Dear August, My friend and I met up and talked about isolation. The week prior had been rough as I had to deal with letting go of people. Then, it seemed like asking for more when I went on to live alone for a week in a city so strange and vast. Yet, ironically, the solitude afforded me solace and a most welcome company, that is, myself. I was also at a point in my...

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Dear June, The long stretch of road is daunting; but it affords me time to mull things over, to just see and just exist. No use in trying to put into film these passing scenes on a moving window, the light peeking through every roadside tree, these mountains and these oceans; they all end up blurry and shaky. Better yet to capture a feeling than chase a memory with a tangible thing such as a...

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midnight Words rolled off the tongue at midnight, I found. Anyone could promise you anything, worst of all love or friendship. But such promises gave little consolation. If anything, what a promise could set us up for was the disillusion. We got lost on the road. And I fell asleep and missed the first moments of dawn. By the time I woke up, we somehow found the right way and everything looked too bright.  sunrise...

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When something has stirred something within you - a nostalgia for what can never be - you first dive in and eventually sink into this feeling of being out-of-touch. Underwater, you exist. But life is less real. Words out of your mouth cease to come across as they should. The order of things are muddled. Perhaps this world - the world that is real - is not mine to live in. Some place somewhere, some...

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Restless summers end. Now there is time to catch one’s breath and there is a bit more room to grow. Summer unfolds through conversations, crossing oceans, bus rides. What remains is a pile of thoughts for mulling over. After all is done, what has changed over the course of a summer? i. Midnight on the road; nothing to see but the measured interval of roadside lamps. I breathed in the air that carried with it...

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Dear May, We left at four in the morning while the rest of the city was still asleep. I sat by the car window and wrapped myself snugly with a scarf. I listened to Petit Biscuit and began to doze off. One time I woke up to look at the dawn outside the window, which was casting this dreamy, bluish glow on our sleepy faces. It felt like a scene belonging to a film, especially...

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Dear August, i. In Alice Munro's short story collection, Too Much Happiness, there's a piece called Face.  It was about a boy who had a big, wine-colored birthmark on his face. This birthmark gave his father a reason not to like him, even calling him, "a chunk of chopped liver."  He had a childhood friend named Nancy, the daughter of the woman who was staying at their guesthouse. The two children became inseparable and most of the story...

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Dear July twenty, "In the original version of 'Mary Poppins', there is a heartbreaking chapter about a pair of infant twins. As babies, they speak to a starling, and they understand what the wind whispers to the cherry trees on its way back up into the sky. The babies swear that they'll never be the adults who coo ridiculously at their bedsides, oblivious to the language of the flowers and bees. But, of course, they...

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