Time and time again, I think about The Years by Alex Dimitrov.
Behind the glass and inside, / all your friends buzzed.
You could feel the shape / of their voices.
(I recommend reading the whole thing, it is a fantastic piece.)
This poem specifically takes me back to last year, when I was still a senior at Berkeley and I would often find myself on the balcony at various parties. People would step out for a breather before heading back in, releasing a whoosh of pitched laughter and body heat into the air with each movement of the sliding door. I would turn back towards the street, watching the cars and stray cats skitter across the pavement, looking forward but searching for nothing in particular.
My current life is somewhat similar. There is a wine bar across the street and every evening, I sit by the window to watch the new couples and old couples, friends catching up, and slightly awkward coworker encounters play out. I learned that Thursday is a popular time because most people in the city work remotely on Fridays. When it’s warm, people come as early as 5 PM, tugging big fluffy dogs on leashes to the outdoor tables. Sometimes I join them from my apartment, raising a beer in mutual celebration, mouthing the words cheers and smiling through the curtains.
It has come to my attention that I’ve been working at my firm for almost a year, and San Francisco will soon be swathed in an array of sunlight, picnic blankets, and more wine bar visitors. My friends and I comment on the things we carry with us into the present and the future, the things we’ve lost along the way, and the things we have recently discovered. C recognized my chipped nail polish from a boba run we had three years ago. Every black sherpa puffer I see in the city reminds me of the one J had in Bologna, the one she wore almost everyday until the city turned warm. I passed someone on the sidewalk today because they were walking too slowly before realizing I’ve met them on a house-party-balcony before. I stopped and say hi, even though I didn’t know their name.
I’ve been around for 8,327 days which feels like a lot and very little at the same time. On one hand, it feels like a long time because I have so many distinct memories that I can recount in alarmingly precise detail and yet, it’s so little when I think about what other events could occur in the future, things I can’t even begin to fathom. I wonder if my ability to remember everything comes from the fact that most of my life hasn’t unfolded yet and I am pulling from a small population of memory. But I also like to think that this is due to my unrelenting belief in the intimacy (and closeness!) of time.
As I am writing this, it suddenly started raining and I only know this because of the sound of water being pulled by the wheels of passing cars. I have spent many nights on the balcony to know exactly what this sounds like. It is vaguely lonely, in the sense that there is no laughter coming from the wine bar tonight—it seems that everyone took shelter inside.
I am currently in the process of making a photobook, which I will avoid speaking too much about because I oftentimes find that the formal announcement of a project can lead to the abandonment of the whole thing altogether. But the idea for this book came about on a February morning, when I checked “Find My” and saw my family members scattered across Southern California. I wondered what each of them were up to—what they were seeing at that exact moment. So the next time I went home, I gave each of them a disposable camera to shoot whatever they wanted.
This book will be an attempt to immortalize the small fragments of our lives, distant but connected at the roots.
