in the time of lili

Lili as Hoàng Thùy Linh. My very first brush with the internet was through her song, Fallin,’ drifting from my neighbor’s Windows Media Player. It felt like a spell cast over me, a moment where everything shimmered with magic. This piece is for her.

i often find myself staring at the dances of Windows Media Player, lost in them for what feels like an entire moment stretched thin.
Dozens of worlds spin open for me to choose from: dust particles, whirlwinds, black holes, falling fragments, fission, drifting, radiation, bubbles, dizziness, windmills, turbulence…
Those words, once they swallow the light, slowly surface, forming a blurred horizon; and if you gaze long enough, the mind tilts, begins to wonder: how is a soul supposed to go on?

A slip of paper, folded into a triangle, name written on it; a hand crumples it, scraps covering the lifeline of a palm.
I throw it down, as if discarding a cat.
A twenty-eight–story tower sends up waves of matter, a glorious surge of oscillations flooding forward, houses collapsing in their wake.
Inside music, danger still lurks.

There are things I witness with my own eyes, and there are things that exist only as merciless symbols; and there are structures that do nothing to halt tragedy.
They know only how to create tragedy.

Behind the floor-to-ceiling glass, the air drifts through, washing the dust off architecture. When the room is emptied, the scars on the wooden floor cannot be hidden, black waistcoats and cheap CDs scattered in the corners like eyes staring wide in shock.
For days on end, my only instinct was to run, quickly, breathless.

Rachael Sage, once a ballet student, always rises onto her toes at that fleeting instant when black is about to turn into white.
And when I retreat back into the frail, ordinary world, I return heavy with anxiety, drowning in a meaning I cannot escape.

At midnight I step outside. A dim wall, a shadow cast from the corridor. Sky and earth, mountains and rivers, circles and lines — distortion is the truth; witnesses, evidence, all absent.
People pass through love as though passing through death, carrying illusions as part of the journey to keep on living.
The street is thick with sounds, my ears flooded with endless mutterings.

I sit in a sweetshop named La Dolce Vita. We don’t speak of Fellini, only of others and of tomorrow. I drain a tall glass of matcha milk, cloyingly sweet, and remember the sharp sting of mustard smoke, and the fields — where childhood dwelled, blank pages stacked, leaving no trace, no dent.
For a long while I was partial to the color green; partial to rice leaves and fireworks. With eyes narrowed, gaze level, in that tender blaze when blossoms unfold, one can almost hear colors dissolving.
Perhaps… this was the omen of a broken dream?
Oh Lily, why do you and I still keep the faces of children, while the scenery around us races headlong into adulthood?

“Walking down the street, Lily looked just like me, painted in common makeup.”
A pair of lines written in 2007.
I wish they were still fresh — fresher than something just pressed into juice.

And yet what unsettles me is this: Rachael Sage’s powder-pink hues, the taut strings of her keyboard, trembling layers of chiffon, long hair left uncut, glitter at the corner of the eye, imagined tattoos, an occasional lace of flowers, stems of time named and renamed — all that contrived naturalness… will it too complete its metamorphosis with the Lilies?
Answer me.

Someone, countless times, lifts her eyes from the keys, serene, yet lost to herself, pupils unfocused, offering no promises. She sings The Four Palaces, sings Swinging, sings Three Cats, sings  Let Mi tell you,
One song after another, until the sky grows barren, the years grow old, and all colors — red, blue, black, white — collapse into indistinction.

I say: let us sit down, sit here on the floor, rest against two velvet pillows of gold. Why gold? Because it feels like dawn.
Before you leave, before you become a stranger, I want to hold onto something familiar, something warm, something that lasts.