wrong room
I keep ending up in the wrong room.
Not metaphorically.
Actually.
Standing there too long.
Holding something I didn’t bring.
Everyone else is already arranged.
It’s my city.
I know the streets, the shortcuts, the bathrooms that lock.
Still I’m always early or late or misfiled.
Always hovering near the door.
Someone says my nae and means someone else.
I stay anyway.
I learn the layout.
I don’t touch anything that looks important.
Every room feels rented.
Every welcome conditional.
I don’t leave because nothing’s wrong.
I don’t belong because nothing’s wrong.
impossible blue
Sometimes I watch ASMR.
Candy bitten close to the microphone.
Gelatin.
Crystal.
Bubs.
Taki-dusted pickles.
Crunch.
Juice.
An impossible blue.
I don’t want to eat it.
I want to hear it snap.
letting me pass
Freedom is my favourite hard-boiled Calpis sweets
on the air-conditioned bus home.
Sticky heat outside.
Windows rattling.
Nobody asking.
Nobody owed.
Sugar on my tongue.
A mirage on the road.
The heat and the weed playing with my head.
The city letting me pass.
No Archive
I arrived with a history in my mouth and did not offer it.
They fed me after the swim.
As you feed something that might bolt.
Salt on my skin.
Teeth still intact.
No one asked my former name.
No one reached for the wound.
Care without mercy.
Shelter without promise.
I learned how to stay still.
How to eat.
The past loosened its grip.
Not healed.
Just unscented.
Nothing here wants my story.
Nothing keeps a record.
I remain
because I am undocumented.
After the Last Day
Yesterday was the last day of the year. I walked a dog that was not mine through a park I had not claimed. The leash felt light in my hand, like something I was trusted with but not expected to keep.
An older couple stopped me. They asked for my name. The question sounded practiced. As if they had learned, over time, that this was how you entered a moment properly. Their voices were calm. They waited for the answer.
They threw the ball, wet with drool, farther than I expected. The dog missed it. They laughed, quietly. When I bent down to clean up after him, they were already moving, already helping, without asking. It felt agreed upon. Ordinary. Shared.
Nothing about it asked to be remembered. That was the relief.
The park was worn in the right places. Grass flattened by use. Trees standing without urgency.
My body stayed where it was. I was not scanning the edges. I was not preparing to leave. I did not feel watched or evaluated.
This might be what being in the right place feels like. Not happiness. Not arrival. Just alignment. Being spoken to with care. Being helped without conditions.
Being allowed to exist without having to account for it.
I walked the dog back.
I fell asleep before midnight. The year changed without me. When I woke up, nothing felt different.
It had been just another day.
let the light in
I listened to it everywhere.
Subways. Headphones pressed tight.
Smoke clinging to my coat
even after I’d stepped outside.
Walking blocks for no reason.
Standing still and calling it walking.
Sitting alone at a bar
with a drink I didn’t want
but paid for anyway.
Sometimes I was waiting for you.
Sometimes I was just making noise
so my thoughts wouldn’t surface
all at once.
Fog as a Body I Once Lived In
Some nights the fog reaches me before the memory does. New York swallowed me; Sydney softened me. This is the story of the body I lost, the one I rebuilt, and the ghosts that still follow.
Notes from a city I carried home
Some nights the fog gets there first.
Before memory.
Before I can stop it.
It sits at the doorway.
The way New York used to stay in my clothes.
Long after I was inside.
Long after I washed them.
I got high to blur the edges.
Not to escape.
Just to make the shape less sharp.
I didn’t have words yet.
Only friction.
New York took me in whole.
Sydney is where I wake up inside the fog and forget why.
The air here is warm.
That still surprises me.
There was a night before someone left.
A body next to mine.
Breathing lined up.
The stupid hope that if nothing moved, nothing would end.
Ridgewood felt submerged.
I smoked on Woodward.
Walked until hours fell apart.
Sundays bled into Mondays.
Every morning already wrong.
What stays isn’t him.
It’s the cats.
Warm weight.
Fur on my hands.
I fed them like it mattered.
I left thinking I’d be back.
I didn’t know that was the last morning.
I didn’t know doors close quietly.
I can’t remember the walls of the room.
Just a yellow shirt.
Too bright.
Like a warning I pretended not to read.
The fog isn’t a person.
It’s the city.
It’s wanting somewhere else so badly you wake up there
and still haven’t arrived.
borrowing the city
Other nights there was coke.
Blur.
Borrowed confidence.
Everything sharp.
Nothing real.
We walked to the train like the city was ours.
Like this wasn’t temporary.
Like it wouldn’t ask for itself back.
The Double Doubler (excerpt)
On money, hope, and the small rituals we mistake for luck.
The bodega on Myrtle had a scratched plexiglass counter that caught the fluorescent light in ugly angles. I stopped there every night and handed over a single dollar for a Double Doubler. I told people it was a harmless habit, something to close the day with, but that was never the truth. I needed something tiny to stretch further than it ever should. I needed the illusion that my luck, or our luck, might still decide to split open.
Money was tight and everything else was tighter. Those little tickets were the only part of the day where the math didn’t feel predetermined. I scratched for both of us, though I would have died before admitting it. I kept trying to turn one dollar into a sign that things might ease up, that we might catch a break, that we weren’t always going to be one bad week from disappearing through the floorboards. Hope felt safer when it didn’t look like hope.
Excerpt from a personal essay currently under submission.
Before the Wire Went Dead
My twenties were a hallway with no exits. Wrong doors, wrong hours, wrong men. New York rewired me on blackout nights. This is the story of the version of me who didn’t survive, and the one who did.
My twenties were a hallway with no exits.
Wrong doors. Wrong men. Wrong hours. I kept walking like the floor owed me nothing.
If you slipped out quietly, good.
Some rooms rot.
Some rooms bite whoever stays too long.
New York rewired me on blackout nights and empty platforms.
Something snapped and never came back.
Some nights the glitch arrives before I do.
Some nights it’s the only real thing.
Some nights I miss the girl from before the wire went dead.
Almost
There are versions of my life that almost happened. Versions of me that almost stayed, almost loved, almost survived. This is the quiet reckoning with every future I nearly stepped into, and the one I finally chose.
I looked back at the year tonight and the worst part is how quickly I accepted the damage.
Kimchi Fried Rice
When I lived in New York, I used to dream about free will.
Not in the ways people talk about it.
Not escape. Not reinvention. Not becoming someone louder or braver.
I pictured myself making kimchi fried rice.
I saw it clearly.
A pan heating on the stove. Oil blooming across the surface.
Cold rice pressed flat until it crackled at the edges.
The sharp smell of kimchi cutting through the room.
That was the fantasy.
Not love.
Not permanence.
Just deciding what to eat, and when.
The Late Walk
A late walk can unravel more than a night. The things we remember, the things we carry, the versions of us that follow. This is the story of what still walks beside me long after the streets go quiet.
I passed someone tonight with your exact build. The same white hair you always insisted wasn’t stress, the same slight hunch you carried without noticing. For a second I thought it was you. I used to call you Quasimodo under my breath, but the way my body reacted before my mind caught up wasn’t a joke.
Rotting Clean
There’s a version of me still stranded on a Ridgewood platform at 4am. Pretty on the outside. Rotting clean. A micro-essay about the nights that refuse to stay dead.
There’s a version of me still stranded on a Ridgewood platform at 4am.
She won’t stay dead.
The city noticed when I vanished.
I didn’t.
I was too busy falling apart with perfect nails.
Pretty on the outside.
Rotting clean.
Distance
Distance changes shape depending on where I stand; between cities, between versions of myself, between what I left and what stayed. This is the space I learned to live inside when nothing lined up anymore.
I can name the exact moment it shifted. The mosaic lamp we picked up in Williamsburg buzzing overhead, and the way you said my name in a tone that didn’t belong to you anymore. It was so foreign I almost stopped moving.
A Love Letter Written Between Two and Four (micro excerpt)
A love letter written in the hours when the city goes quiet and the truth gets loud. A fragment about tenderness, distance, and the moment that stayed long after everything else fell apart.
This is the loneliest I have ever been. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of standing beside someone who cannot hold what you carry. I moved to a country where I knew no one. I crossed an ocean for a man who does not understand the cost of that decision. The cats breathe evenly. Their steadiness embarrasses me with its simplicity. It also saves me in ways I cannot name.