five footprints left to the sea

here—

the dock groans beneath us, wood swollen with yesterday’s storm,

toes curled over its splintered edge, eyes open, unblinking,

lips salted with unshed tears.
i feel the hollow where the tide used to be,
where waves once cradled my spine,
and i—

dig,
dig,
dig,

until the sand spits me out, hands raw,
nothing left to hold.

gasp when i stumble
into the april rain,
pull the clouds apart
to let the gray bleed through.
i turn away
as my fingers curl into fists,
as my breath fogs the air
between us.
press your cheek to the window,
feel the chill seep into your skin.
ignore the sharp edges
of your reflection,
the way it fractures
when you move too quickly.

say it.
you’ve changed.
do you really mean it?

...

watch how the ocean exhales,
light flickering,
water on metal on sand on
the weight of something unsaid.
it smells like rain, like rust,
it smells like—

one.

the first time i felt the tide pull,
it was gentle, coaxing,
an invitation whispered between waves.
dip my toes in, sand clinging into my shoes

and when she says stay, you say what,
but the tide is already shifting,
and white foam curls around your ankles
and she says stay, and you say no,
you say i can’t,
but your feet keep moving, skimming over
the glassy pull of the waves,
chasing nothing, chasing absence,
chasing the way the ocean swallows footprints whole.

two.

the second time, it was stronger,

wrapped itself around my calves, my knees,
climbing higher, climbing closer.
i laughed, but it swallowed the sound whole.

she says, and you say
how can you just not stop,
you’re slipping,
and she presses her palms to the wet sand,
and you dig your fingers in,
but the earth softens,
but the current tugs,
and neither of you are strong enough
to hold it back,
so you both—

three.

the third time, i did not fight it,
did not run, as
cold water soaked past my chest
chilling my body, past the heart

sink,

into the undertow you made,
and she gasps for the breath
that saltwater stole,
and you gasp for the moment
that almost felt like staying,
and she is me,
and you are me,
and i am never—

four.

the fourth time, i almost let go.

still.

we are echoes first,
sound before silence,
we are sketches, unfinished,
paint wet, colors blurring
i feel the space between heartbeats,
the thinning, the stretching,
the snap.

and the rhythms that shatter,
the silence that stays:

five.

14 colors in the rainbow

under fluorescent hymn we splinter into theorems:

one: fourteen & fumbling through third-floor prophecies

two: october's tender violence, tinted with remnants of heat

three: your face a palimpsest of borrowed wings

7:45 bleeds autumn into summer's aftermath. i find you

stooping before porcelain altar, third sink becoming confessional—

your spine curved like a question mark, each plucked lash

a decimal point in beauty's cruel arithmetic. you rewrite

yourself in negative space, in absence, in the hollow

where natural meets artificial color, blending.

fake ones, i say without thinking

my tongue heavy with calculus & constants,

wednesday mornings spent racing through proofs

while you architect new geometries of self.

you turn: one eye naked testament, one eye adorned prophecy,

a bisection of before & after captured in fluorescent truth.
Why wear them if you’re already—
beautiful? you finished, pressing fresh lash on with a practiced twist, ritualistic

you turned to me then, eyes now perfectly matched, little suns and

glue suspends between dimensions like spaces between stars

while your hair drifts gossamer across temple's foundation,

where makeup cracks reveal mortality beneath divine.

i wear plainness like theoretical armor, miscalculating

beauty's coefficient of drag, the force required

to lift girl-wings against gravity of expectation.

you teach me morning's translation:

how transparency requires artificial shadow,

how visibility comes in counted increments,

each lash a brushstroke in identity's calligraphy.

black wing traced eye, fluttering up, sharp line and hook.

you lean close—peach fuzz aureole above pink glossed lips—

& the fault line ruptures: girl-self splits into parallel universes.

we stand fractured across school bathroom stained mirrors,

half-formed theorems seeking proof of existence,

neither quantum state fully collapsed:

truth/lie/compromise oscillating in superposition

until the bell's metallic tongue

rings us back into singular dimension.

between bathroom sink & classroom desk,

we lose ourselves in transformation's labyrinth:

your borrowed wings, my borrowed certainties,

all of us borrowing shapes to pour ourselves into,

while morning light refracts through window-prism,

splitting fourteen into infinite spectrum of becoming.

echos to nantong

great great grandmother’s fingers bled

weaving silk in candlelight till dawn--

porcelain needle clicking against thumb thimble

diamond dot silver circle, sharp cloth

until lotus and peony and orchid bloomed from pain.

chrysanthemum fingertips, silk dyed and aged with time

ambition is a garden of

dreams planted in salt-soaked soil, of confucian teachings buried

between piano arpeggios and the 2 stringed strum of an erhu

golden medal, jade polished voice spewing ancient wisdom

smoothness until the tongue grows heavy with

copper tasting inheritance, of blood, salted.

cross the yangtze when dusk falls,

paper-thin hopes melting in nantong mist, transparent

huddle against fate and sense a spectral

memory that hugs the sampan, watching

mist clinging to shoulders like ghosts, claiming.

this is how we learn the value of survival.

roots crawl from my family’s feet, one

underneath every step but its iron and not

earth. anchor to the future, daughters lost to history—

great (great) grandma weaving her silk, my

mother with a phd in chemistry, and me

at the end, quicksilver and free.

construct bridges from fragmented memories, longer

than memory, search for belonging in every

teahouse and behind every courtyard wall. claim

something more than the fractured echoes of something

wild that persists beneath concrete and domesticity, past

my plastic trinkets, led lights and polyester clothes.

cranes circle overhead, carrying prayers skyward on paper wings,

silent witness to what we’ve become, what we’ve forgotten.

they were messengers to heaven not that long ago.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Between "I" (one stroke, standing alone)
and "我" (five strokes, balanced together)
lies the untranslatable territory of self.

"Finding yourself" becomes "寻找自我"
but this carries collective discovery
not individual excavation.

Shanghai advertisements promise "自信"
through products fixing problems
I never knew existed
until I learned their names.

Authentic feelings birth grammatical errors:

Emotional subjunctive absent

In Chinese's pragmatic clarity,

In English's subject-verb certainty.

Language-switching mid-sentence creates
meanings no monolingual would recognize,
yet expresses precisely half my intention.

Family conversations become simultaneous translations:

"孝" condensed to "respect your elders" loses ancestral weight;
"individuality" expanded still fails to convey American uniqueness.

Dictionary definitions: mere approximations.

Ambition (野心): negative here, positive there.

Cultural concepts resist equivalence:

"Independence" celebrated in Western narrative

Becomes "self-sufficient" (自立)

But lacks context of healthy separation in China.

In Chinese, I shift 15 degrees toward collective harmony.
In English, I shift 15 degrees toward individual expression.
Between them: 30-degree gap where authenticity might exist
if rendered in some hypothetical third language.

Childhood emotions carry different bodies:

"Homesick" hollows my chest,

“思乡" tightens my throat.

The self exists as perpetual mistranslation,
meaning forever lost between tongues,
a dictionary entry with no precise equivalent.