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

I love asking people what true love means to them. It feels like laying bare the bedrock on which our lives are built. When we fall in love, everything becomes adorned with a shimmer. But we only learn to become better lovers through practice, and if we are lucky, we cross paths with people who show us how. Through these conversations, I've discovered a three-fold living theory of love:

1.

You know it’s right when he lets you completely be yourself. Aunt Barbara repeats every time we call. Her piece of wisdom has practically become my mantra.

Are we unapologetically ourselves? Recently, I’ve discovered that the litmus test to this question may be a simple, truth-revealing physical experience — belly-aching, out-of-the-world kind of laughter. Two people completely melt into themselves: it feels safe, like walking down a sunny boulevard with nothing to hide.

In Animal Joy, Alsadir describes both laughter and crying as "eruptions from the unconscious" — moments where the true self breaks through social conditioning. There are two kinds of laughter — Duchenne laughter, the “full-bodied outburst that overtakes you," and non-Duchenne laughter, the socially coded communication that comprises 90% of human laughter, serving to control interactions. We instinctively know which kind is real.

People say they feel lost because they don't know who they are. But I think it also comes from a lack of relationships around them that make them feel seen and themselves. Most situations in life are not conditioned for authentic expression. Surrounding ourselves with friends who let us be ourselves is the most affirming and empowering experience —because so long as we are ourselves, it's impossible to be lost.

2.

This person must make you feel like you are the most fantastic person in the world! My dear friend Francesca exclaims each time the topic of love and relationship comes up. There’s a lot of passion and truth here. A meaningful relationship is built on mutual admiration and respect. It's unmistakable — falling for someone, just looking at them convinces me they are the most wonderful thing I've ever seen.

I can’t believe I’m this lucky.

I’m starry-eyed. And it goes both ways, for lovers and friends.

3.

Then comes the test of a lifetime: No matter what you are going through, I will be here to hold your hand while you figure it out. When Shannon said those exact words to me, tears rolled down my face: my dear friend has found her beloved.

Perfect timing for love is a myth. There is only the right person. The universe is indifferent to our excuses. We will find nothing behind protective detachment, because a closed heart isn't worth protecting.

Beyond this mountain stands another. But the right people go through together. The right people choose each other and force the stars to align if that means they have to gaze from another valley that takes months of trekking to get to. In the toils of life, we meet and magnetize, finding ways to promise and keep those promises.

I’ll be here to hold your hand while you figure it out.

*

Perhaps because both are equally profound, I have this romanticized vision of love that mirrors the making of the universe: we are unknown elements floating aimlessly in darkness, and love is the force that binds us and slowly gives us purpose. We are bioluminescence learning to glow. With each heartbeat, it becomes clearer what this is all about.

In Dao De Jing, Lao Zi generally refrains from opinions about anything other than living in the harmony of Dao, which abstractly refers to “the path” or the ineffable source underlying all existence. In the rare occasion where he does talk about what he holds dearly, the first of his three treasures is love:

“Because I love, I am brave…
Whatever heaven wishes to save, it protects with love.”

The ability to love soothes all fears, which is why I think I’ve always lived life in a hands-up, give-all type of way. All optimists are lovers; when life falls apart (which it inevitably does again and again), love re-builds it without fail.

*

I saw this theory come alive yesterday. At a friend’s wedding, the bride and the groom talked about growing into the best versions of themselves in the safe space of their love — from love at first sight as desk-mates in middle school to getting married at the age of 30. A simple occasion witnessed by mountains and the sea, where forevers meet.

The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about eternity. When Salma and I exchanged messages about love earlier, she spoke of love in the most beautiful way only she can:

“I pray that whatever love you find and foster, it serves as a reminder of the ultimate Beloved - the one that Rumi tells us secrets about, the one we come home to at the end of the longest day (in the Quran, it talks about how we will come to realize, when faced with eternity, that this life was like a day or just a brief morning - it always gives me shivers!)

How beautiful and meaningful to spend that day of life in love…”

How beautiful and meaningful to spend that day of life in love!

It’s a lovers’ world (A little poem from May)

It's Spring and color-full.

Not another fleeting, earthquaking obsession.
 No questions or guesses, or fears of not-enough.

It's soft. 
 A warm tub, heart-bracing.

It’s ticklish.
 Suddenly, life is no longer in my hands.

A flower-sniffing,
 nail-nibbling,
 spice-loving boy.

Sometimes, I have these intense thoughts—
 like a puppy learning the smell of home.

My lungs expand. 
 Do they have wings? Why do I feel like flying?

I look at the sky, the vast blue, 
 and think my heart 
 is no different.

Writing on a long train ride,
sending you love wherever you are.
Erica x

It’s raining in London today.

I’ve always wanted to write about summer rain — its duality of might and tenderness. I want to capture the clandestine excitement one feels when life has no rush: get up and stretch, snack a little, go outside for a run, take a hot shower, then curl up in bed. Thinking, sprawling, dancing, or doing nothing. Even better when you find yourself a rain-day pal and stand in unhurried solidarity in each other’s presence.

The sky has temporarily dimmed its light; if the sky can do that, so can I. Raindrops are the sound of our cups slowly filling. We return to a child-like sense of time, where grey sky freezes the next second, and now stretches infinitely to be filled with fun and exploration.

I love the earthy, musky note — the fragrance of the rain soaks into everything porous. Catch a whiff through the open bedroom window. The world smells and feels different: restlessness has been tucked in, and something dormant is about to flutter open. We learn to be alive by letting things fall into place in these rare moments of stillness.

I lace up just before the dark clouds roll over. A long shake-off run in Regent’s Park, which has practically turned into a playground for rain-day fun. Foliage has never looked so lush. The damp soil, loam, and pebbles tightly press together under my feet. The rain has calmed down the urban dust. Atop Primrose Hill, one sees as far as the city reaches. People hold hands and have long conversations on the half-wet bench. Some sit still with their eyes closed, breathing in the crisp air. The football team is still kicking hard. The air is thick with rain and effort. A field away, birds frolic happily on the shore and in the water.

Back home, you stand in the kitchen whisking a tangy sauce for my favorite Thai minced beef. Eating with you makes me feel so soft and warm inside. A film about Anthony Bourdain is playing, and I think about how lucky we are to have someone we can always talk to, to feel loved and never alone in our struggles. Time flows through the chloroplasts of newborn leaves, the greenest ones — I wrap my arms around you as we drift to sleep — and when the rain stops, you’ll see.

Maybe the sentiment I so desperately want to capture about the summer rain is the drama of change, renewal, its stormy nature, and the nostalgic ephemera that so closely mirror life itself. The next day, dark skies are forgotten. Only droplets hang on the trees. They occasionally greet your hair, like sand slipping away gently in an hourglass. There’s hardly any trace of last night’s roar. The bygone passion of the rain feels… safe. Like how loving makes me feel… invincible. On the windowsill, a puddle grows until it vanishes in the morning sun, into another day’s storm.

Written on May 27,
edited on my flight to Shanghai on May 30

PS: In the practice of writing about the rain, I’ve found no better embodiment for just how powerful writing as a medium is — it encapsulates something so intangible and fleeting into ink that can be felt, lived, and called back to, time and again.

While rummaging through my Idea Forests Notion folder this morning (an hour-long expedition just to find one single note), I rediscovered this piece I keep coming back to. It captures a twilight conversation with my mathematician friend who, on a bench outside a barbecue restaurant in a mall, once tried to prove to me that aliens don't exist in under five minutes.

July 20, 2023

I was queuing for late-night barbecue with Su, my mathematician friend and childhood neighbor who's obsessed with elegant proofs, currently mathing his brain out 24/7 as a PhD. (He once said to me, “My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t start learning university-level math in elementary school.”)

He launched into this thought exercise:

"I can prove aliens don't exist," he said, eyes bright, geek indicator blinking.

His proof went something like this: To understand alien existence, we need to determine a few key factors that make them perceptible to the human senses — their size (whether visible to human eyes), their speed (how long it takes them to reach us, if ever), and their distance (the possibility of interaction if they're intelligent).

"No matter what range the alien falls into," he insisted, "it's like throwing a coin on a spectrum of infinity. One divided by infinity is zero; therefore, the possibility of it being perceived by humans is zero."

He scribbled in the notebook I always carry around:

Where N represents the nearly infinite possible configurations of alien life across space, time, and form.

I nodded, shivering slightly as the air-conditioning blasted, thinking about how much I love these conversations that feel profound and unhinged. There's something about late-night philosophical wanderings that makes the universe feel closer somehow.

But I was not convinced.

"Doesn't your proof disregard the entire scientific enterprise? The whole point of astronomy, astrobiology, SETI — they're all trying to narrow down possibilities, to override that zero."

"We're not randomly sampling the universe. We're looking in the most promising places."

Su shrugged, unbothered by this objection. That's the thing about pure mathematicians… their universe is cleaner than ours.

Later that night, lying awake in my room, I kept thinking about Su's proof. What does it mean to exist in a universe where we might never know? Where the most profound questions might be fundamentally unanswerable?

Maybe the real question isn't whether aliens exist, but what it means to be these strange, curious creatures who look up at the stars and wonder if we're alone. We draw equations and launch telescopes and send radio signals into the void. What if… we could know?

x,
Erica

In front of the Tower of Winds, beneath the shade of a spreading tree, Lydia has created her own small universe. An Athens-born pyrographer, she presses burning iron to paint on leather. With this simple tool, Lydia designs patterns, symbols, and imageries that transform raw material into stories. Bookmarks, notebooks, wallets — each piece inhabited by characters and narratives she's working on.

"Life is a cardiogram with ups and downs and moments that stagnate," she says, pointing at a painting of a little cartoonish figure with a long hat walking along the peaks and valleys of a heartbeat.

I find the same figure on a notebook cover, this time walking on planet Earth. When I turn to ask Lydia about the meaning, she sets down her burning pen and walks to the left edge of the stand, where a metal puppet hangs.

“This little person used to feel like a puppet, controlled by all kinds of things — rules, society, expectations. But one day, she takes a pair of scissors and cuts the strings that tied her to everything... and she is free. Yet strands still hang, reminders of how she used to feel as she continues to move forward. Her clothes are worn, so she patches up the holes because she doesn't care about what's outside, only what's in the heart.

A story I've been working on," she says, smiling shyly.

Only after we free ourselves from all that is expected of us can we start to write our own rules.

Another notebook has a turtle on its cover. Catching my glance, Lydia tells me she loves turtles because they always reach their destination, no matter how long or slow the journey takes.

Then, I remembered something else about turtles. They periodically shed their outer scutes during growth to make way for bigger ones to accommodate their expansion. This also removes parasites or algae, repairing damage.

Beside me stands a curly-haired young man from Berlin, whom I overhear as Lydia asks about him. He holds a rolled cigarette between his fingers, wearing a Sony α camera cross-body, and an outfit that makes me think of my friend Liam from college. His shades are pushed up to his hair. When he insists on paying extra for the necklace Lydia threaded through a leather lighter holder, she gently refuses. So he buys two more keychains, each with stories that Lydia carefully explains.

"You have a beautiful face," Lydia says as boy-with-a-beautiful-face pockets the treasures.

Something about this whole encounter touched me deeply – Lydia and her stories, like threads of silk pulling from a cocoon of imagination.

Here is a piece of Athens, an ancient city that once dazzled the Western world. So much has blunted its edges, but the city will never cease to inspire, so long as people are bent over their tools, tinkering and looking up to find the sun, trees, and friendly faces listening patiently to the tales that spellbind us.

I haven’t carved out much time for writing lately — the pressure for polishness and structure can feel deterring. Writing is my most reliable therapy. In its absence, my mind reels with all that remains unprocessed. It’s only early May, yet the month is already full of happenings: a beautiful retreat in the Lake District that first weekend — new friends, deep conversations on long hikes, wild swimming, reconnecting with nature, and surprisingly good English food — I savor every bit. Spring can be emotional; no other season feels more like a metamorphosis, where the past opens into fearless possibilities.

On the 8th, I flew to Athens. I had booked the trip months prior, when I thought I needed a mandatory break to shield startup burnout. Because what refuels the brain more perfectly than marveling at UNESCO sites? The truth is, our launch has been delayed, and I have not made nearly as much progress as I would have wished with Glia. Wandering around the Acropolis and the Agora, listening to an audio guide about the birth of democracy and the everlasting great ideas, I gazed down at my dusty sandals and realized how much I missed being at my desk in London, working on Glia.

The past month, work has felt like stubborn stagnation that I struggled to break through. I crave the rhythm of building fast again — ticking off everything on my to-do list each day. We don't get many chances to full-send on something like this — to take our best shot at bringing the wildest ideas to life, hoping they'll mean something. So I shortened my trip and came home, feeling ready and grateful.