The Unofficial Guide to Life
Today was the kind of day where you wake up and don’t expect anything particularly interesting to happen. It was Monday, it was raining, the beach was perfectly calm and not at all windy. But then, against all odds, at 2:30 in the afternoon, I witnessed somebody rob a car.
Continue reading “Car Thief”
There is someone on my street who has excellent taste in music. I don’t recognize half the songs playing, but all of them are evocative, sentimental, and oddly cheerful, reminding me of the type of songs a person would listen to in the olden days, or when looking back on life, or while in the middle of living a very colourful life, or because he knows a great deal about life, or because he just really like dancing or staring into space.
Continue reading “My Neighbour’s Music”
Reading on a windowsill is not just sitting on a windowsill with your nose in a book. Since the beginning, it’s meant something more to me. The image of some ideal life I wanted to achieve, a symbol of being luxuriously lazy, of having an infinite amount of time, of being young enough or old enough to be free from real life.
Continue reading “Reading on a Windowsill”
It’s been one month since I sat down to write a blog post which I never ended up finishing. It is nearly the end of June now; it is summer. The world is soft and green, stretching out like the perfect lawn in front of the perfect house, or else like a very fine afternoon, or a very soft blanket. I’m 29 now, and in a new relationship, and applying for a Masters program at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve also had one dose of the vaccine and sat in bars, bookshops, and restaurants. I’ve felt very happy, felt very confused, felt like I stood up for myself and then felt like I should have done a better job of it.
Continue reading “On Life Going On”
I am always thinking about things to do until I eventually do them and start thinking about other things to do. Before, I would think about things to do in whatever city I was in and I would make lists and cross things off. I would spend hours commuting on the bus thinking about things to do before I was twenty-five, before I was thirty, before I was some arbitrary age where I felt I had to cross some invisible finish line in order to feel accomplished.
Continue reading “Things to Do”
Life can be very, very blue until suddenly it is not. I often think about those winter mornings when it was always dark and I was always cold, rushing to places I didn’t want to be and worrying I was too old when I was really very young. There weren’t too many good things about those mornings – being half-asleep and fighting for the spot by the door on the skytrain – except for the sky.
Continue reading “Pink Skies”
For the first time in forever, I went to a café. Going to a café is a very normal thing to do but even normal things become thrilling when you haven’t experienced them in a while. Sitting at that little table, I felt like an old person revisiting a childhood home or looking through photo albums and reliving distant memories. Things came back; I remembered.
Continue reading “Remembering”
It’s May, the most gentle month of the year. So far, it’s rained every day and I’m wearing a winter jacket again but I don’t care and neither does anybody else. It rained on my walk today, the type of rain that falls sideways and makes your hair stick to your face. I passed shops I had never seen before, saw signs of life in places that were once deserted. Chairs and tables have appeared in empty spaces. People, too, seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, their shapes visible behind glass windows where I once only saw my own reflection.
Continue reading “Coming Alive”
Cherry blossoms combine every lovely, soft, and delicate thing in the world. I see them and I think about happiness, and their petals in puddles, and that spring I spent in Japan, being very young in a very old country.
Continue reading “Blooming”
Things I Learned Growing Up 