it looked heavier than it actually was. i remember i somehow came to wear it at Cappadocia and for some days after. what i’d loved most about it was that it smelled like you, a scent i’ve always struggled to put into words, but the closest i’ve found is a candle scented “Cozy Woods & Amber” at my local Dollar Tree.

the more time has passed, the more i’ve found it odd that you always wore a silver cross necklace, cross earrings, the rosary, maybe even a ring — though that last detail is blurry to me now. because you weren’t religious — you told me you identify as an atheist, even joked a couple times about god’s non-existence in the time i knew you. in retrospect it seems fitting somehow, that you’d wear these shining emblems of faith without any real belief behind them.

1. the hollow half - sarah aziza

2. on earth we’re briefly gorgeous - ocean vuong

3. girl, interrupted - susanna kaysen

4. men we reaped - jesmyn ward

5. the glass castle - jeannette walls

6. heavy - kiese laymon

7. brutalities - margo steines

8. girl, 1983 - linn ullmann

9. hunger - roxane gay

10. bluets - maggie nelson

11. in the dream house - carmen maria machado

information/learning something

1. why we sleep - matthew walker

2. how to change your mind - michael pollan

3. the body keeps the score - bessel van der kolk

4. how not to be wrong - jordan ellenberg

5. godel, escher, bach - douglas r hofstadter (long/dense but worth it)

6. the social leap - william von hippel

7. the social animal - david brooks

guilty reads

1. normal people - sally rooney

2. my year of rest and relaxation - ottessa moshfegh

3. verity - colleen hoover

dystopian

1. brave new world - aldous huxley

2. 1984 - george orwell

3. scythe series - neal shusterman

4. unwind series - neal shusterman

misc. fiction

1. ninth house - leigh bardugo

2. the maidens - alex michaelides

3. the silent patient - alex michaelides

4. where the crawdads sing - delia owens

5. challenger deep - neal shusterman

6. a thousand splendid suns - khaled hosseini

7. the kite runner - khaled hosseini

8. daisy jones and the six - taylor jenkins reid

9. the seven husbands of evelyn hugo - taylor jenkins reid

10. 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world - elif shafak

poetry

1. violet bent backwards over the grass - lana del rey

2. ariel - sylvia plath

3. gold - by rumi, translated by haleh liza gafori

4. the sun and her flowers - rupi kaur

self help (?) / wholesome

1. the untethered soul - michael singer

2. buy yourself the f*cking lilies - tara schuster

3. what i wish i knew when i was 20 - tina seelig

4. you are a badass - jen sincero

5. more than a body - lindsay & lexie kite

6. meditations - marcus aurelius

7. the alchemist - paulo coelho

8. the midnight library - matt haig

9. the little prince - antoine de saint-exupery

i’ve been rereading the hollow half by sarah aziza and i’m finding more lines to underline or highlight each time. a couple nights ago i finally went through with sending her a letter through the contact option on her website, something i’d thought about doing for days before but had been too high too often to actually follow through. so i emailed her at 4 AM on a thursday night, knowing i wouldn’t be attending my 9 AM or 1 PM classes, my sentences imperfect and almost stumbling over each other. i pressed “send” before i could start rereading and overthinking and changing my mind, kind of like what i’ll end up doing with this piece.

i’ve been checking substack almost impulsively, refreshing my activity page like a starved rat caged in a Skinner box. i joined four nights ago and i’ve reached eleven subscribers, which simultaneously blows my mind and yet also feels a bit underwhelming. i wonder if i’ve uploaded things that are too long, already knowing that that’s the case but also knowing i probably won’t do something about it until i absolutely have to make a shortened version for MFA application writing samples.

sometimes i wonder if i come off as bizarre, and a part of me already knows i do, probably especially to strangers who only know me through the things i overshare online (this piece, for example). but i’ve genuinely never been happier, which perhaps says a lot about the 21, almost 22 years of life behind me. it’s something i believe when sober, too, if you ever catch me in that state. i’m medicated and productive and maybe too ambitious for my own good, but it certainly feels justified as an Uyghur immigrant from China, where my entire extended family still lives without the option to leave. our region is unironically called an open prison.

a few weeks ago i randomly started crying at a Chinese restaurant right off campus when a friend mentioned their grandfather was visiting them for lunch the next day and i got the sudden thought that i don’t know if i’ll get to see my grandparents again before they die. it sounds dramatic to my own ears so it must sound even more so to everyone else’s, but it’s also the most realistic outcome.

to combat the feeling of hopelessness and incredulousness that came over me, i did what any unhinged college student would do: i stole the wooden chopsticks i’d been eating with. i wiped the orange chicken sauce off on a napkin, inconspicuously slipped them in my bag, then did a combination of a piece sign and my tongue sticking out to lighten the mood from the heaviness i’d suddenly and unexpectedly dropped onto my well-meaning friends who (understandably) didn’t know what to say. i knew it wouldn’t make me feel better, two wooden sticks are nothing compared to the systematic genocide of a people, but i took them anyway, ignoring the thought that the restaurant itself was not to blame because it was more about the “symbolism” of the act. plus, i told myself, they probably wouldn’t even notice it’s gone.

the truth is i don’t feel the absence of my family every holiday, every birthday, every time of year when everyone i know has plans with relatives. it’s an old wound by now, one i’ve learned to push past for the most part — crying and feeling sorry for myself isn’t a great survival strategy, after all. maybe this emotional bottling makes every burst of grief that slips out of me all the more dramatic, and maybe worse, unexpected.

the other day i realized i don’t remember my dad’s brother’s name. earlier today i tried to remember the word in Uyghurche for safety, but i couldn’t, only words that come close enough but which translate more directly to health or fine. i could easily search it up, i know this, but i also know it’s not really just about the word at all.

writing feels like survival because to me it really is.