300 for 30: Day 9

I feel so without words at the moment. Each one slides out sluggishly, like chilled syrup out a tilted bottle.

I got up early to talk to my love this morning - his night - and we were both sleepy and I realized I hadn't said anything in a while and he said goodbye. I felt guilty for not talking better, for not paying enough attention. I still do, a little, but I know he forgives me. He's good at that. It's frustrating to try to communicate with him without touching; our relationship is tremendously tactile. Hands in hands, arms around, me scratching his beard (or scruff, depending on where he is in his shave cycle, which is irregular and intermittent) and him kicking like a puppy. Our mutual friends find it both hilarious and slightly nauseating from a sweetness overdose. It's been nearly six months together and I'm pretty sure we're still in the dizzy giddiness.

I don't know the name for what he smells like, but it's clean and simple and comforting, the way a creamy bar of new Dove soap is. He washes with whatever's handy, so it must be an intrinsic part of him rather than layered-on. He's skinny and lithe but strong, wiry as they say, and with big hands on the end of thin arms. I got us secret decoder rings made of stainless steel, because in many ways we're both children together, dancing in a field. When I told him about the rings on Facebook chat he typed out, "Ooooo...." Still waiting for them to come in the mail, and then for me to be able to go to him.

I introduced him to one of my best friends on campus, and she's become one of his best friends too, and we often eat or lie staring up at the clouds as a trio. I've been "adopted" by other couples in a similar fashion, especially my best friend in the world and her fiance, and I'm glad to be able to do this for her. After something I said to her once, this friend my love and I have taken into our non-jealous triangle - a platonic solid, as it were - calls us Team TARDIS. She's the Doctor and we're Amy and Rory (why, geekiness is one of our bonds, how could you tell?).

I miss both of them very much. I miss my best friend in the world too, but that's a lower-lying ache because of our separation from ages twelve to fourteen, so we have learned to live away from each other and still stay close in soul. Words were enough for Rumi and Shams, for he saw Shams everywhere he looked.

Ah, but I need to touch him. It would chase these clouds away sooner, rather than having to wait for the wind.

300 for 30: Day 8

Depression is being incredibly bored. Depression is being overwhelmed. Depression is gray in your heart and mouth and underneath your eyelids. Depression is tiptoing on a tightrope over a lake of cold, dark water, a weak spotlight barely showing you the way. Depression is when you can't think of a single external thing that you want, other than for the depression to go away, or maybe, maybe one of the very few people who you can cry with as they hold you, who will forgive your dullness and helplessness.

Depression is temporary. Depression is recurrent. Depression is a gnawing on your spirit. Depression is when your bones itch and freeze. Depression is a dull roar that goes on and on. Depression tastes like silver, copper, stainless steel, an old popsicle stick you realize you've been chewing to no purpose, a chilly spoon you mouth at when the food is all gone. Depression is most foods tasting like sawdust and cardboard. Depression is a choke in your throat and a rattle in your walk. Depression is temporary. Depression is listening to yourself blink and getting annoyed so shutting your eyes instead. Depression is bouncing the leg, rocking the body, clicking the teeth, all to drown out the silence. Depression is a dryness. Depression is a weakness. Depression is a loss.

Depression is having trouble getting to sleep. Depression is having trouble getting up. Depression is nightmares. Depression is preferring nightmares to being awake, for fear and depression are not the same thing and sometimes it's nice to have a change. Depression is the minor key of the inner soundtrack. Depression is words being reluctant and sticky. Depression is like having tight clamps on your hands. Depression is a disease. Depression is a chemical imbalance. Depression is the reason so many bright and brilliant people don't know it much of the time.

Depression is my enemy. Depression is an old companion. Depression is temporary.

Depression is not forever. But depression is now.

300 for 30: Day 7

We had a yard sale today. To be more accurate, we participated as one table in a mega yard sale today. The Vientiane International School, which I attended from late 1996 to early 2000 - though they have a new, bigger campus now - holds one every year. My parents are moving from Laos to China and need to get rid of a lot of stuff. We spent several hours, spread over this past week, sorting out eight boxes' worth of old but good-quality flotsam.

The heartwarming thing about this yard sale, rather than an ordinary one, is that for the Lao people who come this is a major shopping extravaganza, a chance to get exotic foreign products without having to cross the border to Thailand. Laos is emerging from communism much the way China and Vietnam are, and though the markets are opening up many things are simply not available. The school charges shoppers entrance, and we still get what seems like hundreds of people looking for bargains. Today there were also bratwursts for sale, a variety of drinks and snacks, and pony/carriage rides. An enterprising coffee shop was giving out samples as well as selling cups of java, in those little paper cups designed for hot beverages that have butterfly-wing handles you unfold so they stick out. I've never seen those in the U.S. They're almost too cute.

Mom said I was giving people too much leeway in bargaining, but I figured the Prime Directive was to get rid of things rather than to make a big profit. Phi (Big Sister) Nu Kit, our cook/housekeeper, who was my nanny the first time we were here, was a tough bargainer as well, but she tends to indulge me in everything because she considers me her first child. I gave a steep discount to a family buying a bike helmet for their son, because I don't want to be responsible for him cracking his head open. I got this vision of him getting in a crash and dying, and his family weeping, "If only that rich foreign girl who spoke such good Lao had reduced the price by 20,000 kip!" (It's 8,000 kip to the dollar at the moment.)

I kept getting confused by the zeros, as I always do here, what with inflation. A lot of people are willing to pay in or get paid in the Thai Baht, it being a stronger currency. Nu Kit helped me with the accounting. The big, industrial fan periodically blowing on us often blew away bills, but we used an old keepsake box to collect them. We made about $200. Mom promises to buy me a black (or brown) trench (or pea) coat when we get back to the U.S. in July. I accepted that in lieu of a share of the cash.

There were a lot of beaming children, and one ecstatic expatriate who bought at least seven books, a great thing in a country with a paucity of good bookstores in any language, let alone English. We're donating the rest to an annual charity bazaar Mom has been affiliated with in the past. I hope people enjoy their purchases.

300 for 30: Day 6

I generally try to keep the men and women I date - or pine for hopelessly - out of my work, for similar reasons that it's a bad idea to get a tattoo of their name. They betray, they dwindle, they turn out different than you thought, they fall in love with someone else and let them break their precious heart that you would have cherished and nurtured (or at least you think so, when in reality you are just as prone to shattering others as anyone else is).

I do write them little poems and essays sometimes, just for them, but I don't consider that "work". It's tentative wooing. There was one young lady with porcelain skin, except for the slightest dash of brown freckles, springy hair, a profile like a Victorian cameo, the greenest of eyes, and a scatter-brained joie de vivre that I found enchanting. I never got the courage to tell her how I felt, I've always been so shy with the women, but I taped a yellow rose to her dorm room door with a note saying I wanted her to know she was admired by someone who wished her well. The only woman I've been in a relationship with was trans, which mattered to me not a mite, though she was so uncomfortable with her own body that I couldn't press her to show it to me. I would have loved every bit of it, pre-op awkwardness and all. It took me a long time to get over her. I still wish her well.

But oh, my significant other at the moment (male), my love, my dear, he's like the quiet, warm sunrise after a series of brilliant - but ephemeral - shooting stars. He's the first person I've dated steadily that I didn't see some kind of doom impending with, something that would inevitably separate us. He's the first person I have equal give and take with, who can provide comfort and strength at my times of weakness but who needs them from me at other times as well. He smells like home and hearth. I can imagine him intentionally hurting me the way I can imagine him repeatedly, purposefully hitting himself with a hammer - it's physically possible, but why on earth would he ever? He makes me laugh and he loves to just lie beside me, us holding each other, sometimes so comfortable that we drift off to sleep in that clutch, the lights still on.

I hope hope hope nothing bad happens to him, to us, that we keep on going like this. We're separated at the moment because I'm visiting my parents, but we both know we're going to run to each other with glad cries.

300 for 30: Day 5

I write because it gives me peace. I write because it gives me energy, purpose, fulfillment. I write because it fills up the hole in my chest that only a few people, when they are with me, can do, and without the writing I keen for them in a long, long, silent yet constant way, the way the Star Whale in that episode of Doctor Who screams.

I write because what about me is that special if you take away the words? I write because there must be a purchase for the prices I've paid. I write because books were my constant friends growing up, and I want to provide friends for other lonely people as well. I write because it pays, a little, and it makes me feel like a real woman to get paid for my creative work.

I write because it's fun. I write because it spills over. I write because if I talked all the time, people would get tired of hearing me and my throat would get sore and dry and stuck.

I write for Caitlin, for Sam, for Maggie, for Indigo, for Sally, for Alexandra-Sasha, for the girl who held my hand under the bathroom door when I was crying alone in a stall and never showed me her face or said her name. I write to spit in the face of the dreams of the memories of the echoes of the bullies, the nightmares, the haunts, the anxieties, the tongue chewed in my sleep, the shake of my hands, my fear of getting behind the wheel of a car.

I write because it's better than writhing, sobbing, rocking back and forth, eating too much, shopping too much online, attempting to have intimacy with people who will never love me. I write because I'm full of agape and wonder. I write for the sake of the prisoner and the flight of birds. I write because the children they mark, the children they know, the place where the sidewalk ends. I write because my own words and words I've borrowed get all mixed together but they're both sublime.

I write because my fingers need exercise. I write because it makes people admire me. I write because I'm bored in my room by myself but sometimes I'm scared to go outside. I write because it's honest. I write because it's the closest thing to sweet lying that I'm comfortable doing regularly. I write because I am where the falling angel meets the rising ape. I write because my favorite authors will die or succumb to Alzheimer's and I must be ready to make the Dust to keep the light and joy of the world alive.

I write because I live.

Why do you?

300 for 30: Day 4

I don't feel like working on any of my novels today, so I'm just going to type 300 words of what comes into my head.

I have a mood disorder that I generally consider Bipolar Disorder for the sake of having a label, though I have never been officially diagnosed with it. The semester before last one of my medications - I've been medicated for almost six years now - stopped working properly for me, and I had the second breakdown of my life and had to go to the psych ward for six days. Though I was never suicidal, this is part of where my ideas for Sweeping the Puddles Away are coming from.

The other part is when I first realized something was wrong, at age nearly-fifteen, and had suicidal thoughts for months on end. Eventually my parents and I were told by doctors that I should move from Beijing, where we were living, to Virginia, where I could do daytime group therapy for three weeks at a (different) psych ward. You can see how I've melded those two experiences in the premise of my new novel. I plan to meld several different people who have made a difference to me in a few composite characters as well, to protect the real inspirations and also to make the thing more story-shaped. Novels work better than life; everything means something and though nothing really ends, you can frame it nicely.

When we first moved into the house in Falls Church I was finished with Waking Echoes and had spent roughly six months trying to get published, about the same time I had been finished with the hospital treatment. I checked out pretty much the whole section the local library had on writing. I credit this self-created program as a major part of my healing process, and it seemed both logical and wonderful to do something similar again, except with a combination of writing-as-way-of-life books and good exercise at the Embassy gym this summer.

It helps me not miss my love so much. And I am nearly as aglow from it as he makes me.