18 September 2026

turns out it's not that I can't cry
it's just that I can't cry sober

I shed some tears yesterday, on the anniversary of my being born
it was a mixture of a humongous mass of loneliness, a hint of confusion, a touch of helplessness, and a trickle of self-pity washing all over me

did I time my tears?
it might have been a good 45 seconds before they ran cold on my skin

if my whole existence was invisible,
did the body of my tears take form?

remember that minuscule fragment of broken glass stuck between your thumbprint
that we spent a nonsensical amount of time searching for?

the glimmer of the devilish thing cuts deep

it nested under my skin for the rest of my eternity,

and never let my consciousness sleep

not a night

if only pure joy could compensate for a childish prank

25 October 2026

I was a shy kid. I got embarrassed over the tiniest of things. One of my friends pointed out to me one time that I was saying sorry too much and that it annoyed her. She said she found it meaningless, that I was always too quick to apologize when I got called out.

I couldn’t help it. I drive on guilt.

Kid? What was I as a kid? I’m not sure.

I abandoned my childhood on a train connecting Da Nang to Saigon. We were on the most important relocation of my life.

Father was not on the train. I’m not sure why, I just remember it that way.

I was excited for the new adventure ahead as I watched the bushes and electric poles passing by the windows. The smell? I don’t recall. But it must have smelled of piss. I always remember trains that way.

The ticket inspector came asking for my ticket.

Mom didn’t buy my ticket. She had adult tickets for her and my eleven-year-old sister, but not for me. She wasn’t sure, or maybe it was just usual practice around that time, adults just didn't buy tickets for kids my age and hoped for a pass from the inspector. That’s what I remember her saying.

The ticket inspector came asking for my ticket. “Ticket, kid?”

I didn’t have it. I don’t remember what I said. Maybe I said nothing. Mom took over. She negotiated with him, but she failed. He insisted on that ticket, so she paid for it. That’s how I assumed it went.

I froze in time. A turning-seven kid, my elbow on the unfolded table chained to the wall, my hands propping up my chin, I stared out the window for the entire trip, embarrassed to the bone.

I was on a running train and I didn’t have a ticket, for a kid or for an adult. I was neither here nor there, in place or in time. And there was my mom, reluctantly paying for my right to exist in the in-between.

I was a kid who never turned into an adult, forever sorted into neither.

I was embarrassed.

I wasn’t supposed to be there.

I had a brother, who died, when he hadn’t yet live. My family have a grave for him, a miscarriage, named Thân Vô Danh - Thân No Name. Three years later, my mom gave birth to me, when she was almost 40. They used to joke that they picked me up from the garbage yard because I grew up looking like nobody in the family. Later I knew for sure that it was a common joke. Back then, I believed it to be true.

I was embarrassed.

I wasn’t even supposed to be.

At the age of four, I had more or less a family home and a childhood. Father was never around much, he was always on some bussiness trips. I heard he was a prodigy from his hometown, knew five languages, and traveled to America and Europe. He was the background force of our family.

We had a house on the ground floor of a community building, the kind of building American officers used to stay in during the Vietnam War, which the government reassigned for their own officers after the war. I remember our house tiled with white and red floor tiles, like a chessboard. I remember there was a wooden staircase leading to a loft where mom stashed away the junk. I used to spend a lot of time there because I was comfortable in the darkness, and because of the thrill my sister had hyped up about the ghosts living there. I had my own secret corner of the world.

I remember there was a storage unit in front of the main building complex. I heard it used to be chicken cages. When we lived there, they had turned it into a parking area for the residents’ motorbikes. It still stank of chicken poop. My big adventure back then was climbing on top of it. Not much of an adventure, really, because adults often climbed up there to dry their vegetables. But I was only three or four, barely a meter tall, so it was a total rush. I'd spread out and dried myself among the beans and peas, breathing in the chicken stink, feeling like king of the world.

I remember the ants on the white wall outside our house. On summer afternoons, mom taught me how to draw a line on the wall with chalk so the ants would follow it. That was a way to discipline the ants that I still find fascinating today. Was it my mom who taught me that, or my great-grandma? I’m not sure.

I remember I was always surrounded by words. There were always books lying around in the house and I'd read them all, from front to back and back again. The first money I earned was from my sister setting up a comic book rental in front of the back gate of our house. The neighborhood kids on summer break were our customers. The back gate was painted blue. I remember that clearly.

We moved to a bigger house, a block house like the ones nowadays. There was a huge two-way road right in front of our door. I remember I was so excited to play with the first basketball my sister got. But I must have played with it too hard, because it bounced and rolled to the other side of the road. It was right there in our sight, but neither of us had the courage to cross the road by ourselves to pick up the ball. I was five, my sister was ten.

I remember that was the first time I knew the feeling of losing something.

But if you know where something is, but know you can never reach it, does it really count as lost?

I was there with my mom when she got the phone call with the news of her younger brother passing, a cool uncle I hadn’t been close with. She cried. I didn’t know what to do, so I laughed.

I must have been around ten.

People consisdered me mature for my age, that has always been the case. But I was right there, in one of the most intimate and vulnerable moment of my mom’s life, and acted like a fucking psycho. I laughed so hard while my mom was crying over my uncle’s death.

I remember my mom froze for a moment.

I think of the dead as that ball we lost across the road. I don’t feel sadness as much as I feel regret.

Mom asked me many questions during my childhood. When she first caught me in the act of cutting myself, she cried and asked what was wrong with me. Then came the second crucial question, right then, when she asked why I was laughing when she was in so much pain. Later, when I was seventeen and drunk, trying to drown myself in the ocean, she asked, in tears, why. Always in tears.

I didn’t have any answers. I stunned her with my own question instead. "Mom, why the hell did you give birth to me? I never asked for it."

It haunts me. It haunts her.

Always in tears.

Guilt drives me.

Mom thinks alcohol was my demon. Everybody thinks so, I thought so. She urged me to quit, and recently, when I stopped drinking, she was almost moved to tears.

But that wasn't it. It's just that my demon is the loudest when drunk.

I was basically destroying myself when I was eighteen, getting into so many bike accidents that I couldn’t count them all. The most serious accident totally smashed a bike. When I got to school with a bleeding head, they called mom. She came and brought me to the hospital. I went into a state of shock with short-term memory loss. But I remember asking her why she hadn’t had them scan my head. And I remember her saying there wasn't a need to.

I have no memory of whatever else about the event but I keep remembering that. That I was crying for help. I desperately wanted to know what was wrong with me. I was childishly hoping that if they had scanned my head, they would have found the answer, and she would have known.

She’s my only God. I only have her to blame. And since I couldn’t blame her, as she doesn’t deserve it, I blame myself instead.

I was driven by guilt.

What was I as a kid?

I remember the colony of ants that ran in a line following the chalk mark on the outer wall of our shabby house in the eerily quiet stillness of the afternoons. I remember the scorching heat. I briefly lived in that fragment of a summer.

The stench of chicken shit consumed my senses.

The ants crawled all over my body and biten me to death.

My death was something that had already happened, mom.

I’ve tried, mom. I’ve tried.

Believe me. I’ve tried.