Category: Personal
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chasing rabbits ’25
What are we if not a vessel of opportunities waiting to be realized? Nothing gives your name more meaning than your responding to it, and purpose isn’t something to be sought but something that demands we show up…
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island daughter
Someone calls my name—the one that fit my mouth when I was younger, when crying came easily, when this island cried with me—and it comes out two syllables instead of three, just the way my parents had intended. Cheng Jie. There is no Allison here. I answer out of equal parts muscle memory and guilt…
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24.
It’s my birthday. I wait by the phone for my loneliness to dissipate. I wait by the phone. I wait for my loneliness. I wait to dissipate. I wait…
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one-woman fountain show
I refuse to humiliate myself by asking for attention, but my eyes betray me. They yearn so terribly to be seen by some other. So when I cry, make a wish, why don’t you? And if you prove sincere, maybe the women before me will grant it to you as you put your hands around…
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playing fetch & victim
I don’t know the answers, but maybe you do. And if you do, you know to find me in the depths of the meadow, where I’m throwing sticks with a dog that no longer resembles a dog. And if you do, but you spare no desire to free me from my inked chains, I will…
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rice bowl ’24
What does it mean to use chopsticks the ‘wrong’ way? Is it simply a testament to my lack of phalanx coordination? Is it that I am offending generations of tradition? Does this fault dictate who I am as a person—and if so, what does it say about me?
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clean up on aisle 23!
Twenty-three is quiet. Subtle. It ripples but does not make waves. It’s a dance, not a war. I have spent so many years learning and now I’m applying, living. I’m done being broken and I’m ready to write love into existence, even if it draws blood…
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this is me trying
Aside from that voice in your head, who else has ever told you you are not where you are meant to be? ‘Society’ is not a valid response, and likely, you’ll find that the answer is ‘no one’…
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pick up the phone, i still miss you
Yes, you can bury a paper in the earth but it will not grow back into a tree; I can put you back in your cradle but you will not regain your innocence. There is so much you will be but you have forgotten so much of who you were…
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sandbox days (salted to taste)
Blooming is more tedious an act than most dare to answer to. It is difficult to feed into the belief that beautiful things come to be so through suffering. Is there a conscience to beauty? Where does it lie?
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out with lanterns
I’m out with lanterns looking for myself. I’m setting fireworks to scare off my fears. I’m red all over but not in the way the celebration has intended—instead with bite marks and fingernail imprints…
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unorthodox homecoming ingredients
I can’t seem to stop thinking that there is something wrong with me, like I swallowed an inherent flaw during a premature Christmas dinner that has since lodged itself in my lungs such that every time I inhale, I am reminded of its splintering existence…
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freefall ’23
I will fall some more in this life, but I will fall better. I will look at the scenery as I fall. Instead of thinking where I’m going to land, I’m going to think about what I fell from, and remember that it was once mine to hold onto…
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daughter, desolate, depleted
There is no way of remembering how it felt to lie in my crib with four walls that constituted my whole world. I wonder, often, if I were to lie in it once more would it feel more like lying in my mother’s arms or like lying in a lidless coffin?
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rigid definitions ’22
I feel like a fraud. “Allison” isn’t even printed on my birth certificate; it is a corset I had sewn with my own two hands and forced myself to suffer until I could lace myself up in it, until there was a presentable image of myself…
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taking the train to my younger self
most nights, I wish the world were ending the next evening. so I might take a train to my younger self and tell her to do us both a favor…
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today i turn 21.
I think we grow up when we start to take on the responsibility of answering that question. Perhaps it’s a question that isn’t meant to be answered. But the process of trying to answer it is what forces us to grow up…
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butter; lessons from thin-spreading
After all, if I’m stressed out and have to be working every waking moment, it has to account for something, right? If I have to sacrifice my sleep to write reports and articles, it will eventually pay off, right?
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these matches of mine
And it sounds ridiculous. And it sounds like a lot. That is a lot for a person to not like about themselves. But I’m not finished. In fact, there are more matches in my matchbox that keep constant my fire of inferiority, matches that I hate…
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the way the world spins & short-lived thursday morning crises
The world spins on its own axis, regardless of the speed of the other planets in its vicinity, regardless of whether an asteroid is hurtling in its direction, regardless of how blazingly the sun decides to shine…
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living in the in-betweens ’21
Let’s not mince words and cut right to the chase: it’s been bad. My twentieth year on this planet has been nothing short of brutal in terms of how much I’ve been put through and all the new emotions I’ve come to learn the names of…
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the process of unloving
I wrote a letter to myself at the end of 2020, setting down some things I hope I’ll have achieved a year from then. The sand in the hourglass has since stopped running and it’s high time I reply to that letter…
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this is what it feels like (to turn twenty)
Turning older is by default, but growing up is a choice. I celebrate how far I have come and how much farther I can go…
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math lessons from dad
We’d do one round of thirty MCQs, my dad would grade it, erase the set, and have me do it all over again. We’d do this for each set for however long it took me to get a perfect score—however long it took me to understand and learn from my mistakes…
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