Then: Madrid, Spain | 2014

In the house of Isabel de las Heras Nájera, I lie between a Parisian twill comforter and sky blue sheets. My feet tingle from toes to heel, the kind of itch that feels good as a too-hot bath. I close my eyes, inviting darkness to take over, but the invading light from calle Florencia Garcia persists. I give in and meet the stucco ceiling.

I ride the metro to Retiro Park to lay in the sun. After an hour of Spanish heat, my hair sticks to my forehead and beads of sweat race down my legs. I move to the shade. Birds talk in the trees above me, and pigeons search the grass for forgotten food. In front of me, a couple shares a melting ice cream cone. The boy touches her cheek and kisses the girl’s nose. Her laugh is pretty as she is. To the right, five friends have a picnic and play with their pomeranian, Nacho. He licks my arm before spotting a German Shepherd and running after him. An accordion player begins playing Pachelbel’s Canon, and I can’t hide my smile anymore. The air smells like it’s dripping with honey, and I think it might be. I lay here for a little bit longer before joining my friends, Michael and Sarah, for a bocadillo before class.

I will come back here when I graduate. I will live in a tiled apartment near El Sol like my Venezuelan friend Miguel. I will teach English or learn to paint. I will eat every olive at Mercado de San Miguel. I will become half olive. The energy of the city pumps through my veins. I am alive.

Now: Los Angeles, California | 2024

It’s 2 am, I think, or maybe 3. I can’t know for sure because I have a rule against looking at screens in the dark. I’m obsessive about this rule, for the same reason I wear orange lensed glasses when I watch TV at night. It’s all about getting good sleep, which I never do, but I stick to my rules anyway.

I can feel my heartbeat, which is never a good thing. Things like our very blood pumping through our bodies are always best when undetectable, moving silently under our skin. In the stillness, my mind drifts to my parents. It usually does. My mom is an intuit, and I’ve been indirectly trained to believe that every feeling means something. This waking in the middle of the night is one of those things that must mean something. I search for the meaning. I panic quietly about my parents’ health. I panic quietly that I will wake up tomorrow and learn that something terrible happened to them around 2 or 3 in the morning, at this very moment. I panic quietly that I can do nothing about that.

This panic expands into something Octopus-like, stretching in at least eight directions. I consider other reasons for waking: maybe there is an impending earthquake or the neighbor’s house is on fire. I wait for something to happen.

Before the panic has fully taken all of its shapes, I lose myself. I don’t mean that I fall back asleep. I mean that I separate from my own body, which lays here, coffinlike in the bed. I wonder if this is my life. This is not philosophical wonder. I am not asking myself questions like, “Is this what my life is?” or “Am I happy?” I am actually wondering if this is my life because, at this moment, I can’t tell if it’s real. I am suddenly confused by everything I am. I’m talking Freaky-Friday-level confusion, as in, “Whose hands are at the ends of my arms?!” And, “Whose arms are they anyway?” Things feel blurry and disparate, like something I will wake up from.

Then: Chengdu, China | 2015

It’s late May, and Chengdu is getting stickier each day. I shut off my alarm and turn on my side to face my roomate, Leah. Her bed is empty already and tidy. She is usually up before me. I wake like I always do: slowly, reluctantly. I pull on Nike shorts, the kind we’re all wearing this summer, and slip my headphones in. I only have one album downloaded for the summer, and I play it. Years later, I’ll turn it on and be right back here, half awake in this tiny, brown room in China.

Outside, I unlock my bike—the one I’d bought used for 200 yuan—and pedal towards the main street. The campus is quiet, and the sun hasn’t yet grown strong enough to break through the cloudy smog. I ride past the canteen and the flagpole, waving proud and red with its five golden stars. The air is thick, and I pedal quicker, chasing a breeze. I lift my feet from the pedals and stretch my legs out to the sides, listening to the quick cricket-like clicks of the chain turning on its own. I ride towards the edge of campus and stop at the gate, riding in circles around and around all those beautiful flowers.

I stop at a grab-and-go store on campus with snacks and school supplies. They have notebooks with incorrectly translated sayings on the covers. They say things in English like, “Do You Want To Do Freedom” and “Believe in Friend.” I grab a yogurt.

I spend the morning in class, learning colors and numbers in Mandarin, and then I visit my friend Nancy’s dorm room, which she shares with three others. She invites me to visit her family outside of the city this weekend.

In the afternoon, I head down an alley outside the campus gate to my favorite noodle restaurant. The stones wobble under my feet, uprooted by weeds. As I turn the corner, I hear the boss’s daughter singing. They smile when I arrive. The daughter, Liu Yang, takes me by the hand and leads me to a table. She points at a picture of a noodle dish.

“Duay,” I nod.

I watch her father make noodles. He does it right in the middle of the restaurant between a giant vat of boiling water and a counter with rising dough. He stretches each mound of dough into a string of noodles, tossing it in the air and pulling it into ribbons. The way he moves the dough reminds me of playing Cat’s Cradle with string as a kid.

I think I could stay here forever. Learning Cheng-Yu so I can tell Liu Yang that she’s beautiful and smart. Stretching noodles like her father. Maybe I will get an apartment with Nancy and take the train to the Linpan to visit her family on weekends.

Life feels tangible here, like I can touch it. I feel like I belong here, but I don’t. I don’t belong here at all.

Now: Los Angeles, California | 2024

I Google, “life doesn’t feel real” and open a few tabs about depersonalization-derealization disorder. According to Mayo-Clinic, this “occurs when you always or often feel that you're seeing yourself from outside your body or you sense that things around you are not real — or both. You may feel like you're living in a dream.”

I wonder if this means that I’m crazy, but I feel so inexplicably un-crazy, so bogged down by logic, that the wonder doesn’t last. I wonder instead if this is common.

At a bar in Filipinotown, I talk with my friends about dreams. I ask them if they fly in their dreams. Their answers are split down the middle, two who fly and two who don’t. I have never flown in a dream, though I have jumped. I ask them if they watch themselves in their dreams or if they are themselves. They say that they are themselves, that their dreams play out in front of them, mirroring their real life point of view. They cannot see their own faces.

This is interesting to me since I am usually outside of my body in my dreams—a different entity entirely, watching myself. My dreams are almost fisheyed, like footage from a security camera. I’d assumed this was everyone’s experience.

Then: Auburn, Alabama | 2013

It’s fall, and the green Alabama summer has chilled to gray. Jimbo wears a green fleece jacket and walks close to me. We are headed to his apartment to feed his yeast. He is always doing something or another with yeast.

The yeast is stuck to a blue bowl. It’s khaki and gluey. Jimbo peels back the saran wrap that hugs the bowl’s mouth. I smell sweet vinegar and beer. I stare. I search for eyes, for a heaving chest. I search for a thing that needs to be fed. I don’t yet know about living bacteria. I don’t yet know what sourdough starter is.

The pale center gurgles. It’s alive.

The next time I’m at Jimbo’s apartment, he’s making sourdough loaves. I sit on a barstool and prop my elbows up on the white Formica. Jimbo rolls the dough back and forth, the undulating rhythm an incantation. He stretches the gas bubbles like small mouths. He pounds the dough into the counter then shapes it into two oval loaves. I pinch off a piece and taste the sour. Behind Jimbo, the oven hums to life. Wet dough sticks to the elbows of his fleece. He smiles at me from across the counter.

The next year, Jimbo will drop out of college with one semester left in Chemical Engineering. He will go to culinary school instead. He will teach me to weigh dry ingredients and taste wine. When I’m 19, he will take me to restaurants in New York City that will change my life. He will explain food to me in ways that I will not yet understand.

I will spend my life exploring the things he taught me. I will write for a food magazine. I will live with my hands in dough. I will knead and shape and feed. Nothing feels more alive than this. I can touch my whole future.

Now: Los Angeles, California | 2024

I’ve always been obsessed with preserving memories. In high school, this took the form of taking pictures of myself and my friends at any and every moment. In college, it took the form of recording audio of people I loved and writing about them. As I got older, I began jotting down memories in bullet points, as many as I could think of. I rummaged through childhood photos constantly and took photos of those photos, duplicating them on my phone.

I wonder if this need to record things is related to the frequent slipping of reality that I experience. If the reason I feel the need to cement my memories is because I had so many different homes in different places with different friends and sometimes they don’t feel real.

I think of this when my longest friend Emily recalls memories from childhood with ease and clarity—things lodged so deep in my subconscious that I can’t tell if they’re real or not. She sees our other childhood friends often, in the town where their families remained after mine left. Together, they keep these memories alive.

I think of another friend, one who chose to stay in the same town he’s lived in his whole life. Recently he said to me, “I will always be here, rooted and planted,” and I’ve replayed that sentence in my mind for weeks. The planting of the feet and the roots below, inextricably intertwined with those around him who have also remained. I think of the the stories they have been telling each other for years.

I wonder what happens to memories when you’re no longer around the people who share them. What happens to the memories if they aren’t told? And what happens to you when those untold memories evaporate? I’m loathe to quote Joan Didion (and take her words slightly out of context) by saying that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but I tell myself my own stories for this very reason. Because if I don’t keep these stories alive, they might disappear. And with each disappearing memory, my tether to the earth loosens just a little bit more.

To strengthen that tether, I try to be physical. To mold something with clay. To dig in the dirt of the garden. To pull up a weed. It’s the reason I’ve never owned a Kindle. It’s the reason I like to cook and look at printed photographs. It’s the reason I miss my parents more as I get older. I need to touch things with my hands and be able to say, beyond doubt, “This is real. I am real.”

And so, because I can’t retrace my steps or watch all of my homes crack with age, I reread my journals. I remind myself of the times I’ve felt alive. How the ground felt then, or the sky. Of all the people I’ve been and the people I’ve loved, those past and parallel lives. Those presents and futures. All that life that was real.

Now(ish): Los Angeles, 2023

Light peeks through the bottom of the curtains. The bed is warm. Winslow stretches his little body out the covers. Below, Georgie is curled on her bed, still deep in her puppy sleep. Evan’s espresso machine hums from the kitchen.

When he sees me and my tangled hair, he holds out his arms. I fit myself between them and wrap mine around his torso. He is warm like the bed. He tells me that coffee will be ready soon.

I sit on the patio, my back facing the waking sun, soaking up its warmth. Birds sing to each other. I wish I knew something about birds and their languages. All I know is that I love their morning songs. I hear Alex, our neighbor, in his yard on the other side of the gate. He lifts something and puts it back down, probably checking the glue on his latest woodworking project—a shelf this time, I think.

There are sounds of Los Angeles, too. A siren moves through the air. The cars whoosh on the freeway like waves. It is early enough for them to still move quickly, ahead of the morning traffic. Close by, someone sorts through a pile of lumber. I hear the echo of wood falling against itself. I hear a hammer and a nail gun. The sounds get closer the more I listen. I wonder which house they come from. A helicopter thrums overhead.

I return to the ground. To the dirt in my backyard and the birds in the trees. I watch a squirrel nibble a jacaranda seed, his eyes darting back and forth, watching for the dogs, watching for danger. I think about all this life buzzing underneath the ground. My neighbor and the builders. Evan. The squirrels and the dogs. The worms in the garden.

Evan comes outside with coffee, and I drink it. It’s hot and bitter and sweet. I cannot deny the reality of something beautiful in my mouth.