E.V. is the name of the first boy who loved me. It is unfortunate that I did not come to appreciate this fact until much later on in life, but he expressed his admiration generously and abundantly. The least memorable of them: passing a love letter through all hands but mine; the more impressionable of them: constantly pointing out my ugly mushroom nose and drawing all over my pages, making permanent his boyish scribbles on my well-kept spiral-bound lines. His handwriting told me everything that I needed to know about him. A naturally gifted singer and probably undiagnosed with ADHD, E was very fittingly the first left-handed person I’d ever met, disruptive during quiet reading time, the youngest of four brothers, funny, and overwhelmingly white. He loved The Beatles at the seasoned age of seven. Wrote his own name in a terrifyingly undisciplined way that suggested to me that he definitely didn’t know his multiplication tables, and had never been tutored in anything in his life, ever. He made himself seen by belly flopping off the diving board during P.E. classes. 

While he was an amusingly underdeveloped reader, I found myself sporadically pulled out of class to perform the routine standardized testing for gifted children. Afterschool, for me, awaited more school –  Wednesdays I had Mandarin, on Thursdays I had piano. Saturdays, figureskating, Sundays, oil painting. And so, E was everything that I was not. We found ourselves in the same class three years in a row. Each year our teachers plotted to place us – coincidentally –  next to each other on the seating chart. Thus, they suffered the consequences of their own actions when they couldn’t shut us up. His unbearably short attention span meant that he shook his Nalgene water bottle for entertainment to get himself through the lulls in our lessons, allowing himself to become mesmerized at the miniature tornado that formed at its center. In his frequent moments of delinquency, if he could catch my curious eye – which he often did – he unfailingly offered to make me an accomplice to his crime. Meaning only that he silently inched his experiment over to my half of the table, daring me to redirect my wavering attention towards the little tropical storm that he was carefully growing in the bottle of water between his two hands. In this way, we quickly became best friends – that is, until he moved away in sixth grade and gave me a pencil drawing of us as a parting gift. 

In my home on the Beitou side of Yangminshan, where sulfur darkens all of my mother’s hidden jewelry, we have an unlit pool behind the parking lot that overlooks the drop of the mountain. It is green in the day and inky in the night. Besides it, an unusable, abandoned refrigerator stands guard. The east facing length of the pool is sectioned off with caution tape because our building tiles are slowly crumbling down. Here the water is heated by the sun’s own volition, and so when the sky sleeps purple, my wrinkled fingertips turn numb. But even my littlest pinky moves this whole pool of water, just swirling and swirling. 

Between the three states of matter, solid / liquid / gas: solid holds the shape of its container and vibrates tightly in place, its intermolecular bonds loyally holding each other close; gas floats far and free. I like the water because I am neither held captive nor made lonely. Here in water, when things move away they are comforted by the familiar presence of gently swaying company, and still there is a little bit of a hope that those who leave, might one day swim their way back. 

Because of that knowledge I have now become adept at memorizing faces. I scan the length and curve of another’s eyelashes, and note down whether the earlobes were affectionate enough to kiss the cheek. Repetition. My love, perhaps now you will know what I am doing, when my eyes wander for just a little while longer – ensuring in dying light that darkness can’t, won’t, win it all.