creative
inquiries: elliesunlightmoon@gmail.com2023 September 10
theories about love
dialectical lovelessnessoriginally published on Substack
- love is
- love is self-diagnosis.
- love stems from a curiosity about another.
- love is a kindness, empathic in nature. it shows you care.
- love is a nectar, of which its overconsumption may dehydrate you.
- love is intrusive, an expansion of mass with a single source and in limited space.
- love is a form of moral judgment.
- love is a fingerprint—no two loves are alike (but statistically some are bound to be exactly alike and it will make the news one day).
- love is lacking in light, and thus in color, shadows, reflection. love does have form, moving our minds to respond to its touch and fill in the blanks.
- love has a weight. the 21 grams experiment theorized the existence of the soul, pointing to the loss of a little over 21 grams of body weight post-death. this is nothing like that.
- love is the intersection of desires and expectations; of the inherent and learned. this is much like the intersection of art and technology.
- love is a SaaS (software as a service) with a subscription-based model. you may cancel or restart your subscription at any time. the retention stats are abysmal.
- love is placed algorithmically across cities based on satellite map data and found via your phone’s AR-capable camera. towns, i hear, are a different story.
- love is emphatically unscientific. atoms are uninvolved.
- love is like a zine. some people fiddle around with it for long periods, making different ones, selling, trading, showcasing, putting it on sale for 30% off on their Big Cartel store (Shopify’s subscription price recently went up to $40/month and that’s much too high for an independent publisher). then they forget about them, others forget about them, some sit in a shelf or a box with a couple of pages scrunched up because they were stored improperly; some are referenced frequently by graphic designers and/or former Tumblr textposters, some feature sexual content and are thus revisited more often, some are steadily sold every year at a new booth at the same book fair—and life moves on unceremoniously.
- love can be found on eBay, but is better found in mom-and-pop stores in the forest or desert towns of America for a steal. they don’t know too much about the internet and think these old things must be outdated, unwanted.
- love is unnecessary. but we should do it anyway.
- love is fickle, Travis Bickle.
- there are no words in the English language that rhyme with “love.”
- love was removed as a required subject in American high school curricula as part of an amended rider in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
- love languages were a pseudoscience invented by the CIA and spread across coastal cities as a psychological operation.
- love is not political, nor revolutionary. in fact, it is the single greatest disruptor of revolutionary movements in the United States and is often a weapon of the state.
- love is desire but desire is not love. desire is something to be explored in another newsletter.
- love is a religion for the deeply confused.
- love is something i’m unsure of.
- love is the stuff of dreams (derogatory).
- love is the source of ghost stories: specters of unfinished business that linger until another comes along to help.
- God made love in the same way He made Hell.
- Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse: “Some lovers do not commit suicide: it is possible for me to emerge from that ‘tunnel’ which follows the amorous encounter. I see daylight again, either because I manage to grant unhappy love a dialectical outcome (retaining the love but getting rid of the hypnosis) or because I abandon that love altogether and set out again, trying to reiterate, with others, the encounter whose dazzlement remains with me…” he was wrong, actually. it’ll never happen again and you should kill yourself.
- love forms as memory meets the present. love is yearning for a certain future.
- love is a chronology of your context.
- love is a bridge from the self to the other.
- love is unforgettable. maybe that’s for a reason.
- love is a grand gesture, split between days, months, years, and every ensuing moment in time, despite a love’s dissipation or your departure from this earth; your love was given to and for another life, and your willingness to give and for another to receive is an exchange inscribed in eternity, of which is humanity. one grand gesture.
- love is necessary.
- love is
2021 June 05
What’s in a City?
On a moment in time in Los Angeles in the mid to late 2000soriginally published on Substack
I used to see a ghost. I lived in a century fourplex in Koreatown when I was ten years old. We were there for two or three years. It was on New Hampshire Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets, a couple blocks north of the first place I remember living in (that one was an apartment).
It was the most room I’d ever had in a home, with a long hallway separating the bedrooms from a roomy living room, which was unfortunately taken over by unopened moving boxes for the entire two years we had lived there. It had a dining room, which I hadn’t understood the meaning of until seeing it there. It had beautiful arched windows facing the street that would let light flow in magically during sunrise. It was especially more room than the place we had lived for almost a year beforehand, the smallest place I’ve ever lived in: a tiny, boxy studio apartment off of Mariposa & 7th, where I slept on a mat on the floor between the computer and the entrance to the closet & bathroom, and gained an almost-allergic reaction to watermelon I still carry today after having a nauseous encounter devouring scoops all night.
It was the first street I’d lived on that felt like a city. Every building on the block was a duplex or fourplex, besides an apartment building or two at the ends of the street; fences were either low or not at all there; kids often played in their large front yards and would be massively loud in the mornings; and a selection of three supermarkets were just a block away east or west, between Jons, Vons, and Ralphs.
And it was lively to live there. I remember us all squeezed into a tiny den connected to the master bedroom on a hot summer morning to watch the 2006 World Cup on a heavy, old Sony CRT television, balanced delicately on a cute, green, children’s IKEA table, with a smattering of gear in support of the South Korean team. Our neighbors would have family parties blasting cumbia almost every single day of the week, generating plenty of raged complaints from my dad. I once stayed up for 40 hours to play through Metal Gear Solid 4 all at once. My mom once ignored week-long warnings about our street being closed to be repaved and drove down the wet street, one wheel on the curb and one wheel in the asphalt, leaving a trail underneath parked cars for years. We were a short stroll down the street to California Donuts, several years before the premium donut craze spawned long lines. Our landlords were a quaint Korean family living in yellowed fluorescent lighting, bedding and tables all at floor-level, with not much care for anything at all but the day-to-day.
It was the first time I had felt I was living some sense of a normal life. For my ten years beforehand, we hopped from apartment to apartment in Koreatown, within the Park La Brea complex, and Santa Clarita as my parents balanced stressful, bare-margins entrepreneurship with raising an only child, in the context of a contemptuous relationship that deteriorated after years of medical assistance to conceive a child in the first place. After years of barely seeing both parents at once, besides bedtime and mornings, I had two parents in the home regularly. And a hamster.
It was here that I used to a see a ghost. I also saw a new load of roaches every day—I managed to step on one with my bare foot once when I stood up too quickly from my chair, and saw that it had green mush inside of it. Police would regularly knock on our door at 3am on the dot, citing reports of a domestic disturbance; they would eventually give a vague, nonsensical explanation that our fax machine’s phone line may be faulty and reporting to 911 as it disconnects repeatedly. I would never see our neighbors that weren’t our landlords. Towards the end of our time there, I had a lucid fever dream of the entire storyline of the young-adult novel Inkheart while I was shaking and screaming with my mouth closed, my eyes open, and my body locked in position, all while my parents arched over me trying their best to wake me up; I would have seemingly random anxiety attacks for the next couple of years.
My dad and I drove out to drop me off at school one morning, 7:45 or so. We were late as usual. At the end of our street, as we turned onto 3rd, I noticed a spot of smoked sidewalk and caution tape covering the corner. I wondered out loud to my dad what may have happened. It stuck with me for the entire day; as I arrived home in the evening, I saw a widespread vigil with a framed photo, from which my dad recognized the man. I came home to cycle through the local channels during the news hours later that night to see what may have happened—nothing. I looked it up on the internet.
An unhoused man, John Robert McGraham, had been doused in gasoline and burned alive near the corner. My dad recognized him as someone he’d run into all around Koreatown for close to a decade. The man seemed to know and be generally friendly with everybody, from Starbucks baristas to local Korean shop-owners. I remember I was surprised to hear about a homeless person with such kind but genuine candor. We mourned together for a man I never had seen and he’d never spoken to.
The man who murdered McGraham sits today in prison, sentenced for life. He had had a long history of outward hatred against unhoused people and retaliated for getting fired, after he was caught assaulting McGraham on the job. It was also understood among those who knew the murderer that he struggled with mental illness.
I began seeing the ghost long before this time. The bedroom I stayed in intersected at the end of the hallway with the bathroom. Whenever I would exit the bathroom or the bedroom and face the long hallway, at the end of which a curtained window toward the street sat, I saw a blooming light around a rounded figure. It remained featureless, long, almost cartoonishly-shaped, and merely a glowing light for the duration of my time there. I would get chills down my back and arms as I stared into the darkness of the hallway every night and every day. It was a tragic time when I realized I saw the shape of the figure in daylight hours, too. Taking showers was a terrifying time every time; the bathroom door didn’t close, and opening the door was always a risk of the ghost having gotten closer. Needing to get to the kitchen, down the hallway, was a task in itself during nighttime.
But the ghost never got closer. It would always remain in place at the other end of the hallway, just before the portal into the living room. By the end of our stay there, I almost wished it would do more, just so my parents would believe that it was there, and that I had reason to be genuinely frightened every night and day.
My parents and I never met and befriended any other neighbors on our street. My dad routinely snitch-called the cops on some fun family that liked having backyard parties. We never walked to the markets and back, despite them being so close to us. I never had any friends from school over because my parents were afraid of showing other people the stacks of unopened boxes taking over the living room (let alone the massive roaches). I never got to run into John McGraham.
When my parents started doing better with work after transitioning away from their businesses, we moved back to an apartment in the Park La Brea complex. I stopped seeing the ghost after I left, enough that I completely forgot for a long while that I’d seen it. My dad started believing that I’d seen the ghost one day when he came across a Korean forum post describing and illustrating a ghost with the same features that someone grew up seeing in Korea. I believed it a little more too. Eventually, he forgot that I used to see a ghost in that fourplex. He forgot about McGraham too.
In October of 2008, over 300 people packed into Immanuel Presbyterian Church to mourn a man in their community. Today, what’s in a city?
2020 December 13
Acceptance
Briefly, on grieforiginally published on Substack
My dad told me a story the last time we were at the cemetery. He doesn’t open up much, but I’ve seen him cry more than ever this year. It was the first time we had seen my grandmother’s gravestone; it took half a year from when she passed to be engraved and installed, and her burial ground was left as an unmarked mound of dirt for months. There, he remembered how I told him about how it felt like I experience all five stages of grief all at once, all the time.
He told me my grandma started showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s around 2009. It only got worse within a couple of years from there, and after my grandpa accidentally overdosed on his medications and needed to be hospitalized, they ended up separated in different convalescent care facilities. My grandpa would always say the same two things to my dad each time they would talk, in person or on the phone: first, ask how my grandma was doing, then second, affirm out loud that he needed to get healthier already so he could go see her. In 2015, he got an infection in his scarred foot while at the hospital. It spread quickly—his leg needed amputation for him to survive. My dad said he reacted quickly in saying yes to the amputation, as if it was an obvious choice to make a 92-year-old man deal with a surgery to cut off a limb.
He said my grandpa stopped asking about my grandma the last hospital visit. There was no life left in his eyes, and you could see it in the last photo my dad took together with him. He stopped asking about the wife he loved and cared for through war, prosperity, sea change, and sickness, and dreamt of going back to Korea with to start their own church. A dream God had given them.
My dad said he started accepting his parents’ sicknesses and mortality for the first time after noticing this. He had denied my grandma’s Alzheimer’s for years, praying every single morning and every night for a miracle. He kept praying until her death in April this year, and found a void in losing part of his daily prayer. Instead of losing the ritual, he decided to keep praying, now for her peaceful passage to heaven, where she could protect us all the most and be with the husband she always loved again.
He told me beside the gravestone he finally understood what acceptance was.