#6: Happiness and other small gods.
The seventeen state of mind, Japanese Breakfast, and the perfect living room.
pov: you’re going home. listen while reading for best experience.
On telling celebrities you love them
After Japanese Breakfast’s show, my friends and I camped out by the venue’s back exit like groupies on the wrong side of town.
Next to an overflowing dumpster, I listed everything I wanted to say to her. I could tell her how I cried reading Crying in H Mart 35,000 feet in the air. Or how I studied the book’s first installment during a writing workshop and decided I would one day write personal essays, too. I was 17 then, more confused and heartbroken than I was a writer. I read her article over and over again, unable to turn away from grief and the way hers glued every sentence together. I vowed to do the same with my words.
Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart ... Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?
Admittedly, I got into her alter ego, Japanese Breakfast, quite late. Only after I left the church did I begin to understand her music—one I can now describe as a fall from grace, the sound of heaven meeting earth. I sing and dance in this dreamscape, where, like her writing, contains shards of sadness and joy in unadulterated doses.
We saw her bandmates leave first, and then her—standing happy on the corner of the street waiting for her Uber, wrapped in a teddy bear coat that reached her ankles, her pigtail braids against the chilly night. If you didn’t look too closely, she blended in with the crowd of SXSW-ers rushing home. Of course, we recognized her immediately, running and squealing her name like little children. When we finally caught up to her, I feared she would disappear any second, as fleeting as the spot of mid-morning light in my living room. Like a twist of fate, I couldn’t speak, stunned by the strange distance between all those nights I fell asleep to “Till Death” and this tiny pocket of time I now have with her. She kindly took photos with each of us, and I went home dizzy with adrenaline and regret.
Reality slipped through this past week as we roamed downtown Austin and 2 AM pizza lines, avoiding weird men and white indie rock bands. In the flurry of SXSW, there were few sober moments. But it’s Sunday today (like, 5 hours before this arrives in your inbox), and I am thinking about how seeing artists who changed your life had to be more than seeing them in the flesh. There is an unshakeable desire to prove to them how much their work has resonated with you—and I feel as if I’d failed. I hope this is my redemption.
On the house where happiness lives
So I’m back at my parents’ house for spring break. As the number of “breaks” I’ll experience as a student continues to dwindle, and I move into what I suppose will be the rest of my life—a long, flat, and institutionally “break-less” stretch of sixty years wherein your final break hits you right when the Roth IRA money does, too—I’ve started to think about the housing market.
My parents did not buy a house, but rather, a competitive spot of land on the edge of my school district’s zipcode. It was, literally, carved out the side of a highway—but I’d get to attend the nicer high school. My mom and stepdad designed the house using one of those little mix-and-match booklets the real estate agent gives you to make you feel like you’re building something “really customized, super ownable to your unique tastes.” When it was done, they arranged to move me out of my grandparents’ house and into theirs, so we’d, at last, be a proper American nuclear family.
It was a nice-looking two-story. Dark wood tiles, auction artwork decorating the walls from their numerous cruises, everything steel-toned, silvery, “luxe-rustic.” But it was also a completely non-functional house. The sink water sometimes smelled of sewage. Window shades were installed backwards. Outlets wouldn’t work. The elegant vaulted ceiling design that my mom had insisted on, leaning over the second-floor railing of the model home to shout I love it so much! down to us, came at the steep cost of privacy. You could hear someone cough—or whisper—from the other side of the house.
I used to think happiness was a permanent state of being, something mythical and perpetually out of reach, obtainable only through means that were designed to elude me all my life. And I used to think, if and when I finally crack this “happy” thing, that’s when my perfect life will begin. All the mess of my old life will sweep itself up and I’ll be on my way to waking every morning to a Natasha Bedingfield soundtrack.
Maybe that’s why, when my stepdad took me to IKEA, I’d taken advantage of the family’s good mood and asked for new everything. New desk, new floor lamp, new swivel chair, new daybed—all of it in trendy 2015 minimalist white. I sat happily, and hopefully, in the middle of my new bedroom that afternoon, trying to assemble my way to happiness. That was back when I still called that house “our house.” It had, at one time, sincerely held all our shared hopes for the future and for each other.
Now, I crawl into the white daybed of my adolescence and inevitably collapse back into a seventeen state of mind. I return like an orbiting star to my old habits—snoozing until noon, wearing the same three t-shirts, scrolling through webcomics under the dining table, and running laps around my scummy neighborhood lake to avoid conversation. Dread comes thudding down the stairs of my heart again at the sound of footsteps outside my door, the migraines return, and if I stay any longer than the week I am due, it takes me three more to recover when I get back home to Austin. I love my family. But I cannot sleep more than seven days in that pale bedroom before I start crying myself to sleep again.
Happiness, I’ve learned, is actually not all that exciting. There are no triumphant gospels waiting in the elevator that will beam you up to true love, just a sense of things being not as difficult as they once were. You must tend to happiness every single day, kind of like a little hearth for a little house. You must not level upon it all your expectations. You must not forget it is a very small and dumb thing. You will likely grow bored of it sometimes and taking it for granted, venture out into the night to look for trouble. But like a small god, if you are patient, it comes back time and time again to save you.
I am always going to have some sadness in me. Who knows where it came from. Who knows why it comes and goes, why I hate it when it’s here and then, like a crazy woman, miss it when it’s gone. That isn’t important. This is, though: Happiness is not what comes gliding into the foyer in her furs and diamonds after you’ve evicted pain from the premises—rather, they are more like roommates. One puts on the evening kettle while the other paces in the bedroom upstairs, and you must figure out some way to get these two to play nicely, to accept and exchange freely with one another without fear of upturning the furniture or setting the house on fire.
(For me, lately, happiness looks like a bowl of hand-pulled noodles cooling on the kitchen table while I scrape dried flour off my fingers. It looks like my clothes in Pearl’s closet and her’s in mine. It looks like a patchwork lamp I once accidentally set on fire at 3 a.m., then stubbornly salvaged. It looks like all our friends seated in a circle around the coffee table, ooo-ing and ahh-ing as I bring out the cake.)
That’s where happiness lives: in between the emotional dialogue of every moment in our lives, the good, the bad, and the ugly, unresisting and serene as a grandmother napping on the porch.
Moments lately
What we’re listening to
K: Other people’s songs. Springtime makes me think of old friends and old lovers, old lives in general. I put on something warm and vaguely southern in the late mornings, like the records Lillie used to play in her car on drives down to obscure gardens. I put on husky-toned male manipulator music to make a sandwich to. I curl up fetal-position in bed, midday March drowsiness, with a headache and Kero Kero Bonito on shuffle. I feel myself dissolving, fingertips to toes, this way—losing myself to rings of memory, bright shiny ones and also ones I did bury like bodies, / closing my eyes and bringing it all back, / sinking into it, / letting it lurch me back into places where I did or did not become somebody / into moments that I did or did not entirely survive.
I call this home-sickness.
C: This spring break was the first I spent in Austin, and “Pink Light” has been on repeat in my empty apartment. I’ve always imagined my perfect living room to be warm and lovely, a pink glow of home-cooked dinners and late night secrets.
Beyond that, this week’s playlist features some gems from my favorite SXSW sets. There is no better feeling than hearing it first performed live and then drunk-blasting it in the Uber home.
What we’re reading
K: I finished Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides like three days ago! Eugenides has the sort of writing style I was dying to emulate as a teenager—I think if I read it five year ago, the prose would have gouged my eyes out and prevented me from seeing anything else. In the face of beauty, I, just like one of those dumb boys playing “Make It with You” over and over through the telephone for a Lisbon girl to listen to, become very dim-witted.
C: I added some magazines to my collection: i-D and Brunch Club. Amber also lent me two of her books that I’m really excited to read: Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Moraga & Anzaludua’s This Bridge Called My Back.
What we’re watching
K: Nothing, really! The clouds. The wild cat. The kids playing outside in the sandbox, shrieking so loud you can hear their joy for miles.
C: I finished Gossip Girl in the wee hours of SXSW! I promise a full analysis at our next letter.
How we’re living
K: Fig trees. Rabbit stamps. Been picking at the acne scars again. Chelsea G. Summers describing a girl going through puberty as “fluffy and pointed as a kitten.” Six cups of tea every day. Old habits like children standing frightened in the doorway of my childhood bedroom. Chocolates and sliced lamb. This swingset in my neighborhood that I haven’t sat on since summer 2019, when I was selfish and wayward and in love, and sunflowers were getting left on my doorstep.
C: Been in a dazed happy kind of tired. :’)
Our brilliant friends
K: Congratulations to Caleb and Alex for their 💫 joint slay💫 in New York City this past week. Here are two of the most effortlessly original, reality-defying, and absurdly funny people I know. Having the opportunity to work together and cheer you on as you make your moves has easily been the highlight of my semester. sending sooo much love!!!