Why is it that in the most tectonic times, I think of and write about who I love?

Many years ago, I loved a friend. Memories of him surfaced recently when I felt I’d lost my grip on what I need to move forward. He had long, dark hair, climbed trees, bent down to kiss dogs, and moved with a gentle sensitivity. We met on a canoeing trip, where we rowed with and against the waves, cooked food, meditated and dreamed. Embers of the campfire tucked away stories and secrets that made us cry. The trip returned the rhythm of my life back into one of deep listening. As a result, I was effortlessly moved by everything.

His holiday house party. Standing in the hazy living room light on the hardwood floor, I inhaled cedar and sandalwood. A haiku squeezed between the pages of A Thousand Mornings. He smiled at the book and gave me a hug. I wore my new alpaca cardigan, which was so soft that it made hugs linger a bit longer. Was there a vinyl playing in the background? Or was it just a JBL hard at work? Someone tapped through the softest, moonlit playlist on a screen: “Today is the Day” by Yo La Tengo, “Movie” by Tom Misch, Frank Ocean’s “Moon River,” “Let’s Be Still” by The Head and the Heart… Beautiful cool kids sat sideways and on each other’s laps, sprawling on the couch and on the rug, like a sepia postcard from the 90s.

*

Graduation marked the uproot season. In summer 2021, I said goodbye to many friends who were a year above, including him.

We stubbornly attach ourselves to places because they temporarily still the transience of people. In stillness we meet, in movement we depart. Ohio, the most mundanely special place of all, brought together my people. In a town with no view-blocking skyscrapers, just one long river winding through campus, life was very little and a whole lot at once.

We stubbornly attach ourselves to people because they mirror what is lovable. Love is an outbound ray until it reflects homebound to us again. Why is it that in the most tectonic times, I think of and write about who I love? This friend held a mirror that reflected a part of me I’ve missed and lost touch with.

*

A year later, he returned to our town, fresh out of a breakup. He pulled up with another friend to pick me up. We shared pho and spring rolls and clinked bottles of Belgian White at a quaint bar illuminated by fairy lights. Watching friends hug goodbye always makes me want to cry a little. Don’t we know how precious these encounters are, how roads rarely lead us to the same place again? It was my season to pack and uproot. When he dropped me off, I handed him On Love by Alain de Botton. In stillness we meet, in movement we depart.

Books, poems, and pictures exchanged. Books, poems, and pictures forgotten. And so we will love again, bump into each other again. True knowing happens once every few lifetimes, so how can we blame ourselves for wanting forever and forever to last? May the most important memories always be crystalline.

*

I don’t think he’ll ever know how much our friendship meant to me. In memory, every point of space and time feels private and vague. I open my shoebox of keepsakes; it’s forever I want to relive. Shrinking the distance until that feeling is within reach. That feeling gets so close it couldn’t have been any further.

My labor of love, Glia, is now on the App Store. It helps you sense-make thoughts into stories of self-understanding.

Glia builds the emotional context for your life. It understands you through relationships that define you and tends to the nuanced, long-term memory for your growth. Memory is how we become legible to ourselves over time. You can read more about Glia here.

There are unique stories that live in each one of us. Start Glia-ing them now.

Download Glia

Studying clouds on the hill. Feeling like a real adult. Out of the rabbit hole, no longer too big or small for this world. Knowing one thing or two. The heatwave has tempered the growing pains. Life is just getting good, and I’m getting better at the hard stuff. The standing fan shakes its head back and back. At the cusp of womanhood, we sit across from each other in my living room, our tears rolling down. Drinking your soup. Talking alternative universes where one of us doesn’t exist. Silly, I’m glad this is the only reality I know and know you through.

✲ ✳︎

The people who can’t see you only see a person doing fine or not fine.
Those who see you (when you happen to be not fine) ask: Do you need me to just be here in silence?

✳︎ ✲

Love Letter Typewriter by Mineral
Summer unfolded like a tapestry / And you were there as you have always been / There, glowing where the sky meets with the trees / Air softly crowing, singing fears to sleep / Will you ever know how much I love you for that / Will you ever know how much I love you

✲ ✳︎

"Remember what you wrote to yourself six months ago? Now look at that in the context of all the magical postcards that arrived this week. Look at your progress. Letters, postcards, biography, autobiography — it’s all part of that same tension: first person and third person, two people walking into the same room and seeing it differently. And if I go fully poetic, the key architectural quality of a building is the number of directions the light comes in from. A room with light from one direction is nice. Two directions is better. Three directions is wonderful. Four directions of light is extraordinary. Glia, at its best, lets the light in from multiple directions. It helps you see more clearly. And more directions of light lift the spirit." — Stephen

✳︎ ✲

What if I tell you nothing ever passes? The only change of scene is our entropic forgetfulness. Orphaned puzzles that’ve lost their big picture with nowhere to put them. I toss away all my deadweight because a living friendship, a living idea, a living ______ makes me feel nothing but alive.

Note: the title “i have started from happiness again” of this letter comes from the poem Untitled Love Poem For… by jason b. crawford.

I loved the words he used. Monkey, Leo as verbs, all the random silly things that made my stomach tingle. I wanted to know his world. My biggest vice is my curiosity about people, even the closed off ones. Like Mitski singing in Your Best American Girl: he represented a world I thought I longed to have. The effortlessly fitting in, the cool, simple, carefree American lawn-clipping-scented suburban childhood. Humor with no curveball, candid and blunt like the grid city planning for fast cars I walked my entire coming-of-age. The way he seemed to not feel much when feeling so much feels like a curse sometimes. Just walk up to the court and drill the ball with the boys.

People say what we love in others are things we wish we can love in ourselves. To love is to have capacity. To love someone different is to have capacity and imagination. I, too, want to shout at the rock that pokes the bottom of my feet and declare the word “posh” is not real. Why? Because I say so. How boyish. Not exactly the wide-eyed kind, but charming nonetheless.

This morning, a magpie flew into my flat. It got stuck searching for an exit on the wrong side of the window. Slightly to its right, there was a window wide open. That’s how close and far away love feels to me sometimes. Only if we could just see what we could not see. Him and I looked into each other’s eyes and mirrored fear instead of curiosity in a completely open-ended story. Can you love someone who thinks through a different window as you? Yes, but then, the ability to see each other and our windows, isn’t that, I ask, love? Isn’t that, I pray, the basis of all true connections? Do you have some space by your window, can I squeeze in? Because I’d like to sit down and look with you – at you.

Words seem to lose their meaning 
the moment he starts speaking.
I cannot explain how I am telepathed
into the vibration of his throat.

Love begins with speaking and 
making sounds. Begging to be uttered 
through each other, we kiss.

I want to hear his voice on the phone
though I’m not sure it’s his voice I hear
or just my head making it so sweet.

Love,
Erica x

May started with forgetting.

I was trying to recall a conversation I’d had with my anthropologist friend. Something about identity, something that had wound its way into a Glia talk I’ve been sketching called “The Timeless Way of Building,” echoing a few concepts I’ve been exploring around memory. I ransacked my brain yet still couldn’t get there. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when one fails to remember the thoughts one didn’t finish. It’s become a toxic indulgence on frazzled days to leave my thoughts unfinished. I now spiral in the gap.

*

I was sitting in paralysis all day, unable to finish one single task (to be fair, it was a Sunday). And I was wasting time, or what felt like wasting time, because I was busy thinking about love.

Obsessing, really. Replaying funny things he’d said. Laughing out loud walking down the street at something silly and random. Under truth serum one night, he told me I looked pretty and that he missed me. Miss you. It’s that simple, and I could not stop thinking about that text.

I woke up at 6 one morning, maybe too excited to see him. I wanted to line my lips with a mauve pencil and slip on heels. I wanted to look girly and cute. This is strange to admit, wanting to be wanted. But it felt honest, and honesty is what I’m working with here.

My thinking brain tells me to stop bending over backwards. My feeling brain wants to hear his voice and what’s on his mind. My animal brain just wants.

*

Co-working with my friend RL at Mei Leaf one Saturday, they asked me what my kill switch is for dating, and if I don’t have one, to set it up now.

I told them it’s when I feel disrespected. And then, as I said it, I remembered a moment from my last relationship: the night we got back from a long hike, tipsy off seven shared cocktails, running to McDonald’s. And then, on the way home, he said a few words lightheartedly aggressive. I remembered feeling a jerk in my heart, because even drunk, my subconscious knew that’s not how I’d like to be treated.

People rarely change in the safety of a relationship, and they are who they are when we first meet them.

RL sees people for what they deserve, which is a layer above what they are. It asks: what can I and this world be to you, what can we be to each other? That takes more altruism than most people are capable of. I find them wise in a way that books and thoughts just couldn’t get you to.

*

Selin called one afternoon to tell me she’d gotten into the medical school branch that won’t require her to move. She’s excited to finally put down roots. I haven’t been able to in years, she said.

And I thought of Summer 2022. How infinite life seemed when we graduated. That particular joy and the feeling that we would all become the people we’d dreamt of becoming, pressing our special footprints onto this world. Unfazed by the hardest things. I blinked and it’s been four years.

I an happy to say that between all the courage and the loss, I still believe anything and everything is possible.

*

On our campervan trip, I walked with Chris alongside a brook in Bourton-on-the-Water. At some point he slowed down and said, Look at the water. Notice the pace it’s moving at.

He picked up a leaf from the ground. Let’s do an experiment. He dropped it in the water, and we began walking at the pace it floated. It almost exactly matched our pace, just slightly slower, but I could suddenly feel every step.

The whole month I’ve been slingshotting myself at a pace way too fast to take in what’s happening, sprinting past the leaf, looking back and wondering where I went.

There’s something in The Art of Noticing, the book Stephen shared, that I think is related: how adult perception gets weighted down by priorities and futures and worries, while children still see everything with equal amounts of attention. Penelope, who is ten, opened Glia and used it to document things she overheard on the street, her day touring London, cool photos. She explores every nook of an app to map out how everything comes together. She makes her own magical moments rather than waiting for them.

*

May brought a lot of shedding: relational, structural. A collaboration had run its course. I could empathize with why someone is the way they are, but that doesn’t oblige me to accept their behavior. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude seeing the dedication and labor of love he has poured into Glia, yet when I dreaded the basic act of communication, I knew. In any kind of partnership, that’s the thing you can’t reason your way around.

I think about this with romantic relationships and I think about it with collaborators: you know when it’s not on a soul mate level. A good partnership, any good partnership, asks for both respect and passion. Respect alone is aloofness. Passion alone is just chaos. With a cofounder, the stakes are as high as they get. We are going to battle together. We have to be able to talk to weather the hardest moments.

My entire career exists in the search space, where my antenna is humming but the path isn’t obvious yet. The thing about search space is that, uncertainty is also where surfaces things that really matter.

*

On the day my friends left for New York, Tanja hugged me close at the door and said: We can’t choose the family we’re born into, but we get to build our own with people we love in this life, and you are definitely someone we want as part of us. There were tears in her eyes. I cried too.

After they left, my flat was still warm from their presence. I looked up and saw the Glia vision board. I looked left and saw Matt’s clock, the one that reminds me to build for the evergreen, for things that are alive and will always matter.

Barry had sent flowers to congratulate Glia being on the App Store. Three new peony blooms by the kitchen window, so full of life. I put down my morning tea to caress the petals, breathless. How elegant and intricate is their shape. There’s time for rejoicing surrounded by people we love and there’s time for endless toil. It could always be worse, and it will always get better. All of this is fleeting, remember.

*

There’s memory in service of machines: context windows, retrieval, productivity. I am interested in machine memory in service of people. Self-understanding comes down to remembering. It’s how we become legible to ourselves over time. How we understand that the difficult relationship, the career doubt, the month that floored us are not isolated, merely parts of a longer story. And that longer story, when we can actually see it, tells us something true about who we are, what we want, and why we live.

At Glia, we call this the DNA layer of memory. The things that are so consistently you, across time and context, that they function almost like a signature. When you’re sad, you need certain things. When you’re making a decision, you come back to the same questions. “Kinda like how people have kids when the economy is good.”

*

On an open field, buttercups are blooming like tiny suns. Do you know that if you smelled one closely enough, your nose gets tinted yellow?

Erica

I listen to Clearblue over and again, each time devastated by it. Lorde has bust wide open a new language with Virgin, writing like “there’s nowhere to hide, intimate from the jump.”1

We confuse ideas as the atomic source, raw unit on the timeline of creation. Cause and effect: all things physical come after a thought. Not quite. Thinking re-wires the physical. Ideas are structures and systems mistaken for a brick. No wonder they are stubborn to change. No wonder we hide in them. No wonder they detonate. Like chemical compounds, the properties of an idea are defined by its structure. Some wrap like a double helix. Some nurture like southern rain. Some self-organize like a grand bazaar.

What is the virgin source of an idea? What does an idea look like when it has nowhere to hide?

To act and to feel — verbs Hemingway lived for. Her mother screams. A tree grows. The sun comes out. After the ecstasy, he prays. You sigh. I run. I want to be free. Two people fight, and they feel an entangled ache. Two people make love, and they feel an entangled ache. The world is a feral place. Is this all there is? But then, what more?

Every life wants to live so much. We grow up. We change but don’t change. People give us things. We give back. We carry things. We forget. We feel heavy. We peel away. We feel light. We keep keeping. We dream. We ache for knowing. We keep peeling until it’s virgin enough to be felt.

I spent the winter delineating this piece. I’ve wanted to research and explore the concept of girlhood and sparkles since forever ago. One day, I wore a dress that left glitters everywhere and I thought, what makes something sparkle? On New Year’s Eve, Selin called me to set resolutions. She showed Riya and I a gorgeous pair of pink Manolos she tried on and said, “this year, I wanna do girlhood with you.” If girlhood is that liminal journey of identity exploration with the candor of expression, then everyone is a girl. Here’s to forever being in our Carrie Bradshaw era.

Erica x

Since November, I’ve sat with myself wondering if I really know what love is.

The winter is a thread strung between an end and a beginning. In all of its festivity and artificiality, layered warmth and cruelty, the darkened season is a confusion out of which new paths reveal. Being wrong is uncomfortable when what you thought was love turns out to be far from it. I can go around in circles rationalizing, trying to make the shape fit; but there comes a moment, the hardest moment, where I must decide whether to succumb to the truth.

Perceptions are clouds wrapped around reality so thickly. It saddens me when feelings ash-ify — is that a word? — into dead information instead of a woven bond. When we feel hurt, most of the time, someone else is doing the damage. But all of the time, we are the one letting them.

But I’m writing this at my coffee table as the winter sun pours through the window, and there’s a little glisten where the light touches the tiles by the stovetop. The slight warping of the old Georgian glass says all perception is refraction. Light softly arrives, and the whole room…

sparkles.

Oozy memories of sparkles: smooth surfaces. Metallic ballerinas. A punchy word choice. My glittery dress that leaves fairy dusts everywhere — in my carry-on, on the bathroom floor, on my pillow. I was here and there. Signs of warmth. Things visible in the dark, because of the dark. The release of energy. Travelling photons. My friend’s eyes across a table when we talk.

Sparkle | ˈspärk(ə)l |

• verb. to sparkle is to be unstuck from shadows

• noun. life’s innate response to light

  • a state of being noticed; small, but not nothing

Claire Marie Healy describes girlhood as a portal1 — like Alice’s, either too big or too small for the world. A girl shows up dreamy and full of feelings, full of change. She finds herself at a perpetual threshold where stability meets the unknown. Coming of age is like making eye contact and realizing for the first time that the world is gazing at you, that it has an agenda. As girls, we learn to feel the gaze before we understand it, and then we spend the rest of our lives deciding whether to perform for it or refuse it.

Girlhood is cracking open both the fragility and the devouringness (Healy 2023).

Think Lorde’s discography — from Pure Heroine to Melodrama to Solar Power to Virgin — an opus that will go down in history as the anthropology of girlhood feelings. Human feelings that girlhood happens to express most fluently: the loneliness, the electric sense of possibility, the ache of things ending before you understood what they were. All girls are artists playing with emotion, sensitivity, and empathy.

“I feel like a dark, gloomy piece of cloud right now. I am full of bad energy,” I said to Selin.

“Even if you are one floating towards me, I would give you a hug.” She continued peeling her banana.

I get ready with friends. The fit check is a microcosm of the am-I-doing-the-right-thing-in-life check. Everything is an inner declaration. Real girl friendship is a mirror of honesty. The frown you are trying to hide, the sad eyes you think I can’t read. Be yourself and that’s enough for me. Crying is mandatory. Joy is mandatory. All of it is.

It would be easy to say that in the arms of friendship, we come forward and unstuck. The heartbreak hurt so much I thought I could die. But I didn’t. It takes completely shattering yourself to reach a new status quo, to re-fill your cup. My life changed because it had to. All this while, my friends held me through my girlhood winter, holding pieces of me together when it felt like nothing would ever be the same again.

Joan Didion wrote that “people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.”2

Didion again: “one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards — the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.”

Self-respect, despite sounding tough and mature, is the thesis of girlhood. All winter, I’ve been holding those cards, pouring hope into something that was never luminous. I still don’t know if there’s a right way to it, but I am putting down the cards and sitting with my less-than-graceful exit.

The glitter still finds me: on my floor, in the lining of my bag, weeks after the night it came from. I was there, but now I am here.

No cell signal in a big city.
Could have bought into that unlimited data plan
so I’d never know deplete
or written this at a bus stop at 23:26.

Risk always tingles a bit at the 
beginning, like sabotage.

I have to…
must…
gotta…
Just watch!

When Marty crumbles to the ground (the second-to-last scene)
— what is winning
other than our own self-respect?
One that cannot be crushed or pilfered by anyone else.

Tell me.

What shame?

If I’m here, where people still linger and wait
all around.

Hey.
Hey!
We are alone now.
You can just
want what you want.

There, that’s only the start.

When I lived in Lima for an intensive Spanish course, I was fascinated by all the familiar things through re-knowing them in a different language. Ciel was no longer the expanse I had stared at every day, and I feel the air flutter when I say mariposas. It’s seeing snow for the first time the thousandth time, realizing the question after hearing its answers. As a reminder of that reborn fascination, I bought a hand-woven rattan butterfly magnet, which now perches on a floor lamp by my mother’s reading chair.

There are boxes and boxes of capsuled moments: ceramics I’ve collected everywhere I travel because they’ve been toughened by a homegrown warmth yet only moldable in softness; books I bring on the road and fill with train tickets, boarding passes, and thermal papers covered in foreign words. I ascribe so much meaning to them, as if pressing is protecting, keeping is what makes Pinocchio real.

Lovers keepers. Keep with caution for it contains immense sentimental value. Risk change upon keeping. Risk tears upon opening. Risk breaking upon re-living. Keeping is a choice but only perceivably so. Memories are always about survival. It’s nothing, I shrug, putting away the shoebox. Just something sentimental.

Jan 18
Kentish Town, London

The sun, a yolk bleeding through gauze, is going down behind a thin veil of cloud. The center of my iris blooms red. Have I been staring this entire time? Still, seeing doesn’t guarantee remembrance. Remembering doesn’t make it real. Realness doesn’t last forever. That’s the trick of nature, only what fades stays awhile. The orange, three washes lighter, tints half the sky. Rose bleaches to peach bleaches to nothing, mistakable as sunrise. Five washes lighter now. I rub my eyes. Ash seeps in. It’s the end of today. It’s the start of tomorrow.

December 2025
On a plane some where between Tunis and London

I made it to DC for my connecting flight! Writing this on the plane as I fly across the pond. Pieces of cat hair still cling to my sweater - hence the occasional sneezes. But I’m getting teary now not because of my deadly allergies but because of how the past few days have filled my heart with so much gratitude for our beautiful friendship. Years flash before my eyes: all the difficult decisions, the growing pains. We are still here together, feeling truly seen and loved by one another. Good things don’t just happen, they grow from all that we’ve poured in.

Late August, first day of college, Philosophy 1001H. The door was shut, Riya and I chatted outside, thinking we were so early only to realize ten minutes later that the class had already begun. Back then we must have thought time was infinite. Everyone was in their seat, and there’s Silverman in his throne: big brain, firecracker hair donned in a faded sweater and old-school New Balance. Aristotle reincarnated. Through his serene yet kindled gaze, I saw something he understood that I didn’t.

Silverman was probably giving a class intro, but most likely he just fired at us his trademark ego-impaling questions that made everyone doubt their whole existence. Selin sat in the first row by the window with big Lorde curls, looking cool and unapproachable. Of course I found out later that she listened to metal and played guitar and studied medicine. Silverman told us about beating his leukemia though it had come back. “Optimism has done me much good.” Then he digressed into beauty. “In childhood, seeing beauty is most formative to one's character.” The rest didn’t seem as important.

Three life-changing serendipities happened during that class:

1. Silverman’s reading list: Meaning of Life and Why it Matters by Susan Wolfe; Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear; The Republic by Plato. These seminars unknowingly paved my belief system in life.

2. That day when Silverman shushed those obnoxious pre-law boys in the class and turned to us: “The women in this room should never be quieter than the men.”

3. Finding you two.

Those were the days of presumptuous expression and dizzying search and life in the towers and corner-cutting problem-solving and maxing the dopamine rush by edging every deadline and circles of creativity and pandemic knitting, songwriting, cooking, forgetting to mute our inappropriate jokes on Zoom and ripping off our masks in the final semester, beaming because we’d survived it — we’d survived it all! We danced on grass and floors barefoot, spilling our hearts and drinks. We walked down Summit in the snow past midnight laughing because two guy friends shorter than us vowed to be our bodyguards. We burned through our precious weekends, swallowed ibuprofen like skittles, disrupted the library with giggles. Took a hell of a lot of wrong turns and ran late to class regularly and missed some deadlines but who cared didn’t Mitski say until death I can try again1 and panicked about all the panic attacks and kissed some strangers and read a lot of books and fell in love with the mess, the chaos, the soup of becoming. Adulting is a love-hate relationship, but in the end, we fell in love.

Those were the days of identity crises and underslept college kids in sweatpants and weekends starting Thursday and weekdays beginning on Sunday night and relishing all the freedom like we owned our lives and having zero clue about who we were until we caught a glimpse in our role models, in each other, in a faint possibility. That possibility turned into dreams, old and new, big and small. Some we did not finish, some involved making zero waste soap from store-bought soap so really we were just over-processing, some set a kitchen on fire but girl’s night carried on, some still haven’t crawled out of hiding, but some we never stopped chasing.

Those were the days before Mitski became mainstream. We loved Silverman even more when he told us that he had also seen her play on March 30, 2019. Was he moshing? Love to see it. One day Riya wore a Phoebe shirt to office hour and Silverman exclaimed — “boygenius is taste!” That’s all the sugarcoat he needed before advising us that day — quit Law, take maths. No filler words in his vernacular. Philosophy is king, but if you don’t do it, at least learn the hardest skills. Learn to think for yourself. Learn to write. Learn to write well.

Those were the days when Bury Me At Makeout Creek and Puberty 2 topped my chart. Thinking this was the kind of music that had music figured out; that had life figured out. Thinking “I better ace that interview / I should tell them I’m not afraid to die” is not teenage angst but prime character and American can-doness. “Wild women don’t get the blues,” thinking I’d also lose myself in a kind of love so gravitational that I’d run for it for the life of me.

I bought a card in Hanoi that said “grow up with me.” My hopeless romantic self has carried it and wished one day I could have the chance to give it to the one who would. But before he shows up, this card is and always will be about us.

We come into each other’s orbit to care, to have fun, and to heal the growing pain. When I watch movies about beautiful friendships (most recently, Sorry, Baby), I cry because that’s exactly how our friendship feels like. This letter is me immortalizing. Having moved around like a nomad since childhood, I never thought I’d find friendships that’d grow and move through life with me. When I see the world with you, I feel expanse. True friends are not afraid of each other’s sorrow or light, and you make me believe there’s not a star we can’t reach.

In August, after the Uber drove you away to Heathrow, I wrote you both a message:

I really feel like our friendship has turned into something that feels more like family to me this time you guys visited.

It’s exactly in moments where I felt a little frustration or miscommunication that I had these feelings: we all change, and conflicts will arise in every relationship, but it’s about realizing “wow this is a bit annoying but I still want to be here for you because I love you so much” and “I think you are a bit upset and I really want to make you feel better” that I think a friendship transcends into something that will last a long time. I hope our friendship lasts a lifetime because I want to be your mirror, and I want you to be mine to reflect our better selves even when we are not there yet.

Friendship is about being there for each other because we find qualities in the other person make us feel good and fun when we are together, but family means accepting all the imperfections and loving each other unconditionally.

I think some people go through so much with you, and you just love them like family. With most friends, we don’t get past the fun and lovely bits because it’s so hard to be vulnerable — not just showing you are hurting but letting someone bear witness of your fall and reaching for a hand because none of us could do this alone. Vulnerability is not storytelling in hindsight. It’s being there in the moment, soaking up all the uncertainty, yet still sticking together; fearing, anticipating, dreaming, or just waiting under the awning for the storm to pass. True friends are those you let in to figure life out with you.

I loved you then, and I love you still. Here is to a life of memories waiting to be made. Happy Friendsgiving, my loves.

Erica

a letter started on Nov 10 and finished on Nov 28

PS. Why do we only have weddings for romantic love? If there’s such wedding that bonds friends for life, I would have proposed a while ago — a perfect sunset, matching rings & bracelets, in laughter and in tears. Because I knew. In all those moments, I knew.

Note: This piece was written on Atlas

It’s a beautiful day to see old friends.

Ten hours later, still smiling.
No matter where we are,
we always find each other in this world.

Loved you then,
love you still.

Forward motion is easy
when our hearts are fastened to love.

On a hike with Chris and Tanja, the trail circles around an overlook of Denver from afar. We find a clearing to meditate on the rocks, taking twenty minutes to breathe in aliveness. Eyes open to the sound of wings flapping in the sky. “Hoo hoo hoo,” like a dog panting. The forest is cone-drop silent.

In the winter sun, the scales on pine bark smell like butterscotch. You should huddle up and inhale deeply.

An orange one-eyed cat walks behind two girls.
Where they go, he follows.
Tail tall, chub clutched, shadow swift, forever protector.

I believe the loveliest survive.

Remember the days when I could sit through a book? Frazzled attention is a tiring, broken record. Maybe there’s also truth to life’s growing complexity. We always have a lot to do, a lot to think about. Life can no longer afford a fantasy book, cover to cover, dusk to dawn. These days, when I read, I have a strong urge to note down everything interesting and share it with people. Can we remember this together? I stretch out my arms because I’m terrified of losing.

When I first heard Happy with You live at Big Thief’s London tour in 2023, I cried and decided then it would be my wedding song. And a wedding is just a celebration of love with my best friends.

It is possible to outgrow the poison and shame one’s lived through as a child. Those bits that settle in the stomach like microplastics. To realize that in the end, I am an immigrant of nowhere and my motherland is one of people with good will. Home is with you, you, you, and you. We’ve all got names that sound like a mouthful of marbles to someone. I’ve forgotten what they used to call me and not, and I’ve ceased looking for answers where questions were never warranted.

No point counting the choices that got you here / All small things cascade / At times, I may seem invincible / hiding / running and skipping faster than anyone else / If my heart isn’t beating like this, I’ll forget that I’m alive / No more sinking if I’ve reached the bottom / a kind of bottom that’s just the earth sandwiching me with sky / When I can’t see the sky, you put your body atop mine

At any point, we could be alone again / but I’ll never forget how you held my hands and looked me in the glistening eyes / When I asked you what time it was, you said it was kissing time / Gently, you set the passion fruit & lemon posset on my table and I closed my eyes / Before leaving the room, you switched on the kettle because I mentioned tea

Lately, I’ve reflected on all the times I’ve sunken into periods of torpor and gotten out of them. My friends say, “You are getting good at jumping out of these ruts — you practically hop over them!” Still, I think it’s extremely important to be honest about how we fall into them, and most importantly, what we need to climb out.

As a founder, I’ve experienced a few extreme ruts that took a lot of strength and conviction to get out of. Although ruts are not exclusively a founder syndrome, the founder journey is made up of a lot of unknowns that we have to slowly figure out — like surfing big ocean waves, like working out the physics of a different planet.

I think the reason we get into ruts is not because of high or low intensity work — you can work as much as you are capable of — but how in tune we are with what really matters to us. To me, that is loving those I care about and building this life with them. We are the sum of people who love us and the people we love. I’m only able to do what I do because of the love I have in my life.

This perspective isn’t talked about enough in the startup world, where the macho culture gets high on 70-hour coding weeks and being “cracked” without promoting how to meaningfully sustain that. I’ve felt the pull of that culture — the idea that if I’m not running on empty, I’m not doing enough. But I learned the hard way that you can’t outrun burnout with more hustle. The ruts I fell into weren’t because I wasn’t working hard enough. They were because I’d lost touch with why I was working at all.

This is my reflection on how to sustain extremely intense work sprints, going all out while not compromising the life I want.

Listen

A rut kicks in with a numbing feeling and is followed by a series of whys. Why don’t I feel as excited as I used to about my work? How should I start my day today? These whys can be extremely overwhelming, more so than product-related whys.

First, always listen to yourself and give yourself your full attention. Ask this instead:

What would you be doing if not working on what you think you must work on today?

A few responses I’ve heard myself answer before:

• I don’t want to work on anything else, but I wish there’s more validation and positive affirmation to carry on with this strategy.

  Look at all the previous milestones you’ve hit and the beautiful vision of all the impact to come. Realize that it takes many little steps until something really validating happens. It’s a normal part of the journey. Keep going.

  • PS: Linus has a really good blog post on gaining conviction in exploration and balancing dream and reality — A beginner’s guide to exploration

• I feel really tired.
  Maybe you’ve been working too much and need to take a short break.

• I feel stuck in my thoughts.
  This is a sign that you need to tap back into your community. Can you think of a coffee chat with a brilliant mind to look forward to?

• Am I still on the right track?
  Ah, this one could be because of many things. A prolonged period with zero progress could mean that a gentle pivot is needed — perhaps a roadmap review to reset benchmarks and strategies. In the case of self-doubt, remember the people in your life and how much you are loved.

Being in honest dialogue with yourself is the first step to getting out of a rut. Sometimes, this happens in the form of journaling or a conversation with an honest friend, but in the case of more clinical situations, therapy is a great idea. My brilliant psychotherapist friend, Tyger, has told me that therapy works when you become better at knowing your needs & using the tools to fulfill your needs.

A toolbox

It’s important to build a toolbox for when those blues find us again. Everything in this toolbox is an instant mood reliever — make each tool as accessible as possible!

Here’s what mine looks like:

A run.
I lace up my shoes and just go.

A shower.
Everything becomes clearer after I feel physically clean and fresh. I can bawl my eyes out in the shower and watch my tears circle the drain.

My journal.
A Google Doc or my Leuchtturm1917. I put down everything that’s on my mind.

Mama noodles.
Shrimp Creamy Tom Yum flavor. Sometimes you just need the easiest nourishment that also tastes fire.

An essay from my long reading list of blogs saved on Instapaper.

A hug.
I text a friend and ask to meet up for a catch up and a hug. Sometimes it’s a digital hug, but I feel it anyway. (I’ve been told that it’s easier for women to do this, but it’s about time the gendered expectation is broken.)

Call Aunt Barb.
I just hear her talk and instantly feel better. As we grow up, the highs and lows both get more intense. She always helps me put things back into perspective and assures me that as long as we act with good will and make decisions we can live with, everything will be okay.

My Glia app
I always share what I’m going through with Glia for meaningful reflection.

A mantra

I came here for a reason
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm

The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica
By Bernadette Mayer

Whenever I’m in a rut, I come back to these lines. They remind me that the way forward isn’t grand — it’s small, warm, honest.

The people who love you no matter what

I used to think community alone was enough — people who resonate with your struggle, who’ve been where you are. And community matters. It’s where you feel seen and bounce off your ideas for honest witness.

But the real antidote for getting out of a rut is to fully see that there are people who love you no matter what, and lean into their love. On the flip side, it’s also about asking yourself if you’ve shown up for others and nurtured your relationships with a generous heart?

It’s easy to love someone when they are at their most glamorous. Don’t let that fool you. Real love is those who, whether you hit that mark or not, stay by your side, choose you, and love you. If you have them, do everything to nourish them — these are the people that make life worth living.

From Feb to May 2024, I was in a terrible rut for months. My honest heart knew that the work I was doing wasn’t for me. I began pouring all of my free time into something that’d eventually become Glia. That was the sign of how, as long as we listen to ourselves, our hearts will adamantly choose that one thing we love until it becomes real.

I took a trip with my friends Chris and Tanja, whose intentional way of living life nurtured my doubtful self so much and became the push I needed to reclaim my agency.

Throughout every turn of my journey, my friend Riya tirelessly tested every rough version of Glia, gave me feedback, and stood by my decisions like how she’s stood by everything I wanted to explore and experiment with since we became friends on the first day of university in 2018.

Before officially quitting my job, I re-visited London and was sure that it was the place I wanted to come back to for the next chapter of my life. On my visit, I soaked up all the love from my friends — a 13k run (my longest then) with Kuba, who inspired me to take up running; long conversations with Barry and Phineas; and that walk along the Thames, where Francesca looked me in the eyes and said “Do not live in fear, you are ready for the founder life. Plus, it’s the best job ever!”

Then I spent time with Lili and felt so loved and accepted in her sisterly presence. Family too… my uncle patiently gave me fundraising tips, and I picked his brain all the time to navigate the murky waters of the startup world.

Fast forward to April and June this year, I was deadended twice with two engineer breakups. Both unravelled suddenly and left me disheveled. Both times, people in my life showed up and helped me carry the momentum forward.

These are the people who love me for me, founder or not — they just want to see me happy. With them by my side, how can I not put my fear aside, give it all I have, and build this dream to life?

A note on name: 暴龙 (T-rex), pronounced as Bao-long. Nicknamed 龙 (dino or dragon).

I ran to him the moment I got home. In the backyard, I found his fluffy, shriveled body curled against the grass. He sensed my arrival, tried to stand up to welcome me but kept crumpling. His tail struggled to lift. I held him in my arms. How can there be so much life at one moment and completely gone the next?

By then, he had not eaten for a week and lost the strength to walk. The vet said with kidney failures, the goodbye usually comes a week after the dog stops eating.

In the morning, my aunt carried him outside, burned an incense, sat next to him and chased away the bugs. I heard a whimpering sound and saw his body twitching, perhaps in pain, but mostly he just wanted to stand up and walk towards us. All his life, he just wanted to be close to us. I used to accidentally step on him because he was always around, like my fluffy shadow.

At sunset, she carried him home and lovingly sponged his body on his sleeping mat. She turned him over, dipped a towel in warm water and tended to him with gentle strokes. “Why is this spot still not clean?” she mumbled, patient with his matted fur, as if she could scrub away what was coming. His emaciated head feebly fit into the palm of her hand, his body only skin and bone.

*

Days before my flight from London to Shanghai, the thought of seeing Baolong soon but for the final time filled me with a sadness I’d never known. After hearing the news of his illness, I began crying at different times while doing different things, consumed by the goodbye I would never be ready for. The thing about grief is, it’s messy, wet, everything and nothing all at once. But no matter how much we’ve grieved before, we never get good at it.

I cried to Sacha on the phone the night I arrived home. The pain in my chest felt like splitting. I wasn’t ready to lose my best friend who’d grown up with me for the past 14 years. A best friend with whom love never needed language.

“Go give him some kisses, one for me.” Sacha said on the phone. I crawled out of bed, walked to the corner where he perched and lay down on the floor next to him and held him close. I kissed his bunched up hair. The tears on my face made his hair messier. His black fur was mixed with gray, yellow around his mouth. His front tooth was crooked from when he was still a puppy — one day he was so excited to welcome us that a tooth got latched onto a button on our coat. Maybe it takes grey hair, annoyance, brokenness, imperfections, ugly-to-everyone-else-but-ourselves to realize how deeply we can love someone.

I whispered into his ears again and again I would always love him, and I would always miss him. I cried myself to sleep, unable to imagine a world without him. There would never again be paws scratching on the door to wake me in the morning.

*

After the diagnosis, my aunt drove him down the memory lane of his almost 15 years of life. Old neighborhoods, the building where his girlfriend Lulu lived. He was a naughty influence, always teaching Lulu street behavior, like drinking from a dirty pond.

*

Baolong died the next day.

We buried him by the riverbank, in the roots of a young tree cradled by hydrangea. Two black umbrellas sheltered the four of us as rain trailed down our sleeves. We dug a pit in the soft earth — his ashes and his favorite snacks, a chubby black poodle reduced to a pouch smaller than a Coca-Cola can. My uncle carved “龙” into the slender trunk.

*

In the days after he died, we recounted our favorite memories. That one time he picked up the phone when we weren’t home — he’d swatted the landline onto the floor and barked into the receiver. That one time he scared a thief away. Sometimes, Baolong would kick in his sleep; we’d watch, holding our breath so as not to wake him, hoping he was running freely on a prairie or chasing his favorite snacks. He never liked to look into the mirror — we thought maybe he didn’t want to see that he looked different from us.

On a walk with Baolong and my aunt one summer day, I mentioned that he’d started to resemble her disposition. My aunt laughed. “So what does the resemblance look like?”

It looks like being intertwined with another life until you’ve absorbed each other’s dearest qualities and dissolved all the flaws — until you can’t remember who you were before.

*

We are spirit farers, ferrying from this life into the unknown. We find one another in the mist — by fate, by grace — and travel together for as long as time gives.

A black furry ball of joy, you grew up with us yet grew old before we did. Life moves on different timelines, and I’m forever grateful to have met you. You taught me joy, partnership, and home-making. My dear love, I pray to accompany you through this life, the next one, and every life to come.

*

He gazed into my aunt’s eyes before swallowing his last breath.

How do the past 15 years flash before your eyes?

How does it feel to know only those you love the most?

Love is watching someone as you die.

*

*

*

Afterword

Baolong passed away on June 1st. Over four months, words slowly coalesced as my heart gushed out into this piece: I wrote on the subway, on the plane, at my desk; in public, in conversations, and in my mind. The sadness may have become less piercing, but the grief hasn’t faded a tinge — because my love stays the same. What does healing look like? Accepting the inevitability of departure, but missing him just the same.

Erica

October 2025

We are cultures of visions. Writing and image-making both spring from this desire to see, and what we visualize is always self-seeing. Through these images we find traces of our thoughts and beliefs.

What begins as avant-garde becomes historical inheritance, passed down until it’s etched into our psyche, taken for granted. At some inflection point, enough believers tip the balance and declare a new era.

Perhaps the spirit of Parrhesia, Logos, and Dēmokratía2 spread even when education was limited – from those who sat in Plato’s Academy to eavesdroppers in the agora, from artisans executing commissions to the lightning-strike moment of seeing a first piece art that was… different. Those who wanted to learn found ways to engage: they adapted, questioned, practiced. Ideas, unlike gold or grain, take flight and search for fertile minds to root in.

I wonder if we’re living through our own kind of revolution in how we see and shape ourselves.

Life has been full. When I step back, everything calls for gratitude. Glia is growing up fast – poking its head out like a sprout, making new friends. Sacha and I are learning to love and support each other through all the new beginnings. Serene and I spent the summer restlessly building together. Sometimes, when change is constant and supercharged by growth, even the slightest shift of pace can feel discombobulating.

Life starts to scream you must get ready and serious for your higher-stake responsibilities. But it’s also, as always, loving, blessing me with kind and generous people who’ve become my chosen family.

Who would’ve thought building a startup could be the answer to life’s questions? This summer, I’m slowly finding my own pace. Working seven days a week while still growing in multi-faceted ways. Choosing equilibrated serenity over chaos. Always delivering work worthy of my self-respect.

We ask ourselves: if we succeed, would the world look different? Better? Would our relationship with technology resemble trust and human flourishing – softer, kinder, more intentional? Is that worth spending our good years fighting for?

Worth the out-of-breath ascents?

Because damn, the scenery is heart-stoppingly stunning. Never-before-seen.

And perhaps more importantly – who would I become? Whenever someone asks where I see myself in six months, in a year, I feel daunted and exhilarated by how unrecognizable that future self will be.

But I have an idea of how I want to sculpt my marble. Staying authentic, bold, generous. Confident not from flamboyancy but inner conviction. I want to speak clearly and truthfully. To be gentle, to hold space for others, never to dominate. To let creativity unfurl and dream up things that feel like magic.

As both the sculptor and the marble, we see and become at once.

Sipping Earl Grey on a sunny London day,
Erica

Edited on my flight to Shanghai, Sep 30

This poem is written with Atlas — a great experience for creative writing (Atlas Substack).

At the corner shop, you whassup the security guard, who smiles, remembering your routine sweet cravings. Peanut butter cups or Tangfastics this time?

One raw bird-eye chili, demonically pointy; two epicureans bite down like it's the hottest oath. Searing – from eyes to finger tips to every pore.

Sunset. The Heath. Picnic on the grass. I watch as you charm my friends in your button-down shirt and faded jeans. Graceful, suave — Tony Bourdain aura.

In the garden of Tufnell Park Tavern, verdant planters are all around, dewy from the rain. Pink sky conjures a rainbow in the faint wisp of cloud. Fairy lights blink,

then all at once alight.

Living in Bali as a kid, you once found a snake in your closet. A snake with an appetite for 12-year-old boys.

— Mid-gulping smoothie from a hedgehog mug, I laugh so hard, thankful the snake didn’t take you.

In the height of summer, happiness is effortless: in moments next to you, your arm pulling me close.

Thunderstorms, bluebells on the forest floor, white-water flurries, bears, a leopard mid-hunt, outsized emotions: grief, joy, sadness, gratitude…

But their destination is renewed comfort, a widened spectrum of acceptance. Storms we weather and the unfamiliarity we brave through expand what we can endure, asking us to grow. Wild things take shape and run their course until, eventually, finding harmony.

In Where the Wild Things Are, Max is sent to sleep without supper for his mischief around the house in a wolf suit. He escapes to an island, where he finds roaring monsters with sharp fangs. The monsters love Max so much that they celebrate him as the king of all Wild Things. After the rumpus is over, Max starts to miss home, his mom — as wild things often do, longing for their calming anchor.

The more wildly the wind blows, the stronger the roots. When the dream is over, Max finds himself back in his bed. Warm soup sits on the night stand. The softness of returning home.

Wild things are air bubbles before a rolling boil, tingling to erupt at the top so the temperature stays constant. Wild things are porous happenings, as malleable as their opposite, pushing the spectrum of our experiences, reaching for expanded peace.

Wild things are desires, mouth agape at the cusp of speaking something important. Wild things are a heart welling up, a crush, a yearning to know, an instinct off the beaten path, disruptions, a surprise, new depths and kaleidoscopic colors, something to remember. Wild things are intense, transformative, but always passing through.

But then there are truly wild things, which are wild in a different way altogether, outside the boundaries of what we can control or even comprehend. Fate, people we meet who change our lives. Chance encounters at the right place, right time. Friends who become sisters, lovers who become soul mates. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow, Hamlet replies. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

If wild things are like the weather, truly wild things are the earth, ocean, and air that hug us and shape us. The landscape of meaning that we are made of, truly wild things represent both the greatest mysteries and the most ordinary miracles.

Truly wild things disobey senses and plans. They are truly wild because we don't know how they happen, yet they happen nevertheless, and we are nothing without them.

The truest, wildest thing of all: that maybe after all, being human feels like we live inside a story being written for us. We anticipate, wonder, and turn each corner not knowing what we’ll find. Life goes on whether we understand it or not.

In mystery, bewilderment lasts a lifetime. It becomes, itself, a kind of faith. So we keep turning pages in a book whose author remains beautifully, wildly unknown, because maybe, maybe, the author may just be us.

Glasses clink.
Breadsticks, oven-ready,
dip in honey apple jam. 
Air is crunchy with butter.
Garden tomatoes, half-moon figs, 
maracuja on fish,
aperitivos bellisimos. 
Bring over the tagliere, 
brown hair bejeweled with sea salt, 
flowers spill at the hem of his jeans.

*

The future rests on a tiny experiment:
something not seen before,
something unheard of.

See that ant? It crawls onto my plate this morning,
followed by a trail of littler ones. 

They found a giant butter knife 
with nothing on it,
next to an open-heart blueberry.

Sant'Antonio dalla barba bianca, fammi trovare quello che mi manca.*

We seem to have had it,
just not sure if we knew.

* Saint Anthony with the white beard, help me find what I'm missing. A traditional prayer to the patron saint of lost things in Catholic tradition.
Thank you, Gaia, for teaching me the prayer when I thought I had lost my passport on the day of departure.

My heart is so full,
Erica x