Made in America

I am...

...made in America, where the extent of our culture is backyard barbeque burgers on the Fourth of July, and the paint-coated picket fence shines so white underneath the blue sky;

...made in America, where history as it is written suffers splashes and spills of white-out, but no worries as all that is still readable is beyond doubt;

...made in America, where politicians always act in the best interest of the people, where police uphold laws to the protect the people, and where government hears the voices of the people;

...made in America, where “the people” means “some people,” “no people,” or “themselves”;

...made in America, a post-racial society so proudly represented by a giant melting pot—just make sure you use white pepper, white onions, and no variety, because keeping the porridge white is our number one priority;

...made in America, born and raised, proud and ignorant, patriotic and silent.



Trung and I were on our way back up to NorCal. I drove as always, while he sat in the passenger seat, and Sang slept in the backseat. Trung and I casually talked about the last few months of our second year in college.

“Nothing new is really going on with UCI,” I said. “I think the biggest thing that happened was stuff with the Irvine 11 that happened like four months ago in February. Have you heard about them?”

“No, what’s that?”

“The Irvine 11 are these people from our school’s Muslim Student Union, and they got busted for speaking out during this one speech from some Israeli ambassador, who was invited to speak at UCI by the law school and political science department and some other sponsors. While he was talking, one person would stand up in the audience, shout out some shit, and when that person was escorted out, another one would stand up and yell out some more shit. That continued in succession, eleven times, so that the ambassador guy wouldn’t get to speak. Now there’s controversy because the Irvine 11 are getting arrested. What’s stupid though is there are actually people standing up for the Irvine 11.”

“You don’t support what the Irvine 11 did?”

“No, why would I?”

Trung raised his eyebrow at me. “Brian, do you understand anything about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?”

“I thought I was talking about Israel and Muslims.”

Trung grunted. “Brian, Israelis practice Judaism, making them Jewish in case you didn’t know, and Palestinians practice Islam, making them Muslim. And that’s just a general blanket statement, but I’m telling you this because you’ll probably hear stuff about Jews versus Muslims too when talking about the conflict.”

“Okay, this is too many names, and either way, my understanding of the Israelian-Palestinny Conflict doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“It’s clear who’s at fault here, isn’t it, Trung? The First Amendment, the right that the Irvine 11 and their supporters are claiming to be violated, doesn’t allow you to go into a meeting at a ballroom, sit in the audience, and shout over the speaker at the front. The First Amendment has regulations so shit like this wouldn’t happen, so that no one can yell ‘fire’ for kicks in a crowded room or walk into a lecture hall and start yelling obscenities over the professor. Even though the Irvine 11 disagreed with the ambassador, they could’ve voiced their opinions in a less annoying and less unlawful way. Hell, what happen to common courtesy and respect?”

“See Brian, this is where knowing something about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict comes into use. Do you know about the Gaza Massacre? No, I know you don’t. There were close to one thousand Palestinian civilian casualties, and well over one thousand total if you include those who fought, all thanks to Israel, who suffered around ten casualties total. If I was in their situation, the students of the Muslim Student Union, I’d protest too because I’d be outraged to hear that my own school would be sponsoring a visit from the Israeli ambassador, a representative of terrible war crimes against my homeland. That would be a huge inconsiderate ‘fuck you’ to me.”

“Well, we’re not talking about emotions here.”

“And that’s exactly the problem, because the rules and laws, Brian, don’t understand emotions. The Irvine 11, I can agree that they weren’t justified by the law, but they were justified by their emotions. It’s too bad that our fucked up system prefers only to look at the law, which is in and of itself imperfect.”

At this point, I was checking my rearview mirror to see if Sang was awake to watch me, for the millionth time, get owned by Trung in a car ride between NorCal and SoCal. Fortunately, he was sleeping, or at least he was pretending to be sleeping.



The first to-do item on the agenda after arriving back in NorCal was always to go downtown and get authentic Mexican food, specifically for me, a Super Burrito with chorizo. Trung and I picked up our orders along with a bottle of sauce and sat down at a table inside, watching the line stretch out the door with sobering students just getting back from the club. We ate in silence for our first few bites, but then I brought up something that had been on my mind for a while.

2010 was ending explosively with protests over fee increases and budget cuts, which erupted all over California in the last few months of November and December, and one of the controversies that stemmed from the protests was an incident where an officer, Jared Kemper, pulled out and aimed a gun at unarmed protesters at UCSF. When this story initially spread, I naturally reacted by thinking, whatever the protestors did, it must have been deserving enough to provoke Kemper’s response.

I discussed with Trung, over burritos and quesadillas, what the rebuttal for my reaction would be, because I wanted to instead be able to believe the rebuttal. He reminded me, first of all, that police officers weren’t robots that operated one hundred percent by the law; they were human too, capable of making mistakes, and that’s what Kemper did. It was something human within Kemper, a kind of fear or frustration, exacerbated by a realization that he had no training in handling the type of situation he was in, that made him desperately reach for his gun. In this case, however, his reaction was still inappropriate and inexcusable, Trung concluded, because it unnecessarily endangered lives, and under no circumstances would a police officer have a lawful reason to draw his gun on unarmed student protestors. Simple as that.

I nodded. Trung remarked that it was nice to see me trying to see things in a different light, because even if it was just half a year ago, I still would’ve been rolling my eyes at students playing victim and whining about having a gun pulled on them. And if it had been high school, he added, I still would’ve been parading racial colorblindness.

“Remember in high school when all your friends were taking that Asian American summer leadership program at DeAnza? You’d very openly accuse them of wasting their time because all they did was, and I quote you, ‘get together with other fob Asians and whine about racism.’ ‘Maybe if they integrated better and got over their race and other people’s races they could actually accomplish something blah blah blah only one race—the human race!—blah blah blah and I’m insensitive to race and ethnic issues.’ You’ve come a long way since then, Brian, and I know I don’t deserve all the credit, I’m sure, but I still like to say you changed all thanks to me.”

I shrugged. Trung might’ve been right. Something that I didn’t wanna tell him but had also been on my mind was the DREAM act, a bill that would’ve provided illegal “aliens” an opportunity for permanent residence if they satisfied certain conditions, one of which was getting into a four-year college and finishing at least two years. The bill was defeated in Senate one day prior, and how I felt about the news shocked me—I actually felt angry, upset. I don’t know if it was because I knew that Trung, who had been posting a bunch of stuff about the DREAM act on his Facebook and Tumblr, really hoped it would pass; or because throughout my last three years of teaching and tutoring, I’ve taught one or two outstanding students who weren’t legal residents in the United States. Whether or not I changed because of Trung or something else, however, there was at least the one important thing I learned to fully understand: Fuck the system.

Bad Person

As my friend Lisa and I wandered down hallways at the UCI student center, we peaked our heads inside study rooms to try to find anyone we might had known. During finals week at 2 AM, it wasn’t hard to find anyone and everyone pulling all nighters on campus and wishing they hadn’t spent their last week recovering from Thanksgiving turkey instead of studying in advance. Lisa eventually found a few friends of hers, and one of her guy friends in particular I thought was cute—typical dark skin Filipino with a buzz cut and line-up and a fresh white v-neck, my type—so I didn’t hesitate to share the table with him. He introduced himself, but there was something about his name that immediately stopped my train of thought.

One night, after Linh and I made up and before our inevitable “break up,” he told me about some of the guys that had hurt him in the past. One such guy was a Filipino kid who went to UCI and went by the name of KR.

“I’m Brian.”

“I’m KR. Nice to meet you.”

He sat back down, and I set myself up at the opposite end of the table next to Lisa. I spoke into her ear, “That was one of the guys that Linh got all butthurt about a long time ago.” She’d already known he sucked dick, but she didn’t know he dated Linh. While KR had his head buried in his books, I eyed him from time to time.

About an hour later, fed up with studying for my history final and failing at memorizing Asian names that all sounded the same, I struck up a conversation about Lisa. I made no attempt to keep my voice down.

“Lisa, look at Linh’s performance with his dance team.” I turned my laptop toward her to show her a youtube video. “Damn I love this piece. Linh kills it too. Linh was supposed to teach it to me but then, y’know, drama happened with Linh and me.”

Lisa shot a glance at KR and turned back to me. “KR’s right there,” she whispered. I pretended not to hear her.

“Linh was a good dancer, but beside that we didn’t really match. I don’t know how I thought things could’ve worked out between me and Linh.” Among the several times I mentioned Linh’s name, I managed to catch KR looking up two or three times. I had him.

Around 5 AM, both Lisa and KR started dosing off. KR asked her if she wanted to go nap out in the hallway on the couches with him, and she agreed. She asked me if I wanted to come, but no, I wanted them to have their alone time. I knew they wouldn’t be sleeping at all.

An hour passed, and Lisa came back. “KR finally went to sleep but I still felt wide awake. So I’m back here I guess.”

I nodded. “So did you guys talk about me?”

“What?” She laughed. “Maybe. You should talk to him! Try getting to know him a little better.”

“Really? Because I think I’m in a hook up mood.”

“No! Don’t do that. I meant actually date him!”

“I’ll consider it. So, what’d he say about Linh?”

“Um, he did bring him up. How’d you know?”

I folded my arms and leaned back in my chair. I shrugged. “I just figured.”



The bed sheets were cold as I sat on them, and the white walls, a slight tint of blue as I stared into them at 1 PM on a cloudy day in March. Trung crept into the room with a cup of water and closed the door behind him.

“Here,” he placed the cup in my hand. I put it on his dresser without drinking it. My throat throbbed and my voice quivered and cracked as I opened my mouth to once again, summarize the developing situation. “Trung, we’re not going to the same college.”

He sat closer to me and placed his hand on top of mine. “I know, but we can work things out Brian. We don’t need to go to UCSD together. Hell, I think I might just go to UCLA. You got accepted into UCI last week, so if you go there you won’t be far away! Brian, we will work.”

“Trung, I—” I stuttered. I fought for a few breaths just so I could try to say a few more words, but I couldn’t. Instead, I burst with streams of tears and that terrible screechy wailing sound I would always make when I cried. Trung threw his arms around me, and I fell back onto the bed with him on top of me. He kissed the side of my face and tried to caress it dry with his fingers.

“Brian, I love you.”

We had started talking in September. We had begun our relationship in December. It had been three and a half months since then. We never wanted to say it, but we had already known we loved each other somewhere in those earlier months.

I swallowed enough tears to say it back to him, “I love you too, Trung.”



Two weeks had passed since Linh and I split over the issue of Trung. A day prior to the split I asked Trung to write some more obscene messages on my FaceBook wall in hopes that Linh would read them (Trung’s “btw brian can i have more underwear when i come over,” to which I responded, “what happened to all of mine that you already have”). As if that wasn’t fun enough, I wondered what kind of reaction I could get out of Linh if I hooked up with one of his ex’s and sent him an obnoxious message bragging about it. Maybe I could finally get him to stop ignoring me. All this was what I was thinking four hours ago when I hatched a plan to find out more about the history of KR and Linh.

Everything in the plan was working out. Lisa heard all about the history during the last hour. She had it in her head, and I knew I could have convinced her to reveal all I wanted to know.

But then I didn’t. I stopped myself. I could’ve gone farther, but I didn’t. Fuck, I am not a bad person.

Empty Nest

I had made the decision to move on. Crushing on Vance wasn’t getting me anywhere and at age fifteen, I still had a lot more to life than sulking over him. "If you won't go out with me now, then just tell me 'no' so I can move on to other things in life." I was thinking of telling him that all day. It was my goal. It was all I imagined that would happen at the end of today.

I had my dad drive me to the Golf Land in Milpitas, and from there I walked to the restaurant Vance worked at. Got there around six, said hey to Vance and some of the workers who recognized me from a few earlier visits. One of Vance’s co-workers thought that I was his boyfriend... I wished. Anyways, after chatting for a few minutes, I sat down at the bar and ordered some food, and periodically Vance walked by to talk a bit. During one of these quick visits, he told me that he was excited about going to some party with Joanna and Hillary, two of his co-workers, right after work. Shit. Okay, whatever, I'll go along with them to the party and have my talk with him after. Vance used his cell phone to call his mom to ask her, and he had some trouble getting her permission. He said that Joanna was taking him out to eat, and he and his mom eventually agreed on a curfew: 12 AM.

I had to figure out a way to get home. Joanna didn't want to drive me all the way back to San Jose, so I just told her to drop me off with Vance after the party because my parents knew where his house was. That was a lie—they didn't know where he lived at all. I just wanted to be with Vance alone so I could give him the talk. What I was going to do once I needed my parents to pick me up was something else that I had to figure out later.

For some reason, I thought that party was going to be a pleasant party at a community center, with soda and rice dishes and what not. That was a party as I understood it at age fifteen. However, I noticed that we weren't driving to some community center. In fact, we were driving away from general public areas. We drove up into the hills, went by a church, and up to a lonely house. It was dark out and sprinkling and the gravel under our feet was slippery. Joanna had to drive around a bunch of random crap lying on the gravel to get to the other side of the house, where there were several other cars already parked. Through the car window, I saw people in scatter groups standing outside smoking cigarettes and holding beer bottles. I was just like, "Oh my fucking god." It was that kind of party. My first college house party.
---

After finishing my shopping trip with Ranier, I came back home around 10 to spend the rest of the night before Thanksgiving helping my mom prepare the turkey. I hadn’t done this since Freshmen year in high school (incidentally, the last year I got straight A’s in school), yet with all that had changed in the last six years, my turkey responsibilities remained the same: crush the bread crumbs and make sure that my mom applied the ratios correctly from the turkey stuffing recipe. I sat at the kitchen table working, while my mom stood at the kitchen counter yanking organs from the turkey and slicing them up.

“...and,” she went on, “I just love the new grocery department at Target, don’t you?”

I smiled. A whole five pound chicken for five dollars? Yes, I did too. “Yeah, it’s really cheap.”

“They have bananas for—”

“Nineteen cents each!” we both chimed together.

My brother never cooked in college or shopped beyond the frozen food aisle; he would just come home from Davis every weekend and my mom would cook up a week’s worth of food and send it with him back up to school in Tupperware. Even though my dad cooked, he still didn’t like talking about it because admitting to doing kitchen work threatened his perceived notions of masculinity.

As a result, the most mundane things my mom and I talked about were probably the most special things we talked about: SoCal grocery stores (Ralph’s) versus NorCal grocery stores (Lucky); the exceptional or exceptionally bad quality of meats sold at food markets in Westminster’s Little Saigon versus that of San Jose’s Saigon Business District; the different ways we cooked our pork chops or the different ways our salmon tasted; and our own techniques for figuring out how much water in the rice cooker was just enough.

My dad walked into the kitchen to find me helping my mom measure out chicken broth for the turkey stuffing. After noting the fact that this was the first time in forever that I had helped with the turkey, he asked me if I was going to be home for the summer. I said maybe, and he proposed that he teach me Vietnamese if I did come home. I agreed.

My dad settled on the couch in front of the TV, and as my mom and I prepared to load the stuffing into the turkey, my brother swung through the kitchen to ask me a question. Did I absolutely need a phone with a full keyboard? I told him not really, why? He planned on getting me an Android phone for Christmas, finally an upgrade from my teenybopper texting phone.

---
Around 11:10, after being awkward and talking to no one and sipping on a water bottle for a few hours, I got a call on my cell and went outside to answer it. I picked up, and it was some woman. She asked me who it was, and I answered Brian. It was Vance's mom, and she asked for Vance and complained that he should've been home by 11. I went back in and gave the phone to Vance. He yelled at her over the phone a bit and abruptly hung up after a few seconds. He said that we should probably leave around 11:30.

We went upstairs and waited for Joanna to use the bathroom. While waiting, Vance and I lied down together on a waterbed. He jumped on top of me and squeezed me tightly; basically he glomped me. I reached around him and hugged him back tightly, putting my head over his shoulder. I savored the moment and did not want to let go, ever.

I enjoyed my four seconds of the hug. Vance pushed himself up and was giggling merrily. Yes, it was just playful. Just playful. Here it was again: the hurt. He knew that I had feelings for him, so I wondered if he knew what that hug really did to me.

On the way back in the car, Vance rambled on and on about how much his parents were so strict about him going out. He said that before his parents found out that he was gay two years ago, they were okay with letting him go out whenever, but now they had become strict because they worried about him going out and having sex with boys. Vance continued to ramble on about how close he and his parents used to be, but ever since they found out that he was gay, they had only tried to be close to him to turn him straight.

It bothered me. It worried me. Two years, and Vance's parents still couldn't accept that he was gay. That he was not a failure. That being gay was not a choice or decision. I wondered out loud, "I wonder what my parents will do when I come out." Vance immediately turned around and sternly told me, "DON'T! You'll regret it!"

As Joanna drove Vance and me into his neighborhood, I thought, Imma have our talk once we got out of the car. We slowly drove up to Vance's house, which was dark, and we stopped. Vance got his stuff and stepped out the door, and right as I was about to open my door, Vance's mom walked out from behind the bushes. She glared at us. Holy. fucking. shit.

Vance tried to say something, but she walked right past him and went up to the car. She looked in, and Joanna and I nervously glanced at each other. Joanna apologized for bringing him home late, but the over-apologetic girl wasn't what Vance's mom cared about. She turned to me and asked, "You're Brian, right?" I nodded yes. And then she asked me if I was the same guy that hung over at Vance's house three weeks ago. I wasn't sure if I should've lied and said no. I looked outside to Vance hoping to find an answer, but he had his head bitterly turned to the side. Very cautiously, I nodded yes again.

It was deathly silent for a few seconds, but then she finally addressed both of us. She said she was worried sick, and that she didn't like Vance going out late, and that this whole thing was not a good way to start off the New Year. And she made it clear that she wanted Vance to never hang out with me again. Joanna apologized for her and me again, and Vance's mom gave us a gesture to tell us to leave. Neither of us even got to say goodbye to Vance.

I had Joanna drop me off at the Great Mall, where I called my parents and told them that my friends had driven me back up to the Great Mall to watch a few movies after the DCM was over. I asked my dad to come pick me up, and after I hung up, I wandered around for a little bit. It was midnight, and the Great Mall was pretty lonely. However, CyberHunt, an Internet Café, was still open, and there were a bunch of wanksters playing CS and stuff. They had a DDR Extreme machine, so I played a game. I AA'd Legend of Max on Extra Stage, got the Encore Extra Stage, and I passed it. Finally. After I was done with that game, I remembered, "What do I smell like right now?" Smoke, yes, cigarette smoke. I grabbed my bottle of Axe and sprayed it all over me.

- from “Lunar New Year”
Written January 29th, 2006
---

At 7 PM, I finished off all the remnants of gravy and turkey on my plate and, forcing the most polite demeanor possible, I stayed downstairs in the living room congregating with my relatives and their little kids. But around eight, it was time to load up my car. I needed to be back down in SoCal because I had a seven hour shift at Promod the next day, Black Friday. I excused myself from the Thanksgiving party to retreat to my room to pack.

Every time I headed back down to SoCal, I somehow always had more things to bring back down than I did coming back up. I rummaged through my closet and reached up toward a shelf to grab a cardboard box. I pulled it down and spilled it to the floor, unleashing wave after wave of papers. Among the key chains, several Lego pieces, and the single condom that showered out, something shiny tumbled down and bounced off my foot. I leaned over and picked it up. It was a key to my mom’s Toyota. What was it doing in there? Upon further inspection, I realized the key didn’t sport the Toyota logo. It wasn’t one of the spares that came with the car—no, it was a copy, a copy made at some kiosk in the mall. Ah yes, the spare key.

I had it made in case the war I had waged against my parents years ago got really bad. Despite all the shit I had given them, they would never retaliate, but I worried that if they ever did, one of the consequences would be taking away the key to my car. I figured the household living atmosphere would have to be completely unbearable if it ever got to that, so I prepared myself by making a copy of my mom’s car key just in case I ever needed to run away from home in the middle of the night.

I guess I didn’t need it anymore.

I brought the key downstairs and left it on top of the TV with the other car keys. After I loaded everything into the car and did a last minute check for anything I might had forgotten, I was ready to go. Standing at the door, I waved at my relatives and they all looked up from their plates to wave back at me. I headed outside to the driveway where my parents waited for me by my car. We exchanged our hugs and kisses and I-love-you’s, and once again, I departed from home in the middle of the night.

Brian and Trung

Back up in San Jose for Thanksgiving break, I met up with Ranier to help him shop for a present for a friend of his, the same one he hung out with the last time he came down to Irvine to visit. The plan was for me to take that gift back down to SoCal and give it to his friend the following week at a dance show as an early Christmas present.

At first, we were hoping to find his friend a Tae Yang poster, but for some reason we didn’t see the faulty reasoning in thinking that we could find a Korean pop star poster inside Grand Century, a Vietnamese mall. While wandering around, I couldn’t help but mentally note the irony about walking around this mall with Ranier. The last time I was here was eleven months ago, New Years day, and I was also with Ranier. It was our first date/hang out.

Yeah, okay, mentally noted. Moving on.

As expected, we did not find a shirtless Korean kid with a gay fohawk hiding among the green waffle stands, pho restaurants, pirated music shops, diamond jewelers, and bamboo stores, so we brainstormed other gift ideas.

“Shakeweight,” I suggested.

“No.”

“Snuggie.”

“No! Why are you suggesting such shitty ideas?”

I shrugged. “Why are you thinking too hard?”

“Oh, I know, I’ll get him tapers, and I wanna get him a good gift because we are good friends. Don’t you do that Brian? Got any good friends?”

I shrugged again. Admittedly, I sucked at friendships.

---
“Brian and Seth”
Written December 23rd, 2005 (Excerpted)

[Quick recap: Seth was my “best friend” from the second grade to the eighth grade, making our friendship my longest friendship. “Friendship” with Seth, however, had a pretty loose definition. Various incidents and causes, some being petty, others being emotionally or physically harmful, eventually led me to ending the friendship at the end of middle school. However, I ended things in sort of a cowardly way: by posting an angry entry on my blog. But a year and a half later, during the 2005 Christmas season, I decided to contact him through another guy that went to his fancy private high school, Vance. After getting a few messages to Seth and finding out the date of his Christmas/birthday party, December 22, I showed up at his house that evening.]

Seth’s mom let me in, but he and his friends were at Nickel City. That gave me time to reminisce and think of what to say to Seth. His house hadn't changed much, and it still had the weird bitter smell of walnuts. Hell, Seth hasn't even gotten a new Gamecube game since I left him. Super Smashed Brothers Melee was his most recent game. It felt like I had just walked to his house to rest for the millionth time after another school day at Bernal Intermediate.

I ended up waiting like forty-five minutes for him and his friends to come back. When I walked out to greet them, I was surprised that I already knew a lot of them. Seth only had like four friends from Bellarmine at the party, and the rest I remembered from Bernal Intermediate (and they remembered me too, but they suspected nothing).

The entire time, we tried to minimize contact with each other, but any time we had to talk, he tried to be nice. It was awkward nice. With all his friends around, I didn't find the time to talk to Seth alone until 10:30. He had to go ask his sister, who was in her room, for some TV cables. Before he went, I got ahead of him and hid in the bathroom. When Seth passed by, I quickly led him into his room, saying that we needed to talk. I did it all without very much thought so that I wouldn't let myself be stopped by my doubts and end up staying until like 12.

So we were in his room alone, and he closed and locked the door. The light from the lamp was as dim as ever. I sat on his bed, but he opted to stand up. I felt like I started to sweat as soon as I asked him, "So what did Vance tell you?" Whatever Vance told him, Seth had gotten the impression that I still wanted to be friends. At that point, I decided to pour everything out of my mouth, with my voice cracking more and more at the end of each sentence.

"Seth, I can't be your friend. After those six years, I don't want to be your friend anymore. It's just that… One and a half years ago, you remember what I said about you on my blog? That wasn't how I wanted to end it. Back then, I couldn't face you so I used the cowardly way out. I felt so guilty that I couldn't face you, and I just left you confused and lost with a blog entry that rambles on about nothing. So I just came here to say what I couldn't one and a half years ago, and what I should've said sooner: You treated me like shit all throughout elementary school and middle school. I hate you. Our friendship is done, and let's just leave it at that."

His countenance was blank. And I almost cried. My face was fucking red-hot. He sighed and told me, "Okay." We agreed that we were now simply "strangers". Following a tense silence, we shook hands like we had just met, and I called my dad and left without saying another word.

So it's over now. I can finally move on. I feel like going out and making some new friends; it should be easier now without all the weight of the memories and regrets associated with my very first close friendship.

But for now, fuck the whole "making new friends" thing. Because you know what I really feel like doing? Masturbating the shit out of my penis. It’s been 14 days. [Yeah, the way I blogged back in high school is very different from the way I blog now.]
---

I handed Trung a wrapped box. He held it on his forearms and raised his eyebrow at it.

“It’s your Christmas present,” I told him. “I’m giving it to you now, a week before Christmas before we head back up to San Jose so that you can actually get me something just as good this year.”

Trung pressed his ear to the box and shook it. He didn’t hear anything. “Silly DinoBrian. I don’t have to worry about getting you anything good because I know there’s probably nothing in this box. At the very least, there are probably more eggrolls in this box, one for every time you cheated on me.”

“No, I swear! I got you something good!”

“You haven’t gotten me anything good since DinoBlanket two years ago! One Valentine’s day, two birthdays, and one Christmas—the most I got out of those was a break up. Remember my nineteenth birthday Brian? You couldn’t even wait more than a week after before breaking up with me. Hmph!”

“Just open the box already.” A fresh New Era cap for his collection. Satisfied Trungy.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

“Brian, do you know about the discount you get at Pro-mode? You can get fifty percent off an entire wardrobe! That’s two tops, two jackets...”

Yes, I knew, thank you. You and any of the other three managers had been reminding me of my awesome totally cool discount every week, but I knew it was your passive way of telling me that the white V-neck I wore to work every other day was getting old. Unfortunately, that white V-neck and like two other shirts were my only non-branded shirts I had, and unfortunately, everything at Promod was shit I would’ve worn as a high school student, and I looked like this in high school:“Brian, here’s a [from-your-crotch-to-your-face-high] stack of clothes that people left in the fitting room. Put them back plz thank you.”

Well, I couldn’t complain about that. Folding clothes was why I was hired. Like a trooper I took the stack to a worn down folding cart unaesthetically located in the front of the store. That was when I saw... (the tone of this entry will now abruptly change to my more usual melodramatic tone)...her: this crazy little brown Mexican girl swooping in between the legs of the cart.

She was adorable. She looked up at me and I looked down at her past the pile of clothes in my arms. She smiled and I smiled back, which made her giggle, if she weren’t so god damn brown, blush. She took off and ran somewhere else in the store, which I didn’t realize doubled as a daycare center, but it was ok. She made an otherwise unexciting day at work a little more special, and that was when I realized:

November 2010? It’s been five years. I thought of the public sex porn I had waiting for me at home so that I wouldn’t cry. Parks, mall bathrooms, stairwells, bridges—oh yes.



Working out didn’t make me straight. Having a girlfriend didn’t make me straight. I was at a dead end. On a rainy night in November 2005, I found myself lying in bed, lights off, staring at the wall through misty eyes. One thing held me back from finally accepting myself. Was I finally going to get over it? No, I couldn’t. I figured I could marry a girl anyway, fuck her while replaying scenes of hot muscle men in my mind, get her pregnant, and boom, a baby nine months later. Because that, a baby, was what I wanted. It was what I always wanted. My own kid. Didn’t matter if I loved my wife or not as long as I could have a happy son, Matt, or a happy daughter, Janelle, or both, Matt and Janelle. (Yeah, of course the wife I wouldn’t love wouldn’t have a choice in baby names.)

Usually when I read stories about guys realizing when they were horny for other guys, they always said they knew from a very early age. I only started to suspect it from myself at the start of the eighth grade, summer 2003. Before I never really understood what attraction meant, and what was associated with it. Boners? I for sure didn’t get them thinking about girls—I didn’t know I was supposed to. I didn’t know I was supposed to want to have sex with them. I didn’t even know what sex was or that dicks were for sex. I always thought that you got a girl pregnant by kissing her and swapping saliva, which was why I always critically judged eighth graders I caught making out in the locker banks. Bitch is throwing her whole life away before high school, I’d think to myself.

You know in the movies, at the happy ending after the guy and the girl get together and marry, they share a kiss and bam, the movie cuts to nine months later with the girl holding the baby. I didn’t know more happened after the kiss that led to the girl getting preggo.

Thus, I didn’t really understand attraction. I just figured I was attracted to girls because guys were supposed to be. But then I stumbled upon homo porn that summer, did some reading, and was like, HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

Now here I was two years later, lying in bed feeling sorry for myself. Marry a wife just so I could have my own kid and pretend to be in a happy marriage for him. Could I really live such a lie? My answer was tentatively yes throughout the two years, but I really knew I couldn’t do it. I was still looking at dick-in-male-butthole porn. I was still checking out guys in the locker room. And worst of all, I was alone.

I proposed a solution to myself: don’t be lonely now, figure out the kid problem later.



When crazy little brown Mexican girl’s parents made their purchase, I made sure, first of all, that my boner was gone, then I went to wave bye to her, and she returned the wave. I saw their whole family off. “Thank you for shopping at Pro-mawwwd!”

The girl turned around to wave and smile at me one last time. I sighed. One day.

The Best and Worst of Liars and Cheaters

I still remember the yelling, the screaming, the crying. I still remember where we stood in the hallway, how we looked at each other, what you said to me. We stood under a blue shade—the light of the early morning sun was filtered by the clouds, then the windows, then the doors. Every little detail, I remember. 15 years old. March 28th, 2006. 7 AM. Getting up and getting ready for school. I stood in my doorway, and you stood in yours five yards away. Your grief, versus my stoicism. This was the moment where I was no longer your son.



Linh just had to bring up Trung.

Something sinister stirred inside me. I saw vulnerability in Linh, and I wanted to see how much I could exploit it. He was uncomfortable with the idea of me being really close with Trung, my ex, so the question was, how uncomfortable could I make him?

I still have everything he has ever given me. Didn’t matter to Linh.

I still carry around our prom photo in my wallet. Nothing but a picture.

We share the same bed when he sleeps over.

There we go; that last one rattled up Linh quite a bit. You two are still obviously holding onto something, he said.

We argued it online and it ended with him telling me that he needed time to think. I shrugged it off and knew that he just needed time, time to get himself together and finally break up already.

As expected, I found a message from him sitting in my Facebook inbox the next day. It was the same old overdramatic accusations of my selfishness and vague allusions to his traumatizing past. I don’t think it’s a good idea to even talk anymore—his last words. Next.



I had needed twenty dollars. It was your birthday weekend. I needed it for someone else’s birthday present. I plotted. What would usually get me twenty dollars? Straight A’s on my report card. Too bad mine was blotted with B’s and C’s here and there. Not a problem with some craftiness. I opened up Microsoft Word, and I replicated. Your birthday dinner was at six. I gave you my master piece, and you gave me your money.

You weren’t stupid. I was stupid for letting you hold onto it. You called school the next day and found out my real grades. You were hurt; I knew it. I came home late that night, past midnight. You had already locked yourself way in your room, and I locked myself in mine. I wrote an entry in which I deflected, and then I slept and woke up the next morning, the morning of March 28th, 2006.

We stood in the hallway and stared each other down. You lifted your finger and began to speak, cry out, howl.

“How could you? It was my birthday! I can’t be your mother. You can’t be my son. How could you do this? How could you do anything like this? Brian, you are a bad person, a bad person!”

Unabashed and nonchalant, I streamed past her tears and down the stairs. Bad person—I’ll keep that in mind.



After a long day of Black Friday shopping all over Irvine, Trung and I settled down at my kitchen table, and sipped from our cups of pearl tea.

“So you and Linh didn’t work out. Didn’t I predict that when you guys tried to make up?” Trung gloated.

“Don’t inflate your ego,” I told him. “I knew it was permanently over between me and Linh the moment Shaun and Tyrone laid their luscious lips on my dick. The only reason I tried to make up with Linh in the first place was so that we could break up for a reason that was a little less damaging to my reputation. And look, I succeeded in what I had set out to do. Breaking up because he couldn’t handle my friendship with my ex sounds a lot better than breaking up because I had a threesome with two other guys at his party in his house’s bathroom and broke his towel rack.”

Trung nodded. “So all those affectionate moments you had with him this past week—”

“All faked,” I declared.



Between March 28th, 2006, and October 2007, we were bad, then good, and now we were bad again, this time much worse. I rummaged through the cabinets trying to find the last packet of some insignificant spice; instead I found a bottle of Zoloft. Depression medicine. Recently prescribed to you. I held in my hand what I had done to you.

I fell back into the kitchen chair and I could feel tears collecting in my eyes. Why can’t you just talk to me, fucking shit! Why can’t you just ask me what was wrong? The way I’ve been treating you like shit, never talking to you, never coming home from the mall until late, never taking the car with your permission, never coming to dinner when you’re there and always leaving plenty of leftovers sitting on top of the garbage pile in the kitchen to let you know that I didn’t eat any of the shit you cooked—all that was to provoke you into finally talking. Why? You had to be provoked because back when I would try to initiate a conversation, you would nod your way through the whole thing and wake up the next morning as though we never even talked. I’ve been doing all this because you and dad are terrible parents. Don’t you fucking care about the reasons why you are terrible parents? Instead you just take depression meds and pretend that we’re a happy fucking family!

Depression medicine. You were taking depression medicine now. I had taken this war too far. My guilt boiled. My conscience killed me. Time to quit?

No, sorry, this war was too far important to quit. It didn’t matter how I felt as long as I could logically rationalize the reasons I was right to fight. Guilt and a conscience—I had suppressed them before, so I could do it again. There would be more games to come. It hurt me as much as it hurt you, but the difference between me and you was that I could live with it.

After all, you said it yourself a long time ago, I was a bad person.



What an awkward dance workshop. In a ten-person class, Linh stood five people away from me, and two or three of those five were his friends who all knew who I was. At first I tried making eye contact with him to see if he would acknowledge me, but then I gave up after no avail. It’d been three weeks since we split, and this time it looked like he was serious about staying that way.

When we were all split up into smaller groups at the end of class, I watched Linh dance in his group. I made no effort to mask that I was staring right at him, focusing on him and no one else in his group. He did amazingly; his cleanliness, performance, and execution—all great as usual. The piece was a femme piece, which I guessed was his specialty (not surprising considering his favorite type of Sunday outfit).

There were three more classes after, but I had to leave soon for PD practice. I stood at the side, packing up my backpack and watching Linh. Half the time his friends were coming up to him to greet and congratulate him, and half the other time he was just standing there waiting for the next class to start. Go say good job to him, Brian. Go. Just tell him and leave. I had the opportunity. I could’ve done it. But I didn’t. I texted him instead after I left; I mean, well, half of our dating phase and all our arguing were done behind a computer. Good job killing it today. This is Brian, btw, in case you deleted my number.

I checked my texts after PD practice. No response. Next day, no response. Nothing ever came. Yep, looked like we were done for sure.

I wondered if telling him good job in person would’ve made a difference.

Right Field

I tilted my head at the text message on my phone: I’m going to be in Irvine today if you want to talk. Sent by Linh, Saturday, November 6. He wanted to make up, yet it only had been a week since I—what’d I do again? Yeah, since I had a threesome with two other guys at his place in his bathroom and broke his towel rack. I thought we’d both move on, but seeing that he wanted to make up, I figured that I couldn’t at least leave his offer go ignored. I texted him back telling that I’d see him later at night, but first, I had to go to an audition workshops for PD, a team in Fullerton.

Originally, I had no intent to try out for PD. I was set on doing the February midyear auditions for the team I got extremely close to getting into back in October, and, assuming that I did make it in during the midyear auditions, and if I was on PD, I’d have to leave PD after only having been on it for three months. To me, there were some serious ethical issues with that.

However, at the workshops, a few friends, some who were on the team currently and some who were alumni from the team, knowing my situation, pushed me to try out anyway. My friends from UCI, Angela and Mimi (who was now at UCI for college), also needed a third group audition partner, so, I figured, fuck it. Tenth audition was a charm?



I could see myself playing baseball, maybe even for the junior varsity team when I got to high school. Ever since the first grade, when my dad bought a plastic hollow bat and ball toy set, we walked to the park together and I’d swing at the ball with so much force from my tiny Asian arms that I’d eventually dent the ball and bend the bat. Now, with our baseball unit coming up in my eighth grade P.E. class, I was excited to finally grasp a real metal bat and hit a real stitched baseball.

“Brian’s up at the bat—everyone move up!”

I glared at Seth as he inched closer from his position at first base. Well, screw you Seth. Just yesterday when my team played a different team, I hit the ball so hard and far that I managed to run all the way to second base. Prepare to get your ass shown up.

I struck out, our team’s third out.

I ran to my place in the outfield and felt a tap on my shoulder. “Take right field,” the team captain told me. Yeah, I was already heading there. I turned around only to see Seth running up to me. I took a deep breath and stuck out my chest, ready for another snide comment from Seth.

“Just stick to DDR, Brian.”

Screw you Seth.



I woke up and found myself grasping nothing but a lonely lifeless pillow in my arms. Fuck that shit. I rolled over and found Linh sound asleep on his side, facing away from me. I smiled. I snuggled closer and slid my arm underneath him even though I knew it would wake him up. It did. He turned around and smiled back.

“Y’know,” I said, “I’ve missed you all this week and last week too.” We kissed.

“Liar.” We kissed again.

“What? I am not a liar.”

It had been a long week. The group performance that Angela, Mimi, and I had been working on for PD auditions was probably the most amount of effort that I had ever put into a group audition. We spent entire evenings at the gym, going from 4 PM all the way to 1 AM with nothing more than some packed PB&J’s to keep me going. By the time I got home, Linh would already be getting ready for bed. Even though we didn’t get to webcam or talk that long, it was those brief two-minute gnight conversations that had me looking forward to the end of the day.

I had to cut short my stay at Linh’s place, unfortunately, because I had to get back to UCI and practice at 1. I got to see him later at night again though during my group’s dinner break when I drove half an hour up to his team’s studio to drop off a PB&J with sliced bananas for him, bananas because I knew he liked them in his cereal, so I figured they’d work in a sandwich.

I kept on thinking back to the Saturday night that we made up—or rather, made out. For the first time. It was as though we continued where we last left off. I didn’t understand how it happened. Linh didn’t want to talk about the threesome, or the towel rack, or why he changed his mind. He only asked to hold me, and so I let him. Everything that happened since then, I forced myself not to question, realizing how happier it made me to not live my day to day life scrutinizing and not believing.



I’m losing a love. I thought French was totally for me, but I guess it was really never meant to be. I read over my blog entry and thought about a title. Something Frenchy. “Mais le Sort a Voulu”—as fate would have it—sounded pretty good. Trung and I had an AIM discussion about the entry, but it quickly went to shit.

Trung:
You can substitute "French" in your entry for anything. Dance shall come in four years. The entry will be like, "I packed the last of my Kallusive shirts into a box. The still glittering Gingerbread Man no longer looked angry at what it was smashing, but it was instead angry at me. Returning his sneer with one of my own, I closed up the box, sent it to the nearest Goodwill, and bought a new dress shirt and tie with the money. Goodbye college. It's time to grow up." Hee. THAT'S A GOOD ENTRY. Save that.

bbq dinner:
well i could reuse it in like two days [our would've-been two-year anniversary mark] and replace "french" with "trung".

Trung:
you could...that was pretty bitchy of you to say.

bbq dinner:
i know.

Trung:
(4:05:32 AM) do you feel better now?
(4:07:05 AM) i really didnt appreciate that
(4:12:47 AM) fine. don't answer. whatever.




I found a text message from Linh sitting in my inbox. Good luck with auditions. You can do it. Sent Sunday, November 14th.

I replied to it, Thanks. I won’t really need it though because I’m just doing the audition for fun.

I was going to ask to not be considered. I had it decided since I woke up the day of auditions. I didn’t want to tell Angela or Mimi because I didn’t want them to convince me out of it. I had the application in my hand, and I was ready to write it down, “Auditioning for fun only,” but then I stopped myself.

I thought, maybe I should tell the director about my plans to try out for another team in February. I still wanted to make it onto PD because I knew it’d provide me with training that I would otherwise not be able to afford, but I knew telling the director my plans would send my application straight into the shredder. No team would take someone they knew would be leaving (or planning to) in three months.

Well, either way, I wouldn’t be getting into PD, so I figured I might as well talk to the director. He told me to write down “planning to try out for another team in February” on my application and that he and the other board members would take it into consideration when discussing my audition. He didn’t sound at all pleased.

Looked like I shot myself in the foot. Shit.

After turning in my application, I checked my phone for Linh’s response to my last text message. Oh. I see. So I couldn’t talk to you because you weren’t being serious about something? Messed up. Lol...

I ignored him for the entire following week.



“I don’t know what Ranier’s going to do while you and I are at Super Saturday.” I took my eyes off the road for a second to check out my backseat. “I guess he’ll just be chilling in my car cleaning stuff and walking around the neighborhood. Remind to hide his Valentine’s Day present.”

“Sounds good. Speaking of Super Saturday and Breakthrough, you know what Priscilla told me a few months ago? She was surprised that you came back to teach at Breakthrough for a second summer.”

I slid both my hands from the bottom of the steering wheel to the top. 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions. The sound of Priscilla’s name always made me sweat. “What? Why?”

“Because during your guys’ first summer, she got the impression that you weren’t really serious about teaching. You didn’t seem mature enough for the job, and she didn’t believe you whenever you talked about wanting to teach French in high school as a career. She thought you were one of the least likely of the teachers to return. I understood her points. Sometimes Brian, I really do question the things you do, why you do them, and if you can actually be serious about them. Look at what happened to French, for example.”

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and narrowed my eyebrows, forcing myself to concentrate on the road. Fuck you Priscilla.



One week passed since the audition before I was ready to talk to Linh (online) about what made me mad to the point of ignoring him for an entire week: him thinking that I wasn’t serious about an audition that I was doing “for fun.” The talk eventually boiled down to a sloppy argument over semantics, about what I meant by “for fun” and what he meant by “not serious.”

Linh:
When you use ["for fun"] for an audition, it means you don't care.

My response to him, I could imagine myself shouting and throwing a fist at the wall for every syllable as I pounded each letter of each word on my keyboard.

bbq dinner:
I don't know who “you” is supposed to be, but I always care. It seems like I'm getting pissed off over something trivial, but it really means a lot. All throughout my life, whenever I tried to do something I really cared about, people would look at me and think of me as a joke.

Linh said he understood why I got mad, and we agreed to call the whole “for fun” / “not serious” thing a misunderstanding. I was happy that he at least understood where I was coming from on wanting to be taken seriously. After all that was settled, I finally told him the good news: In case you haven’t noticed all the congratulatory posts on my Facebook wall, I made it into PD.

The celebration was cut short. Surprisingly, he didn’t notice, and that was because there was something frequently on my wall that made him too uneasy to ever click on my page: He brought up Trung.

The Truth

“my lie”
Written by Trung, September 20th, 2009

7:45 p.m. [After driving back down to LA from NorCal] Everything is packed away in my dorm room. Number 360. The night is still young, though, so DinoBrian and I decide to venture off to a mall that we haven’t been to: Koreatown Galleria.

“Asian shit?” Dino complains.

“But it’s the only one that’ll be open past 9! Besides, the ITG machine is broken here and—“

“Okay we’ll go. But not because of the ITG machine being broken. I don’t care about that.”

I quickly scribble down directions. We were off in minutes. Not before Dino checked his hair, and made a few faces in the mirror, though.

8:30 p.m. The cute Korean gift shop caught my eye as I ran toward it.
“Dino, look!” I pointed. “It’s a donut! It's as big as my head! It's for you! Let’s go in.” I went inside, looking for other fun things to point out.
“Why are they selling pills in here?” I pick one up and show it to Dino. “Teaching kids how to abuse medication. Typical LA.”
“I think you need a new steering wheel cover.” Of course he doesn’t. I just thought they looked ridiculous.
“Mmmmmhmmm. You know she got junk in her trunk!”
And of course, no visit to a shop would be complete without a dino reference. I just pick it up and show it to Dino in awe.

“Dino, can we buy it?!”

“Trungy, no! What is it anyway? You won’t even use it.”

“But there are dinos on it.”

“Silly Trungy. Put it back!”

I put it back. We leave the gift shop empty-handed but with new inside jokes. The next stop, of course, is the food court.

We order dumplings and steak fried rice. As soon as we get the order, Dino starts to calculate.

“Trungy, I can finish each one of these in one bite. How many are you going to have? There should be enough for five dumplings each.”

“Hungry Dino. I think I’ll have three.”

“Okay, good.”

Of course, I end up eating four but I give Dino the rest of the rice to compensate.

11:24 p.m. “Dino! Let’s watch a myth arc. We can finish it when we move everything into your apartment tomorrow.”

I pop in X-Files into my laptop. I insist on watching a myth arc, even though I know I never stay awake during them. That was okay, though. I can rewatch anything I missed tomorrow night. Or the night after. Or the night after that. I have a few days in Irvine to look forward to after this.

As the credits play and Mulder and Scully embarked on their adventure, I wrapped my arm around Dino’s middle and rest my head against his side, kissing the fabric of his shirt. Snuggling close, I mutter a quick “I love you, Dino.”

“Love you too, Trungy,” the warm response.

I close my eyes.

I wake up. The first thing I see is my laundry basket heaped full of disheveled clothing. I grasp around me. My curtains. My comforter. My room.

Oh god. I shoot up. I’m in my room and I’m alone. Alone. I look at the clock. It’s 6:45 a.m. I’m supposed to leave for LA in half an hour.

Reality is a painful slap across the face.

What really happened?

I tried to distract myself herbally throughout the car ride but the good feelings lasted only two minutes before a reminder of everything I lost hit me.

My sister, her friend, and I went to Melrose. I left empty-handed. We went to my dorms. I threw everything in the room and shut the door. We went to Koreatown. I left the store every ten minutes because I saw something that would trigger tears.

But mostly, I slept throughout most of my trip back down because I couldn’t take being awake. I dreamt and relived the last night I saw you, the embrace, the tears. The last time I told you I loved you. The last time I saw my Dino.
---

Honestly, I already knew.

From the very moment I asked you, “Did you ever cheat on me?” I knew.

You answered no, so I figured it was only a matter of waiting for you to grow and stop running.

The night before Halloween, I got that text from you, the one that read, “Just had a threesome with two other guys at the Halloween party. Linh wasn't one of them. And everyone knows, oops. What do I do now?”

Typical. I was still waiting for you to admit to me that you cheated.

The next day, we talked online. You fed me live news updates as you and Linh exchanged angry Facebook messages. When you guys were officially over, you told me that you had something important to tell me. You abruptly planned a visit for Wednesday.

Trung:
what are you gonna tell me? tell me noww. pleasee. :[

bbqdinner:
nononononono

Trung:
hint? it has to do with you wanting to come clean about something. confronting, instead of running.

bbqdinner:
ooohhh. trung understands themes in brian's life

Trung:
ok. you had sex with someone during our relationship! i told you i already assumed that.

bbqdinner:
i'm not saying anything else >:|

Trung:
you should be more sad about that, that I assumed than you actually having done that. =]

bbqdinner:
sad dino :(

Trung:
sad dino = predictable dino

Wednesday night came. I had a board meeting for UCLA’s Coalition of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but I left early to meet up with you. You brought me eggrolls, which you made yourself for the first time ever earlier in the day. You brought five of them in a zip-lock bag.

We sat down on the outdoor stage on Bruin Walk. You insisted that I eat the eggrolls before you tell me what you wanted to tell me. I denied. You persisted. I denied again, and I decided to make it easier on you.

“Just admit it Brian. You plan to tell me that you cheated on me. Just admit it, damn it. I already tell all my friends that we broke up because you cheated on me.”

“What?!”

“Yeah.”

You bit your lip, shot a few glances between different ends of Bruin walk, and got lost in thought for a minute. I imagined that you saw yourself going across the bridge again. When you came back, you admitted to me the truth, and you did it rather bluntly.

“Ok, I cheated—once for every eggroll I brought you so can you eat one already?”

Okay, I was a little surprised. The number surprised me slightly, but nonetheless, I was glad you finally admitted it. We each took an eggroll from the bag and munched on it.

“Trung, it was the reason why I broke up with you, y’know? I couldn’t keep on going in our relationship knowing what I did, but at the same time, I knew you’d break up with me anyway if I told you the truth, so I wrote that letter to cover everything up.”

“We both knew that letter was total bullshit.”

I chewed on my eggroll as you stopped and stared at me.

“Aren’t you going to yell at me now or something? I’m okay with getting slapped too.”

“I’m not going to yell at you, and I’m not going to slap you. I’m not angry because, well, all the anger and sadness that you imagined I would feel, I already experienced them, both during our relationship when I suspected that you were cheating, and after our relationship when I suspected that you cheated. Brian, I’m done being angry. I’m done being sad. My main question is, are you done?”

“You don’t think I’ve been done?”

“Brian, pretend you’re wearing some underwear, and then you sharted in it. It’s a mess. You’re groaning and cursing. You’re mortified. You can feel the liquidy shit running down your legs. You know you’ve forever ruined your underwear. So what now? Are you going to keep on wearing it for everyone to see? Are you going to keep all that brown shit on your ass and feel it smear all around when you walk and press up against your butt when you sit down? The answer to all that Brian is no. No, you aren’t. You are going toss that shit out and run your ass to Target and buy yourself a fresh new pair of underwear! Got it?”

“...what?”

“To answer your question about whether or not I think you’ve been done: I can still smell all that shit when I’m around you.”

You understood. We chatted a little more and finished the eggrolls together.

Runaway: Part 4

(Continued from “Runaway: Part 3”, “Part 2”, and “Part 1”)

“Yeah, Brian, don’t worry. Like I said before, I just want to be your really good close friend now. You can talk to me about this stuff. You can come to me when you need advice. You can come to me if you need to complain about other guys. It won’t bother me.”

“Ok. I believe you. We’re friends.”

“That being said, can I ask you something? From one friend to another?”

“Yeah, what is it Trung?”

“When we were together, did you ever cheat on me? More than just that one time a year ago?”

“What? No! Why are you even asking that?”

“Brian, it’s okay! You can tell me the truth. What’s done is done. It was in the past, when we were together, but now we’re not anymore. We’re friends, like I said. You don’t have to lie anymore.”

“Okay, that’s great Trung, but—”

“Did you cheat on me?”

“—no, Trung, I didn’t. I didn’t cheat on you.”



As more sunlight crept up through cracks in the window blinds, the dreary-eyed and the slightly hungover packed their sleeping bags and their Halloween costumes into their cars and headed home. Meanwhile, all throughout the morning, despite sitting on the same couch, Linh and I texted each other back and forth. Do you wanna talk right now? I asked him. When we weren’t texting, we were smiling and laughing for the people around us, those who were oblivious to the wall of tension separating Linh and me. We’ll talk later, he texted back.

I thought later meant privately in his room, but before I could find any alone time with him, Walden, Ron, and Renee’s bags were already in the car, and soon mine were too.

I realized that Linh never intended to talk in person at all.

When I got home to Irvine and checked my Facebook inbox, I already saw a message from Linh, asking me to confirm if “Shaun, Tyrone, and [I] were in the bathroom doing stuff for the longest time? Lol.” I knew he already knew. We talked around the subject for a while until I got this message from him: Yeah, it’s a slap in the face, but I can’t do anything about it. I’d rather be literally slapped in the face rather than to know how ugly I really must be. Lol. I don’t get my hopes for anything because it’s people like you who make me self-conscious and disgusted. Thanks for coming and I hope you enjoyed yourself.

His message made me a little angry, mainly because I neither called him ugly nor thought he was ugly. But at this point, before saying anything really stupid, I decided it was finally time to go to Trung. I copied and pasted to him what Linh had written me.

bbqdinner:
Is there anything in this message from him that I can fix?

Trung:
Nope, you can’t. At all. You’ve officially burned that bridge. The best you can do is stay away.

bbqdinner:
Well I don’t want to stay away. That’s the same thing as running away and, well, that’s been my solution for too long.

Trung:
Umm. In this case, it’s the ONLY solution. Like seriously Brian, lol. It’s not something that YOU can do. The best you can do is say sorry and offer if he ever wants to talk about it for closure, then you’re more than willing to listen. It’s his move, not yours. It’s not like the times you’ve fucked a guy and then tried to run away from the guy you fucked. Last night you fucked a guy (well, guys) at another guy’s party who was really really into you. Confronting head on to the guy who was into you isn’t gonna do anything.

Well fuck Trung’s advice, I thought to myself. He had to have been wrong. I hurt Linh, and I wasn’t just going to run away and leave Linh to drown in his insecurities. I wrote this back to him:

You think this is because I thought you were ugly? I went through a lot of different ideas to rationalize why I did what I did last night. And well, what I did last night was something I did a long time ago, except worse, and I’ve been trying to rationalize it for the last year and a half or so. I tried to come up with a lot of reasons to justify to myself what I did so I could rest a little more easily, lie a little more easily, or just run from my issues without looking back. But I never succeeded. Rationalizing is something I’ve always been good at in general, but never for shit like this, so don’t think you can easily figure me out and the reasons I do shit.

You wanna know what I thought about to try to rationalize what I did last night? These were my logical explanations:
1. I was drunk.
2. I was feeling angsty because I didn’t get enough attention from you.
3. Seeing you in that tranny maid costume made me instantly unattracted to you because (this is also something you don’t really know about me) I am just that homophobic.
4. There was no number four, but I’ll put the reason you used to rationalize what I did: apparently I think you’re ugly.

I wished that I could believe that any of the above were actually true. The problem with number 1 was that, well, I had two fucking shots. And alcohol is always never an excuse. Number 2 is too immature of an excuse for me to use, and for number 3, even though I wanted to shoot myself the instant I realized that the tranny maid was you, within five minutes I got over it and thought your costume was cute. And number four, you’re not ugly.

There’s no good explanation for what I did last night. I can’t come up with one, and you shouldn’t bother beating yourself trying to come up with one either, especially one in which you bring in your own insecurities. The best I can tell you is that I was simply horny, but other than that, there’s no perfect storybook explanation that will satisfy you or me.

Within a few minutes I got Linh’s reply, and I was dismayed to see that he completely missed the point I was trying to get across. In his message he refuted each of my “logical explanations,” even though I had already done that. I wanted to point out all of his argument’s logical fallacies and misinterpretations of my argument. I wanted to bust out my red pen, mark his message up like I would with my middle school students’ essays, and send it back to him to tell him to rewrite it.

The last sentence he wrote to me was, your selfishness can hurt people, so keep that in mind if you talk to other guys, to which I typed out my reply: No shit. Even though everything I just told you had nothing to do with me being selfish, I wanted to say before going back on topic that I take great pride in my selfishness. But then I stopped myself from sending it.

That was when I realized it was time to quit. That was when I realized that I was trying to fight with logic in an argument that was all about emotion. Trust, betrayal, and love—all topics that my knowledge on logical fallacies and ability to rationalize were completely irrelevant to. There was nothing I could do. Trung was right; the best thing to do was just stay away, so I let Linh’s last message sit in my inbox unanswered. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to run again.

Runaway: Part 3

(Continued from “Runaway: Part 2” and “Part 1”)

I was still sitting up against the wall, rolling the back of my head against it when Walden found me upstairs. “I just wanna have a talk outside, Brian. But yes, that does include having to walk past a bunch of people, including Linh, who all knew that you were messin’ around with two other guys in the bathroom for the last hour. You guys couldn’t have been any more obvious.”

Walden had already taken off his tranny/cowboy/stripper Halloween costume, so it was easier to take him more seriously. I followed him downstairs and tried to stay as close behind him as I could. Once I entered the kitchen where the party was, I narrowed my focus to the backyard door, but someone, who obviously hadn’t sobered up yet, called me out—or congratulated me.

“Whaddup Brian!” He stumbled up to me and jabbed my shoulder. “Shit man, you da shit! Homie you been having a good Halloween? You been enjoying yourself? I know you been!” Getting this kind of reaction actually lifted a little weight off my shoulder; not everyone thought I was a skank for hooking up in the bathroom with two other guys, but then again, not everyone on the team really knew that I had been talking to Linh. I scanned the kitchen for him and easily spotted him. Standing on his however-many-inch heels he stood out above the sea of heads, but as soon as we made eye contact, he whipped his head away, as if to bitchslap my face with the long curls of his wig. I felt the weight on my shoulders again.

The backyard was empty. Walden and I sat down in lawn chairs, and Walden lit up a cigarette and spoke to me while he smoked.

“So, you and Shaun. And Tyrone. A threesome. Wow. How much did you drink before?”

“Two shots.”

“Two shots! It only takes two shots to get you in a cramped bathroom with two other guys? One shot per guy!”

I shrugged.

“I think you need more shots. That’s what you need right now because you look bummed.”

“I am.”

Walden tilted his head at me. “Why? There’s nothing to worry about. Yeah, everyone knows but no one cares. Trust me. No one is judging you.”

“I’m not worried about what everyone thinks about me. I’m worried about Linh.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Walden leaned back in his chair and took a long drag from his cigarette. “Okay, well Brian, let me remind you: you and Linh aren’t even together. You guys have been talking for a week.”

“That doesn’t mean I can still mess around with other guys.”

“Well, yeah, but I mean that at least it’s not much of a loss.”

“Yeah I know, but I’m still disappointed in myself.”

“Why?”

“You know what’s been on my mind this whole time since I got out of that bathroom?”

“What?”

“Trung.”

“Why?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell him what I wanted to say next, so I paused and deeply inhaled the second-hand smoke from Walden’s cigarette. It relaxed me enough to initiate the conversation. “Did I ever tell you why we broke up, Walden?”

“Something about issues, your own or his. You were never really clear.”

“Do you wanna know the real reason why we broke up? You’d be the first person to ever know, ‘cause hell, Trung doesn’t even know.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

I needed to calm my nerves before continuing, so I breathed in and filled my lungs with a few more breaths of smoke. Bad habit—whatever.

“I cheated on Trung. Five times.”

“Wow.” Walden raised his eyes brow as he took another puff on his cigarette. “And he found out?”

“No, I uh, managed to keep them all a secret. Well, he sorta found out about one, but I lied to him and told him I only made out with the guy. I mean, I guess you could say I did, but with his dick in addition to his lips. But yeah, for the most part, they were all a secret.”

“So you guys didn’t break up because he found out? Who broke up with who again?”

“I broke up with him. I had to. I thought that I could keep all five of my slip-ups a secret forever because I learned a long time ago to separate sex and emotion. Walden, I loved Trung, and to this day I still love him, but somehow back then, each time at the moment before I cheated, I figured what I was about to do was okay. I thought that if I played it safe and didn’t contract any STDs—and I didn’t—then I could put my sex scandals all behind me. But, I dunno, my guilt eventually caught up to me. I was surprised. As much as I tried to shut out the guilt, I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine us together celebrating our anniversary in ten years with him still not knowing about something I did nine years prior. I knew I couldn’t go on in our relationship for as long as I kept the secret to myself, but at the same time, I knew that if I admitted to him about all the times I’ve cheated on him, he’d break up with me anyway. It was a lose-lose situation, but I couldn’t face that. I had to find a way out, a way to still win.”

“What’d you do Brian? What’d you tell him?”



Trung sat still in the passenger seat and stared out into the dark street through the front window. I unfolded my letter and struggled with it until I could hold it up against some of the dim light that shined through from the street light above my car. The paper fluttered in my shaky hands, and my voice cracked as I began reading it out to Trung.

“‘Even though we’ve talked about it before, I never forgave you for the whole Anh drama back in May 2008. You made me choose between keeping our relationship and ending my friendship with Anh, or breaking up and keeping my friendship with him. You even gave me a day to think about it. And do you remember what I chose? I chose to break up and keep my friendship with Anh. But you forced me to choose our relationship. I insisted on breaking up, but you managed to manipulate me into choosing otherwise. I think you (specifically you) could make anyone do anything if you forced them to converse with you for a million hours too. Because like two hours after I said, ‘I want to break up,’ you were still trying to convince me otherwise and wouldn’t get the fuck out of my car. I just wanted you to shut up, so I finally agreed. And then came the grueling process of deleting Anh’s phone number from my phone, etc. whatever.

“‘Like I said, I never forgave you for that.

“‘So maybe, I never address my problems with you as they come up because I want things to build up and become unbearable for you. Maybe I’ve always secretly wanted you to break up with me since I wasn’t allowed to break up with you the first time I tried. I feel like the option to break up isn’t even available in this relationship. Honestly, every time we do fight, I secretly hope, ‘Please let this be the one. Break up with me already.’ We were never supposed to make it past that Anh argument.

“‘I’ve fallen out of love many times in this relationship. The reason is usually different every time, but because I’m feeling moody and depressed, I end up focusing on all this stuff from May. And then that becomes the main problem.

“‘But you still probably want to know the reason I fell out of love this time around.

“‘I feel like the reasons why I fell in love with you in the first place no longer apply to you. You’re no longer the committed, driven person that you once were when I met you.

“‘When I met you, you were on your way to being a valedictorian. You had a big interest in history and foreign policy on politics and all that junk. You were really committed to education and so much more.

“‘But college really changed things. You no longer really cared about school, and you’re not the passion-drive history/politic nerd that you used to be. I can’t think of anything that you’re driven toward now. What are you dedicated to right now? I don’t fucking know. Celebrity gossip?

“‘I realized this once Breakthrough ended. Without Breakthrough, I couldn’t see anything in you that kept you going. If you need an example of what I mean by driven, I had dance, a workout plan, and writing to keep me going. You were just the same inside jokes that we’ve had for the last year and a half.

“‘And what’s annoying is that you get irritated by people who are driven. To you, Cameron’s just ‘way too unrealistically excited’ about helping his step mom start a frozen yogurt business. To you, it’s ‘great that these young teenagers [Funksters] want to dance, but why bother ‘cause it’s not like dance is going to get them anywhere in the future.’

“‘Well, at least they’re all passionate about something.

“‘So you can try to start trying more. You can try to stop being lazy and find something to do. All that would be good for your future, but it won’t help this relationship. Nothing that you’ve done has ever really fixed the main problem. You’ve only fixed the reasons I fell out of love each time, but nothing ever fixed the main problem. The main problem, to remind you, is the whole wanting-to-break-up-but-couldn’t thing back in May 2008. As I said before, that—this main problem—is unfixable. It’s unforgivable.

“‘It doesn’t matter if you try to do anything to get me to forgive you for forcing me to stay in the relationship back in 2008. I wanna wake up tomorrow and live as though I never let you convince me to stay with you back in May 2008. You gave me the choice to stay or break up, and I wanted to break up. There wasn’t anything unfair about that until you forced me to stay. I want things to be the way they should’ve been if you hadn’t forced me to stay. There shouldn’t even be any hypothetical statement. When you gave me the choice and when I made the decision to break up, that was it. I broke up with you in May 2008. That was the end.’

There was no more to read. “So, in conclusion, uhh,” I folded the letter and set it in my lap, “ever since that one incident, our almost-breakup five months into our relationship, it was never meant to be.” ...

Runaway: Part 2

(Continued from “Runaway: Part 1”)

I slid into my jeans and sat on the toilet, waiting in the dark while he finished putting on all his clothes.

“What do we do about the towel rack?” I whispered.

“Just leave it in the shower stall.”

“So what’s the plan?” the third voice spoke. I listened as the two of them discussed the plan to each other.

“You’re going to pretend you’ve been vomiting in toilet. We’re going to tell everyone that we’ve been helping you.”

“Okay, I guess I did drink a lot.”

Like anyone’s really going to believe he’s been vomiting for the last hour while the two of us were tending to him. In a locked bathroom.

“Alright, got my clothes on. You ready?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

He opened the door and walked out first, while I stayed behind at the sink. Someone who had probably been waiting to use the bathroom for the last hour walked in and saw the “drunk mess” hunched over the toilet.

“Is he alright?”

I nodded. “Yeah, kid’s just been vomiting. Had a little too much to drink.”

He tilted his head and raised his eye brow at me.

I looked down. “Yeah, I know.”

I left the bathroom and found my pizza costume sitting next to the door. I didn’t bother wrapping it back around my neck. After putting on a shirt, I sat up against a wall, wondering what to do. I felt too nervous to go back downstairs to the party, nervous that everyone knew where I had been the last hour. Remembering that my phone’s ringer went off thirty minutes ago in the bathroom, I pulled it out and saw that I had one text message from Walden. I read it: Wow neexxxt!

Shit. With no one to turn to, I wrote a text to Trung: Just had a threesome with two other guys at the Halloween party. Linh wasn't one of them. And everyone knows, oops. What do I do now?



Trung lay next to me on my bed, tugging at my shirt and trying to look me in the eye, but I continue to stare straight through his pleading eyes at the ceiling. Both our sweat began running down onto my pillow and blankets; it was a warm summer evening.

“Brian, talk to me. Talk about our relationship. What’s bothering you?”

I grunted and turned away from him to look at the wall. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.” I’m fine—I don’t know how many times I uttered this phrase in the last hour. But we both knew that everything was far from fine.

Trung pulled my shoulder and rolled me back onto my back. “Brian, I sat in my car for two hours outside your house waiting for you to come home. Why didn’t you tell me before I left home that you were going out to the mall? And when I called you to tell you I got to your place, why did it take you two more hours to come back?”

I motioned at the shopping bags on the floor. “I stopped by Oakridge.”

“I know that, but I’m asking you why did you feel like you could make a two-hour detour when you already knew I was at your place?”

I didn’t answer; I just stared at the ceiling again. Somewhere in my mind I pieced together the answers to his questions, but I didn’t know the right words to speak them. I just wanted to be alone, Trung. I needed to think because I couldn’t think with you around all the fucking time.

“Brian, please. What’s wrong?”

I’ve been pushing you away more and more every day because every morning when I wake up, I can see our end coming closer and closer. I’ve been growing so disillusioned; you know that picture we had of ourselves in the far distant future? How we’d just finish watching X-Files at 3 AM, and I’d be washing the dishes at the sink as you come up from behind to wrap your arms around me? Just as we normally would do now? That picture’s long since dissolved.

“Brian, say something!”

I’m guilty of keeping secrets from you Trung, secrets that I thought I could bury deep in the back of my mind. And for the longest time I did a good damn job of suppressing them, never letting them reach my conscience, but somehow, they eventually did. That pretty picture I had of us two huddled over a crib, making funny faces insides—gone. Now I just see me living alone in a beaten down apartment and getting a rejection letter from the adoption agency.

“Brian, we’ve been together for twenty months now. Every time we’ve fought, it’s always been like this Brian, you being angry about something me trying to figure out what’s wrong. I can’t always do this. You have to grow up and change some time.”

I finally turned toward Trung and met with his pleading eyes. I gazed into them, and I knew that this argument would be the one argument that I couldn’t get out of, the one argument in which I actually had to say something. “How about I write you a letter?”

Runaway: Part 1

“Murrieta really is in the middle of nowhere.” I stared out the window and couldn’t see anything but black silhouettes of passing scenery and the road in the car’s headlights. I turned around to glance at Ron and his girlfriend Renee in the backseat, completely knocked out in each other’s arms. I sighed. “Still hot.”

“Neeeext.” Walden’s voice wobbled and wavered. Save for a few fingers clingly onto the bottom of his steering wheel, his arms rested dead in his lap. His eyes looked glazed, and I could tell when he did and didn’t focus on the road. If I didn’t want us all to crash and die, I had to keep him awake.

“The end of your guys’ first hell week and your guys’ first performance—you guys really killed it today.”

“Thanks.” Walden’s voice remained just as flat.

“Okay, you guys are tired. Yet here we all are, going straight to the Halloween party right now.”

“Alcohol wakes us up. Are you going to drink?”

I shrugged. “Depends on the person who invited me.”

Walden scoffed. “Neeeext. I still can’t see it—you and Linh.”

I turned around to double-check that Ron and Renee really were asleep. “Linh and me. Why can’t you see it?”

Walden lifted his hands and shook them with each word he spoke. “Because it’s Linh. I know you pretty well now Brian, and I can tell you, Linh is not your type of guy.” Looked like Walden was fully awake now.

“He is my type of guy. He’s got that hard-ish, hypebeast-ish, ghetto-ish manly—”

“What? Are we even talking about the same Linh?”

“You don’t think he’s—”

“Of course I don’t! Lemme tell you this: Last week, during a team bonding picnic at the park, all the guys were playing basketball. Linh, who was totally uninterested, sat on the side, and he was all, ‘I’m over basketball. Let’s go shopping.’ I don’t have any problem with Linh—I like him—but I know that you get picky about certain things in a guy. Choosing shopping over basketball, is that manly enough for you?”

I bit my lip. I had to admit to my shallow-ass self that my heart sank a little when I heard that he opted for shopping. “Well, Linh and I spent a whole night together, and I didn’t sense a single ounce of gayness on him.”

“Fine Brian. You haven’t been around him long enough, but you’ll eventually see. And when you see it, I’ll be there to tell you, ‘I told ya so.’”

“We’ll see. But I’m sure that he is a keeper.”

We got to Linh’s place in Murrieta half an hour later. We parked outside his house and I retrieved my costume from the trunk: a giant, homemade cardboard pizza to be hung in front of me around my neck. I had brought a yellow shirt to wear underneath it, but I figured, hell, it was Halloween, so I went shirtless underneath my cardboard pizza. With the four of us dressed up, Walden, Ron, Renee, and I marched up Linh’s doorstep and rang his doorbell. We waited.

A few seconds later, the door swung open and we were greeted by some Asian chick I had never seen before. I was slightly taken aback—with her heels on this girl must have been standing at six feet three inches. Her long, wavy black hair, curled eye lashes and dark eye shadow at least made her face pretty, but her breasts, which were incased by a bra probably no larger than an A-cup, nevertheless popped out unusually at me. Her small sweater revealed a flat stomach, and her short black skirt revealed long, toned legs; they even kinda had some muscle to them. My eyes twitched as I scrutinized every unusual detail of her body.

“Oh my god!” Renee spoke up. “Linh, is that you?”

I froze.

“Shit!” Ron stepped up to get a closer look. “Oh shit man I thought you actually were a girl for a minute. You outdid yourself.”

The chick—well, fuck, Linh—grabbed his bra and readjusted it. “Thanks guys.” No doubt about it, that was Linh’s voice. “Here, lemme show you where you guys can put your sleeping bags and stuff.” I watched, my feet locked in place outside on the doorstep, my mouth gaped and my eyes wide open as Linh strutted down the hall with his four-inch heels. Ron and Renee followed him inside.

Still unable to lift my feet, I turned to Walden, my face frozen with the same shocked look. He pretended to not notice, stepped one foot inside the doorway, stopped, turned his head over his shoulder to look at me, smirked, and winked. “I told ya so.”

---
“The Final Entry”
Written May 24th, 2009
[[Continued from where this last left off in “Promises Are Just Restraints.”]]

“SHUT THE FUCK UP TRUNG. You’re not the all-knowing smart person you think you are. This has nothing to do with peer pressure, so again, shut the fuck up. You don’t know shit.”

That silenced Trung for a few minutes, but then, he began prying again.

I wasn’t in the mood to dive into the reason. “Things have changed,” I stated. Trung further tried to get me to elaborate, but no, I left it at that.

A week later, on May 8th, the day of our 17-month anniversary, I felt ready to talk about it. Actually, I wasn’t, but Trung convinced me. 3 AM, we had just settled into bed, and Trung was lying in my arms. He brought up the argument, and soon, he got me talking. I was very hesitant.

“Remember the gay party we went to two weeks ago in Murrieta? We met a lot of people. Remember that one guy? The gay one—well, they were all gay. It was a gay party after all. Anyway, that one guy, he told us about his relationship. His two-year-relationship, which ended months prior. He made it two years. Two whole years. It must be terrible to have a relationship that long just end on you, y’know? You’d think that like, after a while, you spend a lot of months, maybe a year, working out all the kinks in the relationship, and then it’s smooth sailing from there. But this guy, he broke up after two years. I can’t believe that something that is capable of going on for two years is also capable of breaking up.

“And then, a few days later, I was looking up some dance choreography videos on YouTube to get some ideas for Breakthrough this summer. I remembered seeing a piece to Ne-Yo’s Closer that I really liked a while ago, and so I found it and went through the user’s profile. I found a link to his blog, and I read it. ...[H]e blogs a lot about his day to day life with his boyfriend. They’re in their mid-20s, and they’ve been together for seven years. I think they actually got together around eighteen, our age. Anyway, they live together, Trung. They work together for the same company, and, yeah, they live together. They travel together. They even have a dog. And, well, seven years. That’s amazing. Their relationship just seems so unbreakable.

“So all that just left me thinking. On one hand, there’s the guy who broke off a two-year relationship, and on the other hand, there’s the couple who’s maintaining a wonderful seven-year relationship. It made me think about our relationship in a way that I never thought about before. I felt disillusioned: what if we don’t last? I felt hopeful: what if we do last? And that’s when I freaked out. I was thinking about our future. You know how that freaks me out right? I never even liked it when you would plan road trips for us that’d only be like four weeks into the future. Yet, here I was questioning where we’d be in two years, in seven years. The thought of such long-term commitment freaked me out, so I tried to not think about it. But then that just freaked me out some more. You know me Trung. I need control, I need direction, I need to know where I am heading. It’s only when I know where I’m heading toward in the future, I can feel fine moving through the present. So, I thought about our future, but, BAM! Vicious cycle. My fear of commitment came out and freaked me out, so I stopped thinking about the future, but lacking a clear vision of the future freaked me out, so I thought about the future again, and yeah yeah yeah.

“And now, well, I’m less freaked out about it. I learned to half think about the future and to half ignore it. I don’t know what I mean by that, but it’s what I do to keep myself going.”

I paused to wait for Trung’s reaction. He ventured a few comments, telling me that there is no such thing as smooth sailing, but it’s the way I live day to day that determines my future, a future no farther than the next day. Live my life, basically. Cliché advice, but he managed to put it in a different way that made me feel somewhat comforted. I shifted a little bit in bed and realized that I had been shifting quite a bit actually. I was the one lying in Trung’s arms now.

“Sometimes, uh, um, well, you know the game we play, Trung? The hypothetical one. You ask hypothetical questions about...about kids. How I would raise them. Like, you ask me what I would do if my daughter became an anime-loving emo kid or came home knocked up or brought home a boyfriend who was clearly an abusive asshole. Or if my son demanded to take ballet and quit breakdancing. We’ve always played this game since we started going out, and we’ve always had this unwritten and unspoken rule: In these hypothetical situations, I act alone. Single Parent. It was a good rule; I would’ve insisted on keeping it if that rule was every brought up. Every once in a while, you’d throw in black John, who is living on my sofa, and Peter, who I borrow money from, and Miranda, who still keeps on missing out on dinners at my house—er, apartment. But still, I am stuck handling these child-raising hypothetical situations without help. And well, I was thinking, maybe, every once in a while, you...”

A part of me told me to not finish the sentence, but I was already at the point of no return. I had to say it. Tears were pushing against the back of my eyes.

“Maybe you could be with me in the situations every once in a while. Help me out a bit, y’know?”

As I uttered the question, I felt Trung’s embrace tighten. He nodded. It was a slow nod. And I buried my face in his chest, soaking in every little second I was there with him. I felt so warm, and so... and, I let out a sniffle, and some heavy breaths, and soon, I was sobbing. Crying. Soaking Trung’s wife beater. He was concerned, but no, I reassured him, “Trung, don’t worry, no, no. I’m not crying out of, out of sadness. No, I’m not sad.

“Trung, I’m happy. That’s all Trung. That’s it. I’m just happy.”