Ah, and I guess this is also about the whiplash of being moved before I understand why. I used to resist. But now I flow: 30 countries later, and over 160 to go…
When I was younger, a boy I loved owned a shirt that read, “The only constant is change.” We ribbed him for it, all of us, mostly because he was foreign and interpreted it a little goofily each time, as if the sentence had shifted overnight while he slept.
I have since learned the line is older than the shirt. Heraclitus said it first, more or less, twenty-five centuries ago, alongside the one about the river you cannot step into twice. And I have come to believe the boy was the only one of us reading it correctly. A sentence about change that means something new each time you look at it is the only honest version of that sentence.
I think about the shirt more than I think about the boy. That is the first thing you should know about writers.
Life is largely unpredictable, the way weather is: not random, just faster than the forecast. One moment you are aligning perfume bottles on a shelf, moving halfway in with a lover, and you stare up at the moon and ask it for an answer.
I have stopped expecting the moon to answer. It has never once answered. It has only ever moved me, the way it moves water, and I have come to accept that this is the only kind of answer I am given. Not a reply. A tide.
And then God; the Universe; Matter; What-Have-You, steps in with enough whiplash to show you it wasn’t safe to get comfy just yet. I have stopped resenting the whiplash. It is a mercy with bad manners. I have been corrected by it more times than I can count, and not once, in retrospect, have I been corrected wrong.
I run programs for a living. The job is pattern recognition: noticing what the report leaves out. And the pattern in my own life, read honestly, is this. I am moved before I can understand why. I am lifted out of rooms before I can see the ceiling coming down. I am turned, again and again, the way a needle is turned, toward a north I cannot name and did not choose. The understanding arrives later, like a letter, which may be why I have started sending them. Security, is usually false. Home, is mobile. And it’s not a person, but it’s my heart.
Providence comes from the Latin for seeing ahead. I am not the one seeing ahead. That has been made very clear to me, and I have made my peace with it, because the alternative is believing I have been lucky, and I have been too specifically rescued, too many times, for luck.
I will not explain it, because I cannot, and because every explanation I have ever heard sounds like it was written by someone who was never once carried.
I say I write from The Desk of the Last Romantic, but the truth is deeper than a desk. I write from the eye of the storm, and people misunderstand the eye. It is not calm because the storm has passed; it is calm because it is the center, and the center is the only place from which the whole thing can be seen at once. I did not walk there. I was placed there. I have never once found the eye on my own, and I have never once been left outside it.
If I let the pressures of society mold me and keep me in a box, in a place that never made me feel quite … accepted, I would stop creating. I would stop loving the world fully. I would write less than my heart desires, and my heart desires a great deal. So I decline the box. Not loudly. Declining does not need to be loud; it only needs to be final.
I do not believe in the world of endless option. I believe in the inner world of endless adaptability and creation.
Here is the difference. Option is the faith that the next thing will save you. Adaptability is the faith that you are already being saved, and that your job in the meantime is to make something with your hands. Option keeps one hand on the door; adaptability puts both hands in the clay. There is an old idea, older than the men who get credit for it, that you should love your fate: not endure it, love it, the way you love a river for moving. I keep a desk for that. It is where I take what has moved me and find out what it was moving me toward. Sometimes the reason is already there. Sometimes I have to make one. That is what creation is. Not finding meaning. Insisting on it.
These musings said: The shop is finally open. You can be immortalized, by me. You can read what I hand pick for you. Where? Here. https://thelastromantic.co/shop
There is a special kind of dance done with a writer. You will be remembered more precisely than you expected and more tenderly than you feared. So if you write to me, or let me write to you, I am excited for you to have the opportunity to be immortalized in the Bourdainism of my own mind: go, pay attention, eat what is put in front of you, keep no illusions, and tell the truth about the place when you get home.
For the first time you will be able to buy letters from me, and books I have chosen with my own hands. A letter is attention made into an object. A book someone chose for you is a map of where they have been. And the travel musings belong here too, because the same thing that moves me out of rooms is the thing that moves me into cities. When I am elsewhere, I will write to you from elsewhere: a letter from a train, a book I picked up in a city I do not live in because of what the city did to me while I read it. The Last Romantic was always a traveling desk. I am only letting you send for it now.
https://thelastromantic.co/shop
I do not know what keeps me. I know that I am kept.
Thank you for your support, always. Now, I burn the midnight oil. But not because I have to. Because I am part-owl, and part-Asian lady.