for your world enjoyment and immersion: listen to this while reading.

This is a mug, from someone I am no longer friends with.

It arrived in a (mostly) unsolicited care package with bags of snacks, scribbled cards, and love notes.

This person was one of my focal friendships from forever ago—someone with whom I laughed and danced harder than almost anyone else in my early 20s. She was also someone who slammed doors in my face and stranded me at her friend’s house in Downtown LA for a hookup at 1AM. (Said friend whom I’d always suspected did not like me.)

She also stayed two nights at my house when I was too heartbroken to sleep and brought me to her parents’ home for warm meals, and car rides up to the city, padded with blankets, pillows, and The Eagles discography.

This person taught me unrelenting generosity and the blaring, whirling bond of, “Let’s forget together.” They also taught me that friendships were tally boards, competitions, and, when needed: a morphing, contorting contract to wield against you.

So I am just as puzzled as you when I say: I loved you then, but no longer today, yet always and forever.

“you’ll be my friend forever”

Love is so strange because it disguises itself as something singular, all-knowing, and unmoving.

“You’ll be my friend forever,” an impossible promise, I whispered to you a decade ago.

I thought it again and again as we squashed ourselves into the dingy Muni seats, the acid and ecstasy slowly releasing us, our ribcages and throats still vibrating from swimming in waves of bass.

It was the 5-Fulton, careening towards Ocean Beach at midnight, and there were all five of us piled onto each other into the back seats. City-kids were taking up half of the row, way cooler and bolder than we’d be in three lifetimes, emptying a grape Swisher onto the floor. Then there was the man in front of us, wrapped in a cloud of whiskey and mud, pontificating angrily to the empty seat next to him. We pressed closer together.

Maybe this was the time we had those long-haired boys waiting on our doorstep for us (Pabts Blue Ribbons and condoms in their jackets), or perhaps after Skrillex, and when we thrashed away my heartbreak, and you helped me find someone cute to dance with and forget that I’d just been dumped.

(I don’t remember, because they are all the same moment. They are the same work of art in my memory museum. You were there, we were all there, this is about all of us, but you are the one I chose to write about.)

“Cara. Why do I have to convince you? Look at you. I wish you could see what I saw, what we all see,” you said to me. Our other friends nod in agreement, to the rhythm of the bouncing bus.

“You’re going to go places. I don’t know where, but it’s different from us. You’re goofy as hell, but no one else gets it like you. People don’t see things

like

you

do. You help me see. I wouldn’t be the same without you.”

Then I remembered what you told me the first time you brought me to see Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t count when you’re rolling. So be caaaareful.” (Why are Koreans so good at speaking with warning and caution? Why do Persians love rose water and pistachio in crystal dishes? Why did your home remind me of how little I was, my messy, unruly hair, that I had so far to go, and that people only wanted to devour me so they could spit me out and brag about how they tasted plumeria honey?)

I recite this back to you.

“Bullshit. You’re never getting rid of me. We’ll be doing this when we’re FIFTY! But don’t be weird when we get home. Just believe it,” you say.

We all tumble off the bus, relieving our poor driver but not before singing, “THANK YOU!” over our shoulders. The fog reaches for the bus and pulls it up the hill, winking at us and scraping us with the cold. I give you my jacket, and you give me the last Camel Crush.

Then you yell at the baseball frat boys across the street—maybe the ones who spilled beer on your Ralph Lauren cardigan, called me Nani from the Disney movie, and took turns guessing our other roommates’ bra size, to all of our horror and disgust. Your voice sounds like champion gravity bong hits and a vengeful specter.

“WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOO! I LIKE TO SEE IT!” your cat call across the traffic. A car rolls up its window.

One of them drops his red Solo cup. The rest stand in shock, then their six-foot-plus bodies slump towards each other. They shuffle along like sheep avoiding selection.

We all die of embarrassment, and then you resurrect us: “I just made their day. Or ruined it. Either way—FUCKERS! Men gotta learn, you know!”

Morals and sense begone, I am laughing so hard, sending menthol so far into my nose that my candyflip reblooms. The stars drizzle silver sand into our hoodies, and somewhere, someone is baking cinnamon rolls with extra glaze that makes me so hungry. The streetlights widen, melt, and dance, becoming candles in a log cabin. My hair is flying everywhere, and all of us are apologizing to the boys, (now vanished around the corner) through our chortling, doubling over. You beam and move to the middle of the circle.

San Francisco used to be ALL cyprus trees! Let’s go look at your drawings at home and turn on that red paper lamp I bought from the Tibetan store. Also, where are my tube socks? The ones from American Apparel? I am free to say whatever I want now.

“That’s what I’m saying, you’re so weird! Did he text you?” I look at my phone and smile. You punch me in the shoulder—a congratulations, a proud friend. We are not sisters, but something more precious.

“He’s weird like you, too. I hope he stays cool because I don’t want him wasting your DAMN time. You hear me?”

We reach the last cross-street before our house. The wind inhales to the top of the hill. The crosswalk clicks-clicks-clicks-WALK! The wind exhales and rolls down the street, sweeping away the last of our party favors. Now I am here.

“You’ll be my friend forever,” I say to you as I unlock the gate. You wrap your arms around me, and we bound up the carpeted stairs, thundering past our neighbors who hate us. You tell me to shower, to wash the rave off my body, and I say, “NO!” because it’s cold and I secretly like how it grosses you out.

“Life is a trip, and I love you.”

It happened, so it was real

The last text I got from this friend was her asking me if I wanted to accompany her as she ran errands the next morning. This was a school night at 11PM. She was only on island for a day because, oh my god! I was just on my way to Cabo, but now my client needs me here for X, Y, Z, it’s so crazy, I’m so busy, the jet only makes it here so often!

She didn’t write my name, remember my son, nor did she bring up where we’d left off—my text a year ago informing her of my breakup and feeling desolate, lost, and back to square one, but how was YOUR life, how was Burning Man, did you have a good time?

I don’t love you anymore, but I did once, and that’s the same as forever.

I wished her a happy birthday, quietly unfollowed her, deleted my accounts for six months, then reappeared under a new identity so no one could find me. This wasn’t solely because of her, but a long contemplation of friendship and what it means to hold space, hold open doors, and have no room for anything else.

I remember now that the care package was actually a box of opened snack bags—things she’d already tried—plus a bunch of mini LMNT packets, the kind they pass out at Costco for free or as promotional samples for aspiring influencers.

And yet, I still keep this mug behind all the others and use it when they have escaped the cabinet.

Perhaps friendships are not to be judged on their perfection or their lack of strife. I remember someone telling me that she was a “party friend,” but not a real friend. Possibly true in evidence, I thought. Yet, I did not grant my agreement.

Not everything needs to be revived. Not everything needs to be spotless to be true.

I can say thank you for it all and not need to know if you feel the same way.

Love warps time. Neither of us as we were exists any longer. And somehow, we are still there on that bus together, again and again. I don’t know if I want anything more than this. It happened, so it (you) will always be enough.

I felt it, so it was real.

My almost response: “Ummm, nope! The heart wants what the heart wants! La la la la—oh! Siri, play that one Selena Gomez song NOW!” My defensiveness was enough to make me sit with her question anyway.

That was about two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been laying out each of my loves (and heartbreaks) as if they were tarot cards. Maybe more like Pokémon cards—comparing and contrasting their physicalities, backgrounds, strengths, shortcomings, even their voices.

(Of course, the best way to remember is to forget. The best way to see is to stop staring—you’re going cross-eyed, Cara!)

And now here is the through-line, the breakthrough, the thread running through them all.

My “type” isn’t physical, emotional, or even aesthetic traits. My type hasn’t even belonged to adult me. It’s been Little-Cara running the show, picking the guys the entire time.

Her type (*ahem* our type) has been men in the center. Men who’d confirm that everything I knew about myself—that I was worthy of being seen, validated, witnessed—was true.

That is who I’ve been drawn to.

a quick blast to the past

I’m coming to terms with how my childhood has shaped my approaches to love.

This kind of work is a dance—step to the left with my retrospective despair. Pull back. Step to the right with, “I mean, you’ve gotta admit that’s pretty absurd.” Pull back. Step forward two times with, “Okay I see it, let’s fucking do this!” Now pull it all together. A melody of insight! Bah-dah-dah-dah!

So, what have I been dancing to before writing this?

Some lyrics and melodies:

1. I was raised on a very strict and punitive NO BOYS policy. A combination of a stringent Catholic upbringing and a very conservative culture (my parents are both immigrant and first-generation Samoan), in which shame and corporal punishment are the default devices of control.

*When you’re doing this kind of digging, you MUST allow yourself to laugh at the irony and the ways you squeezed yourself out of certain things. For me, this is the open window, the reminder that I was, indeed, resilient through it all.

My parents had HOPED they’d scare me into fearing boys. Instead, I became comically, almost pathologically boy-crazy and lovesick. Over real-life people and utter strangers.

I almost fainted and fell off the bus when I found out my crush had made out with my friend… all my pads came tumbling out of my backpack. I could not eat when the cute boy at my church, whom I had seen just twice, moved away. I penned SEVERAL Jonas Brother fanfics, and when Tiger Beat told me Taylor Swift was dating Joe Jonas… I was bedridden for days.

You have to laugh. Just a little.

2. I always felt ugly, out of place, last picked (if at all), and unseen. In our officer-Marine Corps communities, I was the only one with brown skin, wild and curly hair, a big, flat nose, and a name no one could say right. School dances and Valentine’s were nightmares because I knew I wouldn’t be asked or even considered. And IF, by some divine grace, I were to be asked… I would not be allowed to go. And I’d be severely punished for someone else giving me the attention I wanted.

The conundrum was always this: in the deepest part of me, *I’ve* always seen myself as cool, smart, and beautiful. I used to think, “My stories are so great. Look at all this cool music I find ALL the time. My Myspace page is the shit. My hair is going to be okay.”

I lived in those beams of hope. I felt like I had a secret, magical fountain I was drinking from while everyone else sipped on the shitty-generic-commissary coca cola. This I carried with me: the idea that I was someone whom anyone should want to be friends with or have a crush on.

And yet it was also a delusion. If that was the case, why did nobody else reflect this? Affirm this?

I began to believe I was dreaming, hallucinating, spinning in an imaginary world that needed only one thing to become real:

somebody to see me.

That’s all I wanted.

As I got older, I began to hope for someone from the CENTER who could bring me into the circle of acceptance, reverse the story, and help me make up for lost time.

Little-Cara finally gets a stage

THEN came college. Someone somewhere in the Universe lifted the veil for me.

Not only was I noticed, but I was remembered, sought out. I received tokens of all the things that told me I was attractive, interesting, and worthwhile. Finally, I was given a stage to dance upon, an audience to see me and adore me.

But there I was, childishly hungry but illiterate in restraint, reflection, and discernment. Everything was registered as the thrill and the drug of being chosen, no matter how superficial or fleeting. I now had a stage, but I kept singing and dancing to the same old song. I spun with any boy, any friend, any opportunity that approached me. My feet were tired, but I kept going.

It wasn’t enough. I still wanted to be in the center of everything.

Enter my college boyfriend. My most formative experience in love, and my most intoxicating.

Not only was he intelligent, thoughtful, cool, and funny, but he was also popular, wealthy, and from Boston, a place classic and well-known, unlike my rootless-military-brat origins. And of course, he was remarkably handsome, a unanimous agreement by every girl in my orbit.

Then he picked me so publicly, so decisively, so FERVENTLY in front of everyone who knew us and those who didn’t. My delusion was materializing before my eyes—everything I’d wanted, plus a million dreams more. I was lovesick again, but my hours were spent looping how perfect it all was. I felt as if I’d never have to feel alone or unseen again. Little-Me was both vindicated and dusted under the bed with my old fanfics and diaries.

I forgot that lovesickness is exactly that: an ailment.

For every Odesza or Bonobo-streaked night, every body-melting climax, every perfect afternoon in the park eating sandwiches and drinking beers from the deli we’d picked together…

there were cracks. Wobbles. Signs of this world’s instability and eventual demise. Reminders that this boy who, despite his love, still lived outside of me.

He brought me to a family weekend, and at first, it seemed perfect. But when I got there, everything began to sweat into a fever dream. Staying in Tiburon at a home that was nicer than anything I’d ever seen. His whole family, a group of tennis champions trained across lifetimes at the country club. An entire box to ourselves at the Giants game. I was nauseous through it all. I’d sneak away to sit alone outside or hide in our room, watching the Golden Gate stretch into the fog.

I didn’t get it. How could I be back where I started—feeling so alone and ugly when this wonderful person picked ME?

It confused me. It just didn’t feel the way love was supposed to feel.

the reckoning

Last week, I found the final piece of the puzzle: my last and greatest heartbreak back in 2018, who would also become my son’s father.

He was, on paper, nearly the same as my college boyfriend, so I went after him with everything I had. Except I soon learned that he wasn’t generous, thoughtful, or kind. He wasn’t even fucking funny. He was manipulative, dishonest, arrogant, cold, and in our final exchanges, pointedly cruel.

Many say that shame is the most isolating emotion, and I’d agree. There is a sticky, leaky quality to it that people will evade and put distance between, as if it could seep under their door and into their own worlds. My mother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, and everyone needed me to be brave. They loved seeing me strong. Nobody wanted to hear that I was bleeding on the inside.

I’d been cut deeply by my double-edged shame. First, by the disappointment that I’d failed to have my inner hopes and world confirmed. I’d been sorely wrong. I wasn’t smart enough, good enough. I’d been crazy the whole time.

Then, I was sliced again. This time, I was humiliated by my sadness, black-hole fury, and my abandonment. It was embarrassing to be so heartbroken. I felt like a gaping wound that everyone wanted to cover, embalm, and forget.

Since then, I’ve baby-stepped my way back into hope. I healed enough to let love become a distant land. I watched my cousins get married, my two college friends move in with their boyfriends. Another flew to Spain to sip vermouth with dark-lashed men. One more left her deadbeat boyfriend to run for Arcteryx with chiseled, bronzed LA boys.

I wanted to dance again, so I watched them. I memorized their notes, their steps. Then I dreamt, and I dreamt. I combed through my diaries, my playlists, holding my ear to what I thought had worked, but the melody was lost.

I placed myself in pulsing environments to find that same attention, but tumbled my way into more reminders of how offbeat I’d become. A few more attempts on dating apps, here and there. A desperate Hail Mary (I just wanted to be NORMAL!) with a blob of a guy who couldn’t even make himself lunch—enough for me to go, “I’d rather alone and without fucking a single other person than ever do THAT again. Is THIS what it’s come to for me?!”

All just reminders that I needed and wanted to find my way. Still stumbling, but against it all… never letting go of hope.

And here it is. Here is where everything leads.

I was asked what my type was… and there it was, all along.

And now, here I am. Thank you.

There is indeed a grief for my younger me, for all of Little-Cara’s wanderings and searchings.

But I remember that in our deepest griefs, we can find doorways back into the folds of time.

I close my eyes, and I am there with her, through all the whisky-streaked pleas to that boy to PLEASE take her back, slamming gates, closed-eye kisses, and the sleepless nights listening to the rain.

She is no longer alone in her marathon-groundings, in that Japanese hair salon pressing her hair straight, in her boyfriend’s giant home, or that time she saw him at Beauty Bar for another girl’s birthday right after they broke up.

I am lying on her bedroom floor, reading her fanfics, asking her for the next chapter. My hand against her forehead in the throes of her feverish lovesickness, giggling and crying alongside her, through it all.

I choose HER as my number one spot on my Myspace Top 8.

Something has changed! I am no longer alone!

A new era of bright sides. Not the kind I’ve forced for everyone else’s sake, but the kind that feels like a natural spaciousness. A chance. A new and true hope that I’ve never felt before.

I’ve always been a dreamer, a dancer, a lover. Maybe I’ve never been lost, but all along, I’ve been reweaving my beliefs in self-worth. Building up my faith in myself as the wonderful person I am. Praying to the gods that one day, my existence will be untethered to whether or not some guy picks me.

I SEE ME, so I exist. I choose myself, so I am infinitely chosen.

So now! The real breakthrough and the revelation: I don’t know what my type is!

In this incredible, open, bright way. Like, holy shit.

Without that standard and STRIVING, an old question finds new life.

Who do I like? What do I prefer? Who would I choose to be in my world? Who is deep enough, vibrant enough, sturdy enough for me? Who will I allow into my center, my orbit? Who will be lucky enough to want me for me?

(All those itches I wanted to scratch. All the gaps I was hoping to fill. Scratched, lotioned, and moisturized. Filled, spilling over the brim. A jar of milk and honey. )

It feels like a really beautiful blank slate, to be honest.

~ To Little-Cara: I’ll take the wheel when things get rough. We’ll have some fun along the way. Have your crazy crushes, because I will pull you out of bed, listen to you, and hold you through them all. Your hair is great. Take care of it. It won’t be thick like that forever, trust me.

Love will never rank us, overlook us, bring us anywhere we can’t go ourselves, or give us something to “complete” us.

We are everything we thought we’d be. We dreamt it because it was the truth. ~

Like how you forgot to text me after the bookstore, or about the Odesza concert. Funny because you remembered me when I stopped crying and met someone new,

and when I was happy and sexy and vibrant and dancing—

and you were sad about your dad and his Australian wife.

Now I’m the one who remembers you, lately so much. In my dreams, when I see couples in pubs, watching hockey games, and those damn Patriots. I see them and think

if only.

If only I had been flowers and softness and muted and only small-sad,

but instead I was lava and running (always RUNNING) and tidal waves and busted lips and broken wine bottles and cracked shoes I’d throw at you because I could see your eyes

shutting and blinded by my starlike grief.

So for you, I see the shelter you found in breezy blondes. What refuge.

Today, I hope you found someone who is light and soft to hold and to land on

because I am made of cathedrals and orbits.

Okay, now, I see it all. A flash of my passion and your container. Your sweet hazel eyes and that Boston-boy jacket. For a minute, you LOOKED straight into my SUN. Oh wow, did you! And in that, I knew I could be adored. Nothing was impossible.

But maybe that’s just it. We were always two planets, their stars, their moons—too many gravities and too little space.

So then we collided. Pieces of me went flying, and you kicked some away, swallowed the rest into your rings.

Well, if anything. Thank you for showing me that love does exist.

But there must be a Universe, a place where I don’t need to BURN and combust, just to be someone’s light.

And to me: I hope you see that you are the Moon, swirling across galaxies of love.

You have always been this, sweet girl! You have always been tides and tides and depths and depth, but also little lapping pools in the sand.

It was never your fault that neither of you could surf.

Someone will see you and paddle straight into you. Someone will see you and want to swim within you.

I stretch across the horizons, and I find peace.

That song with your name, the one you showed me still drifts across my Spotify. That was you—the one who showed me how to float.

Thank you. For everything.

(a song for Jack)

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Yes, he and I are both three-quarters through fishbowl margaritas. Yes, my son is eyeing the time clock and mouthing to me, “Am I still going to watch Naruto tonight?” Yes, my mom is tensing at the boys-need-discipline spiel rooted in the traditional family structures that my Uncle is vocally passionate about.

But I am listening. Because, at that moment, I am open.

Does this Uncle know? Probably. Does he know me? In some ways, and in many ways, no.

Strangely, therein lies my freedom—I don’t have to explain. He, like my son, is quintessentially Aquarian in his fixed-sign-ness. But I am not threatened.

I am comfortably wavy as we climb into the car. We drop off my Uncle and he leaves me with an offer: to no longer be a Mexico-Lindo-twice-a-year Uncle, but a throw-the-football-around kind of Uncle. The first offer I have ever received from any male figure in my life, outside of my brother’s natural and genuine interest in Max. (My brother, whom I think the world of.)

Will I take it? I don’t know. But it was made, and that is not lost on me.

“You’re an amazing mom. It’s what your dad would’ve done for me,” he leaves me with before he heads into his home, carrying my Auntie’s takeout. I have not been to this house as often as others, and yet it is a landmark, a homing beacon for some of my softest childhood memories.

My sleep is restless, and I am too hazed at the edges to distill the night into wisdom. I fall asleep on the couch, next to Max, to the sound of Naruto.

The next morning, my mom springs up in front of me with her arms open: “Can I tell you how proud I am of you?” I know what she is about to say.

“You just don’t need any of what he is saying. You’re so above that old way of thinking, of wanting or needing a man. You’re on another level. You’re just too expanded for any of that.”

She is looking directly at me, her eyes brimming with tears, but I know this isn’t just about me. We’ve been through this before.

“He doesn’t know anything about you,” she ends. I sigh and try to think of another way, of a million different attempts, to say gently but firmly: “Yes, and in some ways, neither do you.”

This is the advent of thinking as ME.

Not as a single mother.
Not as the right-hand daughter of a widowed mom, or the first child of a dad who died.
Not as a new solopreneur or a writer trying to launch something.

In that moment, I am untethered from whatever the fuck I am supposed to be. I am soaring between the raindrops, hitting the roof, above the blankets of rainclouds, and into the belly of God, the Universe. The very birthplace of desires.

I am finally awake. I want things as me, and I want them, and I want them.

Lately, all I can think of is what I don’t know and what I want to know. Yet, for the first time in my life, it’s not from hypervigilance. I’m hungry and desiring, and there are so many things I want to taste.

When you finally trust yourself and your inner world, the unknown is no longer a threat. Wanting is no longer weakness; it is pure invitation and creativity.

I’ve seen and known many strong women who became both faces of the coin: the mom and the dad. And I respect them for it, truly. I have a special place in my heart for single moms because I am one. I’ve watched my own mother, my cousins, old coworkers—it truly is devotion in one of its most powerful forms.

Still, this isn’t an argument of superiority between gender-roles or capacities, or even who has the right or the capacity to wield feminine or masculine energies.

All I can say are these three things:
1) I don’t want to be a dad. I don’t want to be a man.
2) I am allowed to want, as myself, not from the worry of what others think of me.
3) I would love someone to hold the world with me.

How and where they intersect is something I’m still navigating. Yet this isn’t going to be a discussion on mother-father roles. Maybe I’ve misled you!

This is a discussion on what it means to WANT from your deepest self.

Surprise: i’m a lover girl

Strong women don’t want. Strong women don’t need men. Strong women will be fine. Strong women don’t need your pity. — a motto from my childhood

I do find it funny how a “Boys will be men,” type conversation with my Uncle would feel like a flashlight on one of the biggest, truest admissions of my life:

I want to have a partner, and I want to be a partner. I want to build something with someone. Because, I am not just a mom or a single mom.

I also have no problem admitting that I am not a man or a father, nor do I believe that living my life as such will necessarily produce a defect in my son. Yet, my truth remains this:

I believe it could be really, really, really nice. And so long as it is really, really nice, then I really, really want it.

Nothing is more revelatory than what you truly want and what you are too afraid to want. When we’re too embarrassed or too bogged down by “what it means” to desire freely, we will accept (and attract) crumbs, ghosts, or the last-chance-basket versions of our desires:

Friends who use us as placeholders, audiences, or sounding boards.
Jobs that look great on paper, but slowly, steadily drain us of our passion and life force.
Generationally-inherited dynamics that suffocate or obligate us.
Partners who check the “Yay, I’m not single anymore!” box but are actually quite terrible for us.

Our desires are embedded with pieces of ourselves… and why wouldn’t they be?

Yet, in our very human way of doing things, we complicate desire. We contort our wanting to defend ourselves from what the world will say. In other words, we turn a holy act into vigilance and defense.

Standing in that kitchen, I was reminded of something that has always loomed over me: the idea that girls who want love are weak. It was never uttered verbatim, but it was constantly present across my life—a watchful specter, looming in every corner.

One of the worst corporal punishments I ever received in my life was because I got caught AIM-ing a cute skater-punk who wanted to be my boyfriend.

Later—my mom shaking her head at the girls waiting on the bleachers for their boyfriends after school. “What kind of mother lets her daughter do that?” she’d say as we watched my friend take her boyfriend’s books from him, freeing his arm so he could use his crutches properly.

Another time: an older boy asks me to skate with him at Ice Palace. I was too scared to text him back, but still, I received the ice and silence for two days. As if I should’ve known better than to attract it.

So after that, I would exorcise all of my wants and dreams of love. I would conduct my desires furtively before killing them. I would remind myself that it was weak to want. I’d never ask for anything—only take whatever drifted my way.

In short, I ended up dating a lot of losers. Guys who’d smoke all of my weed, leave me behind at bars with the tab, and become pointedly mean when I got into a better college than he did. And finally, my son’s father. I’d pursue him, pretending it was in the name of justice. In reality, my trapped, suffocated desire was tearing my heart to shreds, and I had no idea what to do.

But I couldn’t say that.

Instead, I’d perform impressive feats of logic-contortion to prove to the world I was too solid, too smart to be heartbroken. And, in some twisted logic, it was still “better” than being a girl who wanted things, especially love.

And even though I was too strong to want, there was always disappointment.

“You can do so much better than him. You really don’t know how great you are,” from the very people who warned me about girls who wanted.

“You could have anything, anyone you wanted.”

Ha! As if I had a single ounce of freedom to even fathom what that could be.

How to desire like the moon

People say that the bodies of nature—the moon, the Sun, the stars—don’t experience desire, as if they are lifeless beings. They experience attraction by the laws of physics. They dance within gravities, entangle themselves in orbits, and yet, we discount them as mechanical functions. Maybe that’s because we silly humans put so much judgment, friction, and assessment on our own attractions and wants.

I look back at what I was conditioned to believe (through words and action), and I realize I am the meeting of two elements:

the relentless fury and fire consuming all of the shame, regret…
and the buoyant grace of a still, receiving ocean.

It is not easy to want. I feel and dream for all those who may understand what I am feeling. And in many ways, I do see the shelter resting within, “I’m too strong to want.”

No wonder people (myself, especially) are so afraid to want with every ounce of their being!

To release expectations, inhibitions, and the, “What will they think of me?” is to reach out for the blessing of your past and future selves. It is the only real way to say, “I’m late but better than never.”

That’s a pretty tall order, right?

But even the wildest dreams begin as a whisper, an exhaustion of shrinking, and a, “You know what, FUCK IT, I’m going to do it,” muttered beneath your breath, eyes shut, as you jump off the edge of what you know.

So here I am, emulating the Moon and the Sun:

𖦹 I am a lover girl. I love to love, to be in love, to make, give, and receive love.

𖦹 I live not to “get” or to achieve but to create. I do all things with every ounce of my Soul.

𖦹 I want to build something with a good man (not a perfect man), but someone who is just like me and not like me at all.

𖦹 I can be strong and also want to be held. That is not a contradiction—it is my depth.

𖦹 I’m not afraid to want what I don’t have. Not having is not a deficiency; it is a fact. And what I want for my son and me, I want as I would want a gift.

So, there it is. My heart is on the altar.

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The message is just as important as the messenger

Two days ago, I attended my 16th workshop on “becoming.” The messenger this time: a whip-smart spirituality-meets-psychology bro riffing on the Love of the Universe. He called a brief-second intermission to croon, “Baby, will you please get me a cup of coffee?” to his off-camera wife. She makes him a new pot because the old one was cold. He is sorry (that’s not what he meant, the cold coffee was fine!) but so, so grateful.

Logic-me thinks it’s a ruse to get us to buy his $300 course. Logic-logic-me says, “Stop being an asshole, Cara.” But from somewhere within me, a ghost whispers.

“When was I last in love?”

There is a cool breeze pouring through my windows, dampening the wisps rising from the sandalwood I’ve just lit. Do I need to move my desk, yet again, to renegotiate the qi flow in my room?

Regardless, the wind reminds me of the approaching wave. Following the January 1st new year, the current has finally untangled me from my uncertainty and fatigue. I am ascending into the sunlight and will be pulled into the trough, then the belly of the wave. “Thank god,” I say, with a little g, because big G doesn’t like how I only call on him in despair.

And yet: how long before I reach the peak and am brought down with the crest, crashing into the foam, then the depths once again?

“Keep going anyways.”

Not much has been inspiring me lately. I’m burnt out. I spent the entirety of 2025 hitting the “OPT OUT,” button on nearly every single relationship dynamic in my life. Stupid ancestral dances to gossip with people who would sell you out for your seat in first class. Family friends who bitch about the gifts you bring to Christmas dinner, but can’t bear to be alone. “Dutiful,” as a compliment.

No more obligations, no more obedience. All of this I cleared out for myself, by myself. Minus the help from Saturn, the Patriarch of Karma.

Of course, soon after (almost tauntingly and ironically), I was flooded with New Yorker articles on how most Americans are terrible, lonely people—too fragile, stringent, and self-consumed. Maybe that’s me—difficult, scared, and hateful.

I’ll give it a go anyways.

But I love my ghosts!

Now, I have become an empty, echoing house.

The windows are wiped clear, the furniture is gone, and my ghosts have nowhere to hide. They pry at the floorboards, dig their fingers into the windowsills, eyes sewn shut and moaning:

“You can’t do it. Who you are is the worst, the most selfish. A deserving prisoner.”

Matriarchal patterning taught me that denial is your weapon against your hatred. From my Marine father: pain is weakness leaving the body. Ignore your ghosts or exorcise them—that is the way of courage.

But I don’t want to hurt them. They are mine and me, and I want to scream with them until my throat is raw and our voices disintegrate into the folds of time and space.

How to do things anyways

I admit that I am a textbook projectionist. I roll my eyes when people can’t commit because I, too, fear the unknown. I grow stony and silent when people seek the easy way because I have also evaded the work. I hate when people ask me what they should do because, for so long, I could not orient myself without first looking around the room.

And yet, here I am, and here I return anyways.

I have also never felt “freedom” as an inherent right, but rather as something to be bought with pain.

Some of my purchasing history: skipping swim practice and running to the Okinawan seawall to eat sweets with my first best friend. Nasty, multi-day comedowns from pills shaped like animals and hours buried in warehouses throbbing with bass. The times I snipped my tongue free and coated it in acidic honesty. All this freedom, only to wake up to the pain of, “What did I ruin this time? Do I have enough to pay this off?”

The pain doesn’t win every time, but more than once is enough. Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls these victories descansos, after the bouquets, candles, and gifts left where someone has died alongside the highway or roads.

Our own lives—as if they were country highways— are marked by these deaths. When they go unmarked and unconsecrated, they will rise as ravenous, bitter, despairing spirits. Your mindspace, your heartspace… that is what they feed upon. Everywhere I turn, there are pressures to starve these specters.

But how could I possibly starve, deny, silence my ghosts when they are also me?

How could my grace, my beauty, my genius trust me enough to flourish if they see that I cannot spare even a glance for my rage, despair, and pain?

How you treat anyone is how you treat everyone. Said someone somewhere, maybe it was Jesus.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if our ghosts have always drunk from the same well as our grace? What if the overlap and moments they touch are what make our lives worth their existence? (A nihilist somewhere: “Nothing is worth anything.” I refuse this. Lazy fucker, pull yourself together!)

It feels real and easy to hold this.

“But tell me,” I pray again and again to the gods and whoever will listen—mid-beer and making dinner, folding my son’s laundry, watching couples whisper between kisses at the wine bar while I sip alone.

“What is the destiny for these ghosts? Where do they need to be spent, deployed? Where will they find peace?”

Mountain mists and eyes of koa

The gods of Hawai‘i pointed me to a place: the former wetlands of the windward side beneath the Ko‘olau Range, an area continually restored by ancestral devotion and a refusal of outsider greed. They needed volunteers to tend to the land, so I decided (as my haunted-house self) to bring my son along while I tried being useful out of choice, rather than obligation.

That Saturday morning was wet with island winter. We were assigned to weed a lo‘i (water garden) named momona, a word in 'Ōlelo Hawai‘i meaning fat, but as in plump with abundance.

We plunged our feet into the cold Earth, and up rose the smell and spirits of crushed rock, long-dead plants, and animals awaiting their reincarnation. Across the fields and beyond the mangroves, the morning mists sat in the folds of the mountains. Seeing they were neither opaque to affirm their existence, nor dissipating in apology to the immovable rock, I felt my ghosts begin to still themselves.

I remembered the mists would inevitably dissolve under the rising sun, and the mountains would yet stand. So what was the goddamn point? How could they be so bold, only to be so futile? I wanted to cry, and the weeds spat mud across my face as I tore them from the ground.

A breeze, passing. The faintness of words hidden under a breath: “Close your eyes.”

The answer was this: the mists, ephemeral and fading, offering their drops to the rising sun, amplifying, refracting, and casting rainbows across the ridges. There was no cost and no prize for the mists, as they were born from the damp, deep, in-between of night and day. It was simply the way things were.

“Maybe,” I thought.

Opening my eyes, it occurred to me that rainbows are actually full circles.

I looked away from the mountains to find someone facing me: a man with dark eyebrows and lashes wreathing eyes the color of koa. I had spotted him earlier, as we trekked across the fields to the lo‘i, but thought myself transparent and let myself forget. But here he remained, refusing to turn his gaze. I was in his path on purpose.

Flecks of California grass and morning moisture drifted between us like a veil. I felt dangerous and furtive, so I let it rest, but I couldn’t help glancing, pretending to look beyond him to see if he was still near. Each time I opened my mouth, he would lift his head, raising his chest and body towards me, then averting his eyes back to the earth. It enthralled me, but I worried it was all too fragile, and if I moved any closer, I could shatter everything.

And yet, I was covered in mud. He couldn’t have seen me unless he sought me.

When our work was finished, we approached the ‘auwai to rinse off the mud. My son and I sat down, and I ran my fingers through the green carpets that sat on the water.

“I wonder what these are,” I said aloud.

“They’re azolla. A type of water fern.”

His voice was deeper, closer. There he was, with his eyes of koa, shining all over me like someone trying to read in the dark. And there I was, cold mountain water spiraling around and between my legs. I finally thought of something to say, but when I parted my lips to speak, he disappeared down the stream, only to stand within aura’s reach while we all waited in line for kalua pork, poi, and papaya.

I never saw him again, nor will I, especially because I am girlish enough to wish for it. Not for him specifically, but for the surge, the heat, and the vibrance that comes when I am my own Sun, driving the orbits of my life.

I have always wanted to be the Sun, gathering offerings from clouds. But in many ways, I am the Moon, glowing and yanking the tides into mountains, only to retreat and leave darkness in the night sky. Eventually, I rise again, but nothing is as I left it.

And yet, I do it all. I wish and I pray. I grasp and I want. I plead the world for answers, and then I say, “Fuck it all,” and follow my own oracle into the murky unknown. I lay descansos along the highway, then back onto the road I go.

Whatever it is, I do it anyways.

Do we exist because others see us? Or do we exist once we see ourselves? Can either be true without the other?

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I’ve been rewatching my life, again and again, but now the movie has gotten caught on a loop—the film roll has been snipped, and the projector is stuck whipping the detached strip, again and again.

Since my dad died (almost 20 years ago), I’ve tried to tell a spacious, generous truth of who I am, where I came from, but it never seems like it’s enough. All I get is a cage around my chest and a tannic, stringent dryness—the kind that comes from bitter tea and makes you rub your tongue along the roof of your mouth, your teeth, searching for wetness.

Now, I can’t remember my father at all. He is THERE in my memory, but flat and unmoving, like in the photos on my bookshelf.

This year, my entire world has collapsed on itself, and underneath the rubble, I see what I’ve truly wanted:

a generosity

for myself.

And maybe, from there, I can afford him the grace I’ve hoped I’d be big enough, loving enough, brave enough to muster.

So here I go.

DECOMPRESSING THE TRUTH

I’ve heard people claim they had HAPPY, easy childhoods, and I’ve always asserted myself as one of these people. It was the easy, daughterly, and morally correct way to let the “better” side of the story take up weight, especially since my dad’s life was so noble, so brave, and his death, so sudden and violent.

And in some ways, it IS easier to sweep everything under a single narrative.

Here am I now, as a mom, and I know more intimately than ever the effort, energy, and soul-bearing that goes into raising a child, whether intentional or not. But if “intention” commands reality, then everything would be a delusion, as intentions are rarely ever manifested by speech or announcement.

They are pervasive and revealing—subconsciously, intrinsically linked to everything we make, say, and do, across our past, present, and future.

My dad: the man, the legend

My dad, in many ways, was tenacious about our enjoyment, fulfillment, expansion, and well-being… or at least, his understanding of what those meant.

At his brightest, he was the hunter of delicious ice cream, history museums, locals-only theme parks buried behind side-roads, and premium buffets at luxury hotels because he knew everything was ours to taste. These weren’t acts of obligation, but a natural extension of his own dreams: the fruits of his labor and duty were ours to be relished because we were of him. My memory as his daughter is punctuated by shimmering, humming moments in timespace—stacked between the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, or wafting from all those family barbecues in our perfect little tract home in Irvine when he’d have a few beers, and he’d so wonderfully shed the weight of his own presence.

He joked often about the luxuries of his own childhood—stale French fries from McDonald’s, watching Willy Wonka through his neighbor’s window, and a single bottle of Coca Cola, given to him by his half-brother who hid him outside the restaurant while he dined indoors. (To this day, I hate that fucking loser half-brother and refuse to remember his name. This is MY truth, and I decide where my generosity goes.)

My dad would share these snapshots, then tell us to laugh, stand up straight in church, and be grateful to God that we were going to eat churros and yule logs at the Disneyland Christmas parade.

“They were just stories,” he’d say. “Everything is good and different now.”

As if he were reaching back into time to tell himself.

Growing up, my father, to me, was composed of legends and hero myths.

He had traveled far and long, outsmarted and endured the kinds of hardship that were “regular” to his culture—unrelenting duty and hierarchy, induced modesty by way of humiliation, and the pressing envy of those for whom it was already too late because they didn’t have what it took. Not like he did.

He was one of the most ambitious people of his island at the time and one of the few to believe that fortune and purpose could be achieved beyond his little rock of a home and its pettiness, myopia, and arrogant illiteracy. Some dickhead doctor at the hospital fucked up his Naval Academy application, so he worked at a Wendy’s for a year before going to Oregon State, and eventually became the highest-ranked Samoan in the Marine Corps.

How is that not incredible?

Stories I heard from everyone but himself.

Today, I see these not as myths, but fables of the tension it creates to abandon your world, yet be invisibly, unconsciously constrained by the indentations it has left on you.

He built a home that shielded us from his hardships, but he still decorated our walls with talismans, omens of his culture and upbringing that I had to honor, with no explanation or reason except BECAUSE HE SAID SO! Honestly, I don’t think he even knew he had brought them with him, and that they were constantly looming over the dinner table, school assemblies, and field trips like watchful, tattling deities.

I know this because I always heard them. I did.

I heard them and their silent, suffocating logic—impossible to decipher, but absolutely necessary to respect.

Punctuation is not the sentence

I knew of him, but I must admit he was difficult to decipher. He gave me the snapshots, the origin stories, the vignettes, the jokes. But I never knew what to get him for Christmas, which friends of mine he would like, what would please him, or what would set off the splitting of the Earth.

To say this feels like condemnation, but if I’m going to be generous with myself, I have to stop filling in the blanks for someone who is dead and cannot correct or challenge me.

The truth is this: I loved and admired my dad, but I had enormous difficulty knowing him beyond his expectations and hopes for me, and my fear of him.

First off, he was rather remote. It was the nature of his work. The pressure, the ambition were things he kept away from us because it was “grown up stuff”—war and military and risk, why would you want your kids to bear that? But it did create a moat around him, and I sensed (and was told, in steely glares and silences) that I was not to cross it.

Second, it was also hard to know him because he was quite terrifying to me.

He was a mystery, with a shapeshifting energy that could be expressed as incredible charisma and warmth. He was a leader’s voice and gravity, the kind that would inspire me to write lists of all the ways I could be EXCELLENT, just like him. I could be a writer, a lawyer, a journalist, or someone who could help if I just applied myself. He made me feel like Icarus, resurrected and given another chance at greatness.

And at the slightest degree to the left, he would morph into a rage that was as consuming as a massive black hole and the heat of a thousand Suns, all at once. Hands and words and looks would go flying like asteroids, and there I was, on the ground, rearranging the pieces of myself into someone that would be acceptable.

JUST DO AS YOUR FATHER FUCKING SAYS, ICARUS!

“Maybe I’ll get it this time!” I would think with hope, again and again, until I gave up.

I do think he knew this and wielded it intentionally, though maybe, less so and reluctantly, in his final months.

I CAN’T DO MATH! I’M NOT FUCKING SORRY!

In 8th grade, I received a big, fat, glaring F in math. It was about to be Christmas break, and I knew that I was about to spend the entirety of it imprisoned while all of my friends got to eat Christmas candy at the base’s shoppette, ride the bus to Camp Foster and Mihama, and talk to boys on AIM and Myspace.

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll give it to him on his birthday. He will be in a good mood! That will lessen the blow,” desperate, idiot, 13-year-old me.

I also considered whether I should slam and break my hand in my window to inspire sympathy and deflect my impending corporal punishment. I did, but my hand did not break. And, I ruined his fucking birthday.

Here’s the real punchline, though: even if it did break, nobody would’ve noticed it amidst the astounding tag-team between my dad and mom, not even me. I saw so many stars that night that I forgot I had slammed my hand until the next day, when I could barely hold a pencil. I would later play with my futility and misery through other forms of self-harm and degradation that I will not awaken here because those demons have earned their sleep.

Why didn’t it occur to him that I hated math or wasn’t as smart as he’d hoped?
Why didn’t it occur to him, or my mother, that I would be in so much pain?
Why wouldn’t he, they, anyone just fucking LOOK AT ME?

A few months later, we would all go to Hong Kong, and we would become perfect and dandy.

We would ride double-decker buses and squeal quietly at how fancy Mandarin food is served with all the heads and claws and eyes bugging and bearing at you. We would drink pulpy pineapple juice from McDonald’s, and he would snuggle my baby sister after she was lightly bullied by myself and my second sister. He would be the only one to spot Goofy get accosted by a handsy eight-year old and point it out to all of us so we could belly-laugh over Mickey waffles and scrambled eggs. It would be enough happiness to think that he trusted me and that my loneliness was just an illusion.

I would forget that he told me to cover my wrists after that boy slammed me against the rock wall. I would forget how humiliated he and my mother looked when I had to pick up trash on base after betraying the only friend I ever loved. I would forget how lonely I felt and how much I just wanted to go back to California, and turn all of this into a sweaty fever dream.

“I CAN do this,” I thought. “WE can do this. Everything is going to be okay. I can be GOOD!”

Nearing the end.

Then we would land in Hawaii, and he and my mother would abandon me, yet again. He would disappear into his Commanding Officer responsibilities, and my mother would immerse herself in caring for four children, making friends, and playing politics with everyone except families that might’ve had a friend for me.

They would never admit it, but by now, I had taught them to be highly suspicious of me, and that it would be necessary for my safety and their convenience to sentence me to an all-girls Catholic school halfway across the island. To match, we moved onto the top of a hill that jutted far out into the ocean, was barred by a sentry, and could only be reached by a long, winding road. He received a historic house that had seen World War II and a plate with his name and rank. The grass was always sharp and dry, no matter how green. He had done something really great and gotten what he wanted.

I was safe now because I was out of reach and nowhere to go but back within their walls, back to the angry, wordless deities. Back to the internet.

I’m just like you.

Every so often, my dad would drive my sister and me to school in his very little, very silver, very practical Saturn sedan. This seemed like the only place he could never be in a bad mood—driving us over the Pali in the early weekday mornings.

With every block we passed, every yard we closed as we approached my school, I would close my eyes and begin to dissolve myself so that everything would pass through me—all the signs that I was an outcast, a conundrum, or at my most, a stinky and grumpy teenager.

And as we pulled up before that ancient little school, there was so little left of me.

But there was enough of me to see him. Right before I got out of the car, he would turn back to say goodbye, and there he was, as I loved him: the dad who taught me that yellow, powdered Gatorade was the ONLY acceptable hydration. The one who would take us to get Slurpees after school. The one who promised that so long as I stayed close to my family, to God, everything would be okay.

“Goodbye! I’ll be okay. I’ll do my best. Thank you for everything, ” I would say, unbeknownst that I was whispering across into the crevasses and folds of time.

I would truly, truly, truly mean it, even as I felt myself fading and disintegrating with each step up those dreadful, hollow wooden stairs amidst all the girls who reminded me of how weird and distant I was. He would zoom off in the Zoomster (what he had named that little Saturn—I told you he was funny!), and I would bless him, despise him, and wish he would come back to save me!

Please save me! All of your excellence and power and anger—

SHOW that same anger, that same fire, to my loneliness, to all of the things that hurt me

and taught me

how difficult I was

to weather,

to tame,

to understand,

and to love.

Tell them they are wrong and that—actually,

ironically, karmically,

fatefully—

I am just

like

you.

Saturn, Father Time, Father Issues

I ask myself often: what more can parents give to their kids, other than to live widely, truly, and fully? We lived in his world, his career. As a mother now, I’m not really bothered by that.

But the least he could’ve done was allow me a world of my own within his.

Everything I felt and lived was on the margins and in secret. I’d hop in the car and pretend, and accept because he and my mother worked so hard for this. That school, the Disneyland trip, the berating and humiliation were all in the same category because it was all for me.

It was very confusing to be watched so closely, yet always feel so profoundly and almost stubbornly unknown.

And since the theme of this writing is finding the GENEROUS truth, I will admit that I wanted to admire him and, in many ways, I did, but the proximity needed to KNOW him was too great a risk. If he were too close, he and my mother would see me and all of the discrepancies between who I SHOULD be and who I actually was, and from them, harvest myriad opportunities to suspect, surveil, and compress me.

I will also admit that, by the age of eleven, I decidedly liked it when he was gone on long trips. And by age fifteen, the age at which he was killed because of his job, I think I had given up on knowing him closely.

It is, perhaps, tongue-in-cheek funny that I would grow up to believe myself spiky, volatile, and terrifying—and that these were qualities that would make me hated but powerful. Ask my college boyfriend, my siblings, my mother, those coworkers from the ice cream shop, and my roommates after I’d had too much to drink. I have a fucking temper, one of my own brand and style, and in some bizarre logic, it makes me feel connected to him. Not just through blame, but a sense of shared accountability and empathy.

It’s hard to be this way. I don’t mean to sound self-pitying, but it is really hard. Angry and conscious of your own extraordinariness (both the reality and potential of it). Deeply seeing and generous, and yet, with a fucking chip on your shoulder. Very loving and wanting to be liked, but also remote, complicated, and hard to understand.

So to say that my childhood was “happy” is a compressed, tight-lipped truth. It was punctuated by happiness, love, and admiration for my father, of course. But it also bred in me an unremovable fear, an inevitable striving, and a mythology of my own difficulty,

my own secrecy,

and a fear of ME,

because I was

(as I described him)

incredibly

volatile,

hard to understand,

and

capable of a terrifying anger.

A human wish: that in the second his life left his body, he saw me across time and space. Maybe even now, he KNOWS who I am, who I was, who I will BE. I wonder what an alien would say about that—humans are SO funny, little, and strange!

What a silly, little girl thing to say. That’s what I’ve always been, and am, even now. A silly little girl.

The more I say this, the more I feel myself (and him) come back to life.

Happy 60th birthday, Dad.